This post explains how work-at-home moms, or anyone, can use printables to monetize their blogs. You can learn to make passive income on your blog quickly by creating and selling in-demand and seasonal printables.
- What are Printables?
- How do Printables Make Money?
- Creating a Profitable Printable for your Blog
- Most Popular Printables to Monetize your Blog?
What are Printables?
Printables are just what they sound like – graphic designs or text that are in the form of a digital download.
Also, they can be drawings, graphic designs, or pictures that you can download online and print out yourself.
If you want to make passive income with little time or effort, then selling printables on your blog or on Etsy is an ideal work-from-home job that you can do in your spare time.
Initially, you have to put in many hours for this type of business, but there’s very little work required afterwards.
And, it’s mostly hands-free once you create your product listing for your blog and other places.
How do Printables Make Money?
For your blog, printables can be sold directly on your website.
This way, you control the price and can collect all the profit.
To make money with printables you can create an account with a payment software and set up the links on your blog.
Once it’s set up and ready, your printables are completely passive income.
Then, when a website visitor clicks on the product link and pays, the customer is automatically sent a link to the printable.
Similarly, printables are much easier and faster to create than an ebook, and they are more targeted.
Also, since you can quickly put together a printable, you can design several for very specific topics or seasons and place them strategically on your website.
Additionally, one strategy for a specific post is to create a printable with detailed information and sell it in the post.
This super-targeted approach helps to grow your traffic since you know people coming to that post through Google are going to be looking for that specific information.
And, besides being a great way to monetize your blog, this is also a great strategy for growing your email list. Instead of selling a printable, you can offer it as a lead magnet to get people on your list.
Ultimately, since the printable is focused on a specific post, your conversion rates are higher.
Creating a Profitable Printable for your Blog
There are two profitable methods for printables.
First, narrow down your topic. Printables need to be very detailed but brief so you’ll need a very specific idea or need to satisfy.
This kind of printable is going to make money on your site because it relates to the larger theme and will interest a lot of the people that read your blog.
Likewise, another great way to get printable ideas is through your top-performing posts.
The best way to make money from these posts is to create a printable around the post topic.
Another way to find topic ideas for your printable is to do a Google search for the keywords bringing people to your post.
Most searches will show a box titled, “People Also Asked”. Use these questions as printable ideas to answer these secondary questions from visitors.
Most Popular Printables to Monetize your Blog?
In deciding which printables to create to monetize your blog, this will depend on your niche and the needs of your customers.
Popular printables to monetize your blog:
- Planners (like a Goal Setting Planner if you have a blog post on this subject)
- Journals
- Calendars – most everyone can always use a printable calendar
- Ebook (could be an Ebook of your blog post or on any subject)
- Checklists
- Worksheets
- Note pages
So, if your blog post is about tips to save money, your printable could be a checklist of these money saving ideas. Also, you could design a budgeting planner or spreadsheet for your readers.
And, if you blog about mom life, you could create a housekeeping cleaning and organizing schedule.
There are so many ideas and products you could create. Just keep doing your research!
Creative Tools for Making Printables
For my blog and Etsy store, I like to create my printables using Canva.
It’s so user-friendly and easy to create almost anything!
Plus, they have a FREE version that you can use — some people only use the free version forever.
I love using Canva Pro for these extra benefits:
- Magically resize your work
- Quickly remove a background in two seconds
- You can create and use your Brand colors, fonts, etc.
- Tons of design folders and photo folders
- Animate your graphics and text
- And, there is a huge library of photos, images, and elements that are included with Canva Pro.
But, again, the free version of Canva may be more than enough for beginners.
How to Price a Printable
How you price a printable can be very confusing.
Some say you should set your price lower than other sellers, so you’ll get the sale.
Others believe the biggest mistake in pricing your printable isn’t setting it too high but setting the price too low and missing out on making as much money as you could otherwise.
But, pricing your printable too low not only means missing out on more money, but could mean losing out on sales if people associate the low-price with low-quality.
A good rule of thumb is to see what others are charging for the same type of product.
Also, you could go onto Etsy search, type in the product you are looking for, and get several cost estimates.
Then, I would charge the average price of all the similar products.
Ultimately, it takes time, patience, and lots of sales to get the feel for how much to charge for your products.
How to Sell your Printables to Make Money
There are two main ways to sell printables on your blog to make money.
Sell your printables through your own blog.
The easiest method for selling printables directly on your blog is through an all-in-one shopping cart provider, like ThriveCart or Shopify.
Other digital sales services websites include Gumroad and SendOwl. They all work identically and the setup process is the same.
- Gumroad can accept credit card payments directly, meaning you skip the PayPal processing fee on your sales. Gumroad is also available in some of the countries PayPal is not accepted. There is no monthly fee but you pay 5% of the price plus a $0.25 commission on each sale.
- SendOwl can stamp the customer’s name and e-mail on your pdf files whenever they go out, making it less likely anyone will upload your files on the internet for free. The website is best for people that sell in high quantities. There is no per-sale commission but the site charges $6 to $39 per month.
Once you have your blog store set up it’s time to start selling your printables.
- Update any relevant posts with a paragraph and bullet points about the product along with a link. This is great for printables that are directly related to a specific post or page on your site.
- Create a landing page for each printable. This is a separate page, usually set up on special software. A landing page is important because it doesn’t include your blog sidebar or any of the other options that can distract a visitor. It is just a targeted sales page for one product.
- Include all your products and printables on one product landing page. This gives you one page to highlight all your products with links or buy buttons to your shopping cart.
Sell printables in your Etsy Shop.
The second method for selling your printables is to create an Etsy Shop. Etsy is a marketplace site aimed at selling crafts and DIY ideas. However, there is a cost for selling on Etsy – $0.20 for each four-month listing plus a 3.5% transaction fee on top of PayPal fees.
Additionally, some bloggers promote their printables on their blog and then link to their Etsy Shop. And, this process seems to work pretty well.
Promoting your Printables to Get Sales
If you are using a social media management tool, you can schedule to share the posts featuring your products on autopilot. However, don’t overload your followers. But, share a product-related post at least once a day on Twitter and once a week on Facebook.
Don’t forget to share on all the other social networks. This will bring more people to your blog to become email subscribers and regular readers.
If your product-related posts are not bringing in a lot of Google search traffic, update your posts with more content and images. Any improvement and additions you can make will help you rank better on Google.
Also, you can use your printables as add-on incentives to sell higher-value products.
And, if you are also selling on
The easiest way to make money with printables is with higher search traffic from Google.
You do this by targeting keywords around your printable to get consistent monthly visitors from search.
Conclusion for How to Use Printables to Monetize Your Blog
Finally, the best part about making money with printables is that it is one of the best passive income streams. Once you have a printable created and linked to your blog, you won’t have to do anything to make money. So, a customer buys your product and the shopping cart system sends it automatically.
And, THAT is real passive income.
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