Today I'm sharing with you six digital product ideas that you could start selling today that are proven to make anywhere from a few thousand to tens of thousands of dollars a month in profit. These are all new products or variations of products that we haven't seen before but they're all things that you can create and sell digitally. I've included long-term proven to work products that can make a ton of money as well as some new digital products that have had more success over the last 6 to 12 months so that you know it's up to date and relevant. We're going to look at what the products are, how much money they make, and we'll even briefly talk about how to make them so that you know roughly where to get started.
So let's just jump into idea number one which is selling portfolio templates. Now these are just digital download portfolios that other professionals can download and use to fill in their own details. This particular shop sells these templates to interior designers and architects and the idea here is that professionals in those fields will use these client presentation downloads as templates to attract more clients. Now I'm using Etsy to show you these products because I personally used Etsy to successfully sell digital downloads and because we can use tools to view the sales data to see how these digital products are selling over time. Etsy is useful here because we can see how the market is reacting to specific digital products, but just like with any product, it can be sold anywhere online, whether that's Shopify or TikTok.
The only real difference is the marketing method you use. This product is very similar to a resume. It's just much more visual.
And they're not cheap either. The bestseller on their page is selling for $50, but some of their products are even more. And again, that's almost all profit since these are digital downloads and there's no product cost. Now I know what you're thinking. You probably don't know how to make this specific product or you feel like you need to be an interior designer or an architect to make this product, but we'll get to that.
Now they've made over 2,200 sales, which isn't that many compared to some of the other shops that we've talked about. But that's what makes this product so interesting. Because if we look at a shop analyzer tool, we can see that they've made over $130,000. And that's because they're able to sell their product for more profit compared to some of the other digital products out there. Now, on top of that, they got their first ever review on October 14th of 2023, which was just about eight months ago.
So that means that they're making around $14,000 a month in profit in just their first eight months of being open for sale. I think they've done so well because they do have a great product, they have good SEO in all of their listings, and they've separated themselves from the rest of the market, and they're not trying to sell the exact same product as everyone else for cheaper like what most shops do. You could take this same concept and make portfolio templates for other professions, like graphic designers, photographers, web developers, marketing professionals, event planners, or any other profession. If you used an AI like ChatGPT to come up with the content and then figured out how to make it look pretty, Honestly, you could use AI to make placeholder images as well.
Then you could honestly tap into this market and make some money in this niche. While I definitely think that you can figure out how to do this business, even if you're not one of these professions, I think that it would require you to think out of the box a little bit. And I think that that's the main reason that this particular shop has been so successful. So for that reason, I would give this a 6 out of 10 difficulty, since it's slightly more difficult. Now, this product can bring in a lot of money, especially if you have a good target market.
So for that reason, I give it an 8 out of 10. As for the competition in this niche, there's not going to be that many people trying to sell this type of product since it is a little bit harder to create. So for competition, I'd rate it 9 out of 10 for a total score of 23 out of 30. Now for this next product, it takes that same idea of templatizing something and making it easier for the customer and that's by making social media templates. This is usually a sort of post template to help people grow their social media. And the main idea here is that is to give someone sort of a branded look to their content while helping them have ideas for the actual content to post. When one of these catches on, it really takes off.
For example, this product has gotten over 100 reviews and it costs more than $20. And it's just a social media kit that helps users know what to post and what to say to their audience to get clients. And again, you don't have to be a professional to make this.
You could use AI to help you come up with the content and then it's just your job to make it look nice. Now here's another example of a very similar product. And this one is even simpler, even though it's still selling really well. This is just an Instagram posts and stories template.
And it's basically just Canva templates that make your photos look a little bit better than if you just posted them and it kind of gives them this branded look. This would be super simple to set up in Canva. And you can see that hundreds of people have already bought it and people are actively buying it. And there are entire shops based around this type of product as well.
Now, for example, this shop opened up almost exactly a year ago, and they've already made over 39,000 sales, selling their social media and business branding templates. Now, they've expanded a little bit into related items. So they've got content calendars and logos and Shopify web templates and these highlight covers for your Instagram account.
But overall, this shop is doing quite well. Now, they actually got their first ever review on August 14th of 23, which was just about 11 months ago. And if we use a shop analyzer tool, we can see that they've done over $400,000 since they opened up.
But we have to remember to subtract their discount of 60%. So If we open up our calculator, we can take 412 and just remove that 60% discount and see that they're doing more like $164,000 in the last 11 months or just shy of $15,000 a month. And that's just by selling this sort of social media template download.
Of course, there are hundreds of types of social media downloads that you could sell, but I just wanted to show you this shop that's currently making it work within the last year. These types of social media templates are very niche and they're targeted towards... salon owners or people that work in nail shops and that's probably why this shop has done so well. This type of product you can make in Canva and sell for a few dollars all the way up to maybe around $20 depending on how good the product is but you still have to figure out what to put inside your kits.
So for difficulty I'd rate this a 6 out of 10 because it isn't the easiest thing to put together. For profitability I would say that this is a 7 out of 10. There are things that you could sell for more but with a good listing you can definitely make a good profit. For competition, this has to be a nine out of 10. There's not nearly as many people thinking about this type of product compared to other products like t-shirts.
And you can get really specific with the type of people or businesses that you're targeting with the social media templates that you're making. The next product is a sort of category of products which is always going to be super popular to sell, and that's selling mock-ups. Mock-ups are like images of products that don't yet exist or just images of products that you can't take photos of. For example, this shop is selling apparel mock-ups, which are just images of different pieces of clothing that other sellers can put their designs on, and it just helps them to sell. So it helps customers understand what the final product should look like.
And ideally, the best kind of mock-ups are ones that don't really even look like mock-ups at all. They're just here to help sell whatever product or product design the mock-up is showing off. So this mock-up shop specifically got their first review in...
September of 23, which was about 10 months ago. Now they've done over 50,000 sales at roughly $2 a piece on average. And that doesn't include some of their more expensive packages that they're selling.
So that means that they've done over $118,000 in profit over the last 10 months or around $11,000 a month. Now there's a lot of mock-up shops that have opened within the last year that are doing the same thing. For example, this mock-up shop called Eco Mock-Up Studio has done over 29,000 sales or... This shop, My Morning Mockups, has done over 18,000 sales.
And these shops are particularly interesting because they're not just selling mockups, but they're actually selling AI-generated mockups. And you can sort of tell that something's a little bit off, but the mockups still look pretty good. Now, I did a video talking about this at the beginning of the year and got a little bit of backlash because people were afraid that selling AI mockups in their shop would cause it to get shut down. To me, it just doesn't appear that that's an issue.
There was a heavy amount of clickbait going around during that time, scaring people away from selling AI stuff in their shops. But even though these AI mock-up shops are doing quite well, do your own research. I just thought you should know.
Okay, future Alec here real quick because they posted this article after I recorded the video and took a stance on AI, which is kind of a big deal for us sellers. But you can see if you read through this article, they are actually allowing AI artwork. As long as sellers are disclosing it in their listing descriptions.
So as long as you disclose that you're using AI, you're completely allowed to sell AI artwork or AI generated content as long as the seller or you are generating the prompts yourself. I just thought I'd let you guys know. Now, if we come to an AI image generator like Midjourney, which is my personal favorite, you can see that it's quite capable of creating realistic looking mockups for all types of products like t-shirts. You can see these look pretty good.
Very similar lifestyle mockups to the ones that convert well on Etsy. They also have really realistic looking mug mockups that you could use to sell, or even things like posters look really well when they're generated using AI because it's simple and the AI just seems to be able to recreate these pretty perfectly. You can see just the amount of detail and everything in this image looks pretty realistic. And by the way, you can always find the prompt that was used to generate one of these images by clicking on it and then looking up here. so that you can recreate the same type of image for yourself if you want to.
Selling AI mockups seems to be working really well for these shops that are currently selling the AI mockups ever since I made that video at the beginning of the year. And honestly, this has to be one of the easiest products to sell. They're literally just generating the mockups and then selling them in their shop.
For that reason, I would rate this side hustle a 10 out of 10 for difficulty. Super easy to do. Now since they are typically a lower profit product, I would have to rate this a 7 out of 10 for profitability. And since anyone can make these images and sell them in their own shops, it has to get a 6 out of 10 for competition since there is that possibility that a lot of people start doing this, even though I don't think they have yet.
So for the total score of 23 out of 30. Now staying on this AI theme, it really wouldn't be an Alec video if we didn't talk about selling digital art. For example, this shop opened up about a year and a half ago right after I posted my first AI artwork video and they've already done over 14,000 sales. So if we multiply that by their six dollar price that they have on every single product, we get about $85,000 just for selling these super simple artwork pieces that could easily be created using AI.
Now I got clowned on. and a lot of people were skeptical if this would work or not. But here's yet another shop that's also selling this digital download AI style artwork. And they got their first review in October of 23, which was just eight months ago. And they already have over 13,000 sales.
And here's yet another AI art shop. This time they're selling more abstract clip art and pattern downloads. And their listings are a bit more expensive too.
And they've also already done over 13,000 sales. And they got their first review in October of 23, which again was about eight months ago. And again, just by sticking with it, staying consistent, they've done over 13,000 sales and all of their sales are almost all profit since there's no product costs and all they're paying for is the Etsy transaction fees. Now we've definitely beaten this whole AI artwork thing to death on my channel, but I still believe that it's one of the easiest ways that you can start making at least a little bit of money online. Now Midjourney is more than capable of creating quality art similar to the art that's selling in this shop.
For example, I took this listing as inspiration and used Midjourney to recreate my own version of it, and I think it came out looking pretty good. This is a little bit too similar to theirs to sell, but it took about five seconds of work, and it's definitely good enough quality to sell on Etsy. I've got multiple full-length videos covering how to do this, so if you're interested, you can go check those out after this one.
I'd say this one is slightly harder than making the AI mock-ups, since you have to get a little bit better at writing the prompts. But since AI is still doing all the heavy lifting, I would give this an 8 out of 10 difficulty. Again, selling this product you're working with slightly smaller profit margins than some of the other products since digital art isn't usually worth too much on Etsy, so profitability is just a 7 out of 10. And there is a fair amount of competition since a lot of people would love to sell this type of product, so I'll give it a 6 out of 10 for competition for a total of 23 out of 30. Now if you want a product that has a lot less competition but still has that beefy profit You could try selling planning tools.
A planning tool is just something that helps someone stay organized and plan their life. For example, this shop from Canada sells all sorts of budget and business planning spreadsheets, and they cover all sorts of different categories like bookkeeping and budget tracking and overall just financial planning. Now, this might sound really boring to some of you, but keep in mind that they've made over 28,000 sales ever since they got their first review. in April of 23, which was about 13 months ago.
Now, how much do they actually make from that? Well, we can see that they've done over $776,000 in gross sales. We do have to remember to remove their 50% off discount since that doesn't get calculated in.
But if we take that total amount and we divide it by two, you can see that they've done $388,000 within roughly the last year or 13 months, or about $29,000 a month. Again, we use Etsy because all of their sales data is public, so you can come check these numbers for yourself. And they're not the only shop that's selling planning tools that's been successful. Like this European shop that sells planners and templates from all sorts of things for ADHD and reading and just general life planners. And this shop has made over 40,000 sales.
So at $1 to $2 each on average, they've made maybe $40,000 to $60,000 since they started selling in May of last year. Notice that both of these shops have a very low amount of listings, but remember that those types of products take longer to make than something like an AI product. There are countless types of planning tools that you can make for weddings, or travel, finances, social media, real estate, or honestly anything.
The key is to remember that when you're making this type of product, your first listings probably won't sell. You have to keep making better and better products until you find those best sellers. Just don't give up too soon.
You're always just one listing away from finding those best sellers. These planning tools might look super complex, but you can usually create them in a tool like Canva or Excel, depending on what you're selling, making them not too difficult to create. So for difficulty, I'd give it a 6 out of 10. These planning tools are also highly- profitable most of the time, assuming that you do actually have a good problem-solving product, so I'd rate it an 8 out of 10 for profitability. As for competition, since there's a sort of perceived higher barrier to entry, there's a lot less people trying to sell these products, so for that reason, I'd give it a 7 out of 10 for a total of 21 out of 30. The next product is one that I would be personally most excited about because it fits that Etsy demographic almost perfectly, and that's selling portrait recreations. So our example shop is this one because it's a brand new shop that opened up within the last year and they're just selling these digital art style recreations of family portraits or pet portraits and basically all that happens is a customer submits a photo with their order and the shop will turn it into this digital artwork style which I'll show you how to do in a second.
Now the cheapest option here is a five dollar digital download so at 20,000 sales that would be about a hundred thousand dollars. but since they have more options that are over $5, it's probably a lot more than that. Here's another shop doing nearly the exact same thing that opened up last year in June, and they've done over 4,000 sales, but each of them is for a $20 profit. So that means with 4,000 sales, they've made over $80,000 within their first year.
So imagine what they're going to be doing two years from now, or even next year. And of course, this is an OG product that shops have been selling for years on all sorts of products. and they've made hundreds of thousands of sales with it.
This is one of the most evergreen and proven products. And the coolest part about it is you don't even need specific artistic skill to make this type of artwork. It can all be done with something called a Photoshop action.
Now they can be expensive upfront, but a Photoshop action is basically just a set of instructions that you can give to the Photoshop platform that can transform your image into a painting before your eyes without you having to do anything. The hardest part is finding a good one of these actions and then setting it up. You can use Photoshop actions to generate all kinds of different artwork that you can sell in your shop. If you're curious to learn more about this then subscribe and leave me a comment down below and maybe I'll make a video on this in the future. Now the final bonus to selling this portrait recreation product specifically is that you can obviously offer the digital download which in this case this shop is selling for about $30 on the lowest or even up to $37 depending on the size that you get, but you can also offer physical drop shipped print on demand posters or canvases, which you can charge even more for making more profit per order.
If you're able to use AI or a Photoshop action to make these sort of recreations, then this would be a lot easier, but still a slightly more difficult option. So for that, I'd rate it a seven out of 10 difficulty, but that also means that you can sell these items for more money. So this one gets a nine out of 10 for profitability. And since not that many people are willing to learn how to make this type of art, there's not very much competition. So I'd rate it a 9 out of 10 in competition for a total score of 25 out of 30. Now, none of these businesses are going to make you rich overnight, but they can over time.
If you're curious about how to run an Etsy dropshipping business from a more technical standpoint, you can go check out this video now and I'll see you over there.