I’ve made nearly $10K from my Gumroad passive income business — Here’s how

I never thought I’d try out Gumroad. In the past, I had experience creating and selling digital products that I used other platforms for.

I had some major misconceptions about Gumroad so when I started my passive income digital products business using this platform several months ago, I would’ve never thought I would cross nearly $10K at this point in the year.

Here’s everything you want to know about my experience running a Gumroad business.

I’m going to cover:

• How to get started selling on Gumroad
• My products and how I created them
• Marketing strategies I use to sell online
• How I make money in this passive income business
• Income projections for 2022 and goals for the rest of the year

Let’s get to it.

How I got started selling on Gumroad

If you’re reading this, you probably already know what Gumroad is.

To those who don’t, it’s an online platform that you can use to sell your digital and physical products.

I sell e-books and some services on the platform.

When I make a sale, Gumroad digitally delivers the goods to my customer and they pay me.

Simple.

The platform I used before trying Gumroad was Sendowl. I really liked Sendowl, primarily because they paid you instantly.

When I looked into Gumroad many years ago, I was under the impression that they took 2–4 weeks to pay you, which is okay but, compared to instant payment, I wasn’t a fan.

Not sure if my understanding was incorrect or if they changed over time but, that’s definitely not how they operate today.

Customers have two options to pay:

• Paypal
• Stripe

Paypal payments hit my Paypal account instantly. Stripe payments are sent to my bank account every two weeks.

To get started, all I did was:

• Upload my products to the platform
• Design a thumbnail (I used Canva)
• Title the product and write a description (I looked at other successful Gumroad sellers to get inspired by how they wrote their product description)
• Set pricing
• And, a few more setup pieces

And, I was done.

It took about 5–10 minutes to complete the process, not including the time for designing the thumbnail or writing the description, which I took my time with.

What do I sell and how did I create those products?

I have sold a total of 4 products on Gumroad:

1. Website flipping ebook
2. Faceless TikTok business ebook
3. Pinterest management
4. An anonymous service that goes along with my “secret” TikTok account

The ebooks didn’t take very long to create. I even wrote one in a weekend!

I wrote them using Google Docs and Canva.

The Pinterest management service I’ve been running for years. I didn’t sell it on Gumroad prior to this year. I gave it a try on the platform and it’s worked out so far.

Then the anonymous service I sold was research-oriented. It went well and I got sales as soon as I posted it to the platform but, because it was a very time-intensive service, I ended up removing it for sale from my Gumroad account.

Marketing strategies I’ve used to sell

I do content marketing and some light email marketing.

The content marketing consists of writing blog posts on Medium and my personal blog. I mention the products I sell in the posts and that’s it.

I’ve written dedicated blog posts for the products, too, like this one:

I’ve mentioned the products in my emails to my email newsletter subscribers as well but, I don’t tend to do this very often.

That’s the only marketing I’ve done, to sell a little over $8,000 on Gumroad.

How I make money in a passive income business

I consider this passive income because the mentions I make in my blog posts are very minimal effort. I’m writing blog posts anyway. It doesn’t take any time to mention the products there.

I usually just paste a prewritten blurb at the end of my articles which takes seconds, literally.

So, that effort produces up to thousands per month in passive income from my Gumroad sales.

I don’t tend to mention my Pinterest management service that often because I’m usually closed to new clients for most of the year. If I was actively taking on new clients, I’d do more content marketing around that service.

My income projections and plans for the rest of 2022

I hope to break $10K in Gumroad sales in 2022 with $25K for a goal of total digital products, which will include my products hosted on other platforms.

I’ve been curious about paid marketing for a while so I might experiment with that and sales funnels to help increase sales.

Takeaways

Gumroad is a powerful platform.

It’s free to join (they take a percentage of sales) and easy to use.

If you want to create a passive income business and don’t know what platform to use, consider Gumroad.

I’ve had a positive experience so far.

Do you sell passive income products?

What do you sell and what are your goals for the year?

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