A way to scale
Building streams of passive income is a way to scale your business without having to put additional efforts and time once the initial investment is done: It scales perfectly and that is exactly what you looking for as a small business owner and for your work life balance
One way to achieve this is by selling digital assets: Digital assets can be anything from e-books, templates, online courses, or any other type of digital content that provides value to your customers
This approach is particularly interesting for service companies that already have a business offer based on knowledge and expertise like legal firms, financial advisors, market analyst: It is perfectly adapted because the content is already here and it that can be easily bundled in high value reports and publications that your clients will buy for insights (there are plenty of guides to create high quality content and you still can hire someone to write for you)
Market & distribute
Once you have produced a valuable digital asset, your next challenge is to put in people’s hands so they can buy it
With a little subtlety to overtake: selling a digital asset means giving the right to access and download the content. There is no notion of stock or limited quantity as you have when you purchase a product or service on a ecommerce website
You understand now that if you want to build a revenue stream for your digital assets, you need to limit the access and sharing to reduce sales loss (if people can get it for free, they won’t buy it from you)
There are couple of solutions that you can consider to distribute:
On Amazon
You can outsource the distribution of your assets to Amazon via their KDP self publishing portal via the payment of a distribution of a fee and a share on the sales
Here is a detailed guide of the cost to distribute via amazon
In short, you can expect to give back~ 30% of your revenue for a completely managed and independent solution including payments colllection and secured / unique downloads
On your Website
Offering your content on your website is ideal to boost sales (a visitor who is already on your site is obviously already interested in what you do) and to improve the SEO of your marketing site (you will benefit from the traffic and engagement generated by the digital assets selling)
It also gives you more control on your marketing and allows you to collect data and informations on your visitors (email, analytics…)
Technically there are 2 ways to distribute digital content from a Webflow marketing site
Gated content
With this approach, your visitor has create an account and login on your Webflow website (via a third party like Memberstack to get access to a a gated content page once the payment is done
Unless you allow the download from the gated page, your visitor will have to login to access the content which effectively prevent sharing (sharing a password is something people don’t do lightly) but is also cumbersome
Shoprocket + Webflow
An other way to do this is to use a third party like Shoprocket that offers a good trade off between security and usability: You can use their platform to create your catalog of digital assets, set download limitations in time (expiring download links) and occurrences (2 download) and collect payments. The integration into your Webflow marketing website is done very simply with their widget
Final words
Selling digital assets is a very efficient way for service business to build passive revenues streams, establish their expertise, and drive traffic to their website (if they self host the selling pages)
There are a couple of options to add a “digital asset shops” to your marketing website. The one to choose depends on a trade off between security (limit downloads) and usability
As a web designer / Webflow developer, I really like the Shoprocket solution because it is very simple to integrate and offer interesting options to limit downloads
Without technical skills and limited time, I would probably get started with Amazon and quickly switch to Webflow+Shoprocket if the volumes of sales increase. As a measure point, and considering Shoprocket & Amazon costs and an ebook priced at 8$, the breakeven is at ~ 12 sales / month
