Selling digital products on your blog is a great (and usually fairly cheap, if not totally free) way to make some easy, passive money on your blog. I have some very basic digital products on my shop at the moment but I hope to grow this list to give people plenty of choice as to what they want to purchase.
Please note that this article contains affiliate links. This means if you choose to purchase any products via the affiliate links, I will receive a small commission at no extra cost to you to support the blog. These affiliate links do not affect my opinion of the product.
The first thing I’d recommend doing is signing up for a 30-day free trial for Canva – you can set up a free account if you want but the free trial gives you Pro features to try for thirty days, giving you the chance to see if it’s the sort of thing you’ll need.
Next, you’ll want to follow my Guide to Setting Up a Shop on Your Blog to get yourself underway. It’s a fairly simple process and will set you up with a really easy-to-use service that will have you uploading your digital products for fun.
So to be clear, all the products I have suggested below are not physical products. These are digital products. This means you’re essentially selling people a PDF of the product that they can go ahead and download.
The list of products
1. Bookmarks
Bookmarks are a simple one – think of a simple sentence you’d like to read when you open your book and then choose a background or photo from Canva as the background. They give loads of examples for some design inspiration.
2. Calendars
This one may be a bit more time consuming as it requires you to be designing for 12 pages (one for each month) and depending on whether you choose to do the same design for every page or have a slight change (you may choose to go with a certain book theme and so may have different quotes from the book on each month for example) it could take up some time. But you’ll also be able to sell it for slightly more as it’s a more substantial product.
3. Birthday Cards
Similar to birthday cards – create the front design and then make sure that you format the PDF in a way that allows people to print the card in a way that will have a line to fold down. Use websites like Thortful for design inspiration – obviously use your own design but having some wording or ideas to work on speeds up the design process.
4. Christmas Cards
Same with the birthday cards – keep these festive but also original. Try something funny or something cosy. Google is your friend here – see what themes and photos pop up when you google Christmas and then use the additional keywords. (Again – don’t use any actual images from Google as they’re more likely than not copyrighted.)
5. Valentine’s Cards
This may not be up your street as you may not be a very romantic person. But if your website has a niche or a theme (IE mine is books) then maybe create some Valentine’s cards that go along with this theme. What says love more than giving a book lover a book-related Valentine’s Day card?
6. Moving In Day Cards
In a similar vein to Valentine’s Day cards, why not try and stick to a theme with your Moving In Day cards? I could create one that says that all new homes should have a book room or all new homes should have a reading corner for example.
7. Business Card templates
Now if you really fancy yourself as a graphic designer, offering people templates on which to edit is a great way to sell digital products. These are essentially the same as a calendar, you’re leaving the areas blank for them to fill in using whatever software they wish. Business card templates can be a fairly easy one to do as they have small physical space and, more often than not, they can be fairly minimal in design.
8. New baby cards
One of your friends or family members recently had a new baby or expecting a baby soon? Why not offer people cards that you’ve designed that they can gift people. Now, without this sounding like you’re turning your blog into a card-selling shop, you can never give people too much option.
9. New pet cards
Is this a thing? I feel like it should be a thing. If you’re going to give someone a card for having a new baby, you should definitely give them a card for adopting a kitten.
10. Posters
You could rework your bookmark design ideas into A4 or even A3 versions and sell these as digital posters. Posters are one of the best physical products as people often don’t feel the need to print them off on special paper – their A4 printer paper at home is fine enough.
11. Birthday invitations
If you’ve already created some great ideas for Birthday cards, why not try turning some of these into invitations? Again – you could keep these to the theme of your blog OR simply give them any sort of theme.
12. “I’ve moved house” cards
I’m not even sure if these are still a thing – don’t you just WhatsApp your mates? However, I feel there is a generation coming through of those who are more artistically inclined (those who spend hours on Pinterest) and so may want to send out physical “I’ve Moved House” cards. Also, some people are old or technophobes and so can’t use WhatsApp.
13. Wedding invitations
Wedding invitations need to be fancy, they need to have lots of squiggles and they’re a great digital product to make because you can fill just a couple of areas blank and make it really easy for the bride and groom to write them.
14. Checklists
People LOVE to keep lists – why not give them a really good-looking checklist to do this on? I’d suggest getting maybe one or two colours involved and leaving a lot of the page blank. Canva offers some checklist designs already that you can use as a basis for your own.
15. CV templates
Offering people the opportunity to download a good-looking CV that they can simply put their own information onto can give people so much more confidence when applying for a job. Who knows? If your design is smart enough, you may well trick that employer into thinking you’re far smarter than you actually are.
16. Restaurant Menu templates
If you’re a food blog, why not branch out and offer templates of food and drinks menus for restaurants to use. You could even email local restaurants with these designs and offer them a bespoke service.
17. Newsletter templates
Companies love doing newsletters to their own staff or our to their customers and if you can offer A4 designs of these that they can utilise, it’ll be a huge benefit to them. If you begin with a rough guide and some key design cues then this should help whoever downloads it adjust it to their needs.
18. Designs to be put in frames
You know those white pieces of paper with “Live Laugh Love” written on them in funky swirly writing? You could do that. I hope you’d try and come up with something a little more inspirational and add in some unique design elements but some people charge a decent amount of money for these things and all they’re giving people is the digital product for them to print out and put in their own frame they still have to buy.
There are so many ideas that you can use to create digital products to sell on your blog. Canva offers such a fantastic suite of already-made ideas that you can manipulate and take some ideas from, so I’d highly recommend popping over there and having a play.
