What did you try first? What failed financially? What started working? Provide actual numbers and a timeline for building income streams.

When it comes to entrepreneurship, there is a huge spectrum of difficulty when it comes to operating a business.

Some people play hard mode, while others have found a way to basically print money without too much effort.

In general, older and more traditional methods of entrepreneurship fall into the hard mode category, while newer and often younger entrepreneurs lean more towards easy mode.

Additionally, digital income is much easier to scale and launch compared to traditional businesses that are mostly physical.

The best digital products to sell today include software, ebooks, and courses. With affiliate marketing, it’s possible to sell without even creating your own product.

I made the transition to digital products when I had a physical reselling shop that I had difficulty scaling. Managing inventory, worrying about cashflow, dealing with returns, and the physical labor of managing and storing shoes proved difficult and time consuming.

So, I decided to productize my service. Instead of continuing to sell shoes, I created a digital business within the same category. It was an educational resource for sneaker resellers, and within 3 years, it ended up making more than my physical reselling business did, and with way less headache.

Let’s talk about how to make the transition from a traditional business to online income based on what I’ve seen work for me and others.

In order to get started with online income, one needs to shift in mindset and methods to make the transition.

Here’s what my experience has been, broken down in a brief step by step timeline on how to start and launch a digital products business:

I turned my service of selling shoes into a product that I could sell over and over by making an ebook. Other examples of doing this could mean turning your expertise you bill hourly for into a video course, or a hands-on service into something that you delegate and outsource as an agency that can scale

I never ran ads when I sold my products initially. I didn’t even try to sell to people I knew. Instead, I waited for organic sales to come with content marketing (SEO and social media). Once I found my audience and was converting organically, I knew that if I could sell 10 I could sell 1000+ (and I did!).

The great thing about digital products is that it makes no difference in fulfillment if suddenly you sold 100 in a day compared to selling just one. Digital products are fulfilled effortlessly in the background regardless of the quantity. If I sold 100 shoes in 1 day, I’d spend 10+ hours just packing and shipping them. Take advantage of this by scaling your digital products as much as you can, whether it’s with continued organic content or ads if your budget allows for it.

For my first digital product, it took 6 months to reach my first consistent $1000/month, and from there, it took another year or so to stabilize at a liveable income of $3000-$40000/month+.

I was able to hit my $10k+/month goal at the end of year 3 of my business.

You get faster with experience. My second digital product hit its first $1000 month just 3 months after I launched it. I also went back to offering services now that I had experience creating and launching digital products, and it took me less than 1 month to close my first $1500 client through a referral.

After starting with digital products, it’s hard to go back to the traditional physical realm. The freedom it gives in terms of operation location and relative ease compared to an old school business is totally unbeatable. I won’t be going back any time soon, and for those who are making the transition now, keep going and good luck: it’s totally worth it!