How to Get Started Selling Printables to Make an Income from Home

Many people are looking to start an online business who have no clue where to begin. Some are looking for ways to reinvent themselves and leave their current job while others are looking for ways to bring in extra income with a side hustle.

There is a multitude of options to select from which include promoting other people's products, to offering services like social media management or freelance writing.

But you can also make money by creating simple, easy to create digital products to sell online known as printables. Selling printables can be a great way to supplement your income, but some individuals like blogger Becky Beach of PLR Beach and Karon Kohn of Determined to Love Mondays have turned it into lucrative full-time careers.

The great thing about selling printables is you don't have to be a graphic designer and how much you can earn is up to you.  You simply need a few free (or paid) tools and the desire and commitment to get into this niche. Unlike other side hustle ideas, selling these products doesn’t even require you to have your own site, so the costs are low to non-existent to get started.

Why You Should Consider Creating Printables?

The reason why you want to do this will be unique to each person, but as long as you will have an interest in a low barrier to entry business idea, selling and creating printables can serve as a strong foundation for your business. However, you can't expect overnight success. Though it can be lucrative after you have established your business, it is not a get-rich-quick niche. It requires a commitment to learning and developing your skills.

There are tons of tutorials and learning resources that can help you get started selling printables in just a few days or hours. Some people have the desire but never start their online business because it can feel so daunting and they are unsure where to start. However, resources like the course Printables by Number, provide an excellent step-by-step guide to getting started.

As with any business, selling printables requires you to have the following:

• a product to sell
• a place to sell
• a promotion strategy to attract customers

Those are the three basics involved with a printables business. It's a field that covers a lot of variety, some sub-niches appeal to all kinds of interests – from the serious to the funny side.

Selling Printables Generate Passive Income

These types of products make a great passive income avenue. Not to mention it’s one of the fastest growing income streams on the internet today, which is why a lot of people are getting on board. However, passive income requires upfront work but once you’ve created the product, you won’t be spending much time or energy on taking care of them so that they make money for you.

These are products that, once created, can continue to bring in money over and over again while you’re free to pursue other interests. This will enable you to either create more printables or have time to devote to whatever your other income streams.

Or, you can build it into something that can help you become your own boss and leave behind the daily office grind. There’s no such thing as an easy road to success, so don’t make the mistake of thinking of this as a lazy or super easy way to make money.

But it's not a full set it and forget it business. Even after you create your product you’ll still need to make sure it sells. The way to do that is to make sure that what you’ve created is something of quality. And you will want to be improving your skillset so that you can produce higher quality products as time goes on. You may or may not have a lot to learn. It depends on what your skills currently are.

You’ll also have to make sure that you set these products up to sell wherever you’re uploading them, and depending on what kind you sell, you may have to update your printables like changing the year or whatever if it’s something dated.

There may be times when you’ll have to go in and discontinue a printable or a line of printables if something has changed and they’re no longer relevant. So you will be putting in the work – especially in the beginning.

Once your brand and store are set up and the printables are listed, you’ll make money on these at all hours of the day – including when you sleep – because they’re in high demand and this demand hasn’t shown any sign of slowing down. It continues to grow as new ideas are developed.

Appeals to a Wide Audience

Another reason why you want to sell printables is that they have a broad audience appeal. Consumers keep coming back for more. If you don’t have any idea at all as to what you’d like to create, all you need to do is look at your own life or the lives of your friends. Look at what you or they find helpful, what you need, enjoy, or what you wish you had that could make your life easier.

Then create it! Spy on your competition with research tools like Everbee or Craft Inspector and see what they’re working on and what’s selling a lot on sites like Etsy in the printables category. Everyone uses a form of printable in their life. Just think about the paper products you use to manage your schedule and your home. Everything from recipes to uplifting images and more are part of the printable world.

Requires Minimal Time Investment

Don’t worry so much about getting started that you overthink things. It really is easier than you believe. Printables aren’t something that will take you weeks or months to make and set up once you know what you’re doing, which is one of the reasons that you want to create printables.

Creating them is even faster once you master the type of printable you’ve chosen for your niche. Plus, the more of them that you make, the faster and more efficient at it you’ll become. There’s not a lot of time involved for the simpler designs, so you could have printables ready to go in as little as a few minutes to a day depending on the scope of the project that you’re working on.

You can create templates and tweak one element like the design or image on the page, taking mere seconds to complete. Because they’re quick to make, this means that you can have a large product inventory quickly, which translates into more money for you.

You can create and upload one to two printables a day, for example. At the end of a week, you’ll have 7 to 14 printables ready to sell. You can stick to one niche when you’re making them, or you could create them as individual sheets in a variety of niches.

The best part about getting into making money with printables is that you get all the perks of selling a digital product as it requires absolutely no shipping. This means no boxes or inventory cluttering your home.

Limited Overhead

There’s very little hassle whatsoever involved when you get into making printable items. Plus, this is a great creative outlet as well as being a money maker. Another good point is that you’re not going to have to empty your life savings to get started in this business.

You don’t have to have any overhead. There’s nothing for you to dust, make trips to the post office, or take care of. Shoppers choose the printable they want, they pay for it, and click on download.

It’s that simple for them – and you!

What Is a Printable?

Printables are just documents, pages, or creative designs that can be printed on paper. People use them in various areas of their lives professionally or personally.

Printables can be used in many different ways, including:

• Worksheets for school assignments
• Recipes
• Crafts and DIY tutorials
• Party invitations
• Holiday cards
• Stationery
• Birthday cards
• Planners
• Journals
• Activity Trackers
• Wall Art

Printables come in a variety of sizes ranging from standard US letter sizes to A4. Many are used to help organize a household or work projects.  Other times they are used for special events.  For example, when planning a wedding. Because there’s so much to do, it can be helpful to write down what needs to be done before the wedding so that you stay on top of the multitude of tasks that have to be handled for such a big life moment.

Specialty Planners

Baby-themed printables are also quite popular.  They cover everything that you need to get done before the birth and can be organized in a printable planner. You can also use one after a baby’s arrival to track the baby's first year.

Temporary calendar planners such as ones used for vacation or a business trip can also be created. Project planners are another form of printables. These are similar to calendar planners but can be created solely for certain projects. For example, if you’re starting a business or setting up a work project as an entrepreneur, you can use a project planner.

Meal planners are hot selling printables, too. Most people like to schedule what they’re going to eat for the week ahead of time. Using a meal planner helps to prevent people from getting ready to make a dish and then realizing that they don’t have all the ingredients that they need to get this done.

These planners can be designed in a variety of ways. You might put all the days of the week, which is a pretty standard design. Under the days, you would have space for the consumer to be able to write down what the meal was going to be.

Besides meal planners, financial planners can be made as printables. These financial planners are not only great for personal use but for businesses as well and they can be used for home budgeting.

Another printable that’s popular is diet and fitness. These are usually within the weight loss niche. These trackers can be designed however you like. Some people use spaces to write separate entries, such as food and exercise on one page and separate them by color. Challenges are also a good thing to add to these kinds of printables. Pages like this might have specific timelines written across the top. For example, you could have something like a 30-day exercise challenge or a 100-day exercise challenge.

Trackers are also under the category of printables. A tracker can be used for things like tracking weight loss. It can be used to track fitness goals, and exercise and it can also be used for tracking the elimination of or formation of habits.

Printables can also be used for health tracking, such as making sure to get at least 7 hours of sleep every night. Some trackers are used for financial purposes. A consumer will list a debt at the top of the tracker, then list payments and extra payments that go toward paying off this debt. Or they can be used as a way to track spending habits.

Coloring pages are one of the top ten bestselling printables out today.

That’s because it’s such a varied niche with a wide audience. These sheets are used by kids, teens, and adults alike.

Printables in this category, such as coloring sheets sold separately or as a bundle, sell well because they have broad appeal. Coloring pages are for personal use, but they’re also used in therapeutic offices to help calm anxiety, so the audience can expand from personal use to businesses buying and using coloring sheets.

So if you were someone who created coloring sheets, and you like the idea of them being used to help someone, you could focus on making soothing ones. You can create ones that are designed for little children, teens, or adults. Design your color pages to specific niches like sports or occupations or even destinations around the world. There is no limit to what you can sell. The kinds of pages that you design are up to you. You can create your own design or you can use a pre-made design for your pages.

However, be mindful not to use characters or places that are copyrighted or trademarked such as a superhero from a movie, but you could use a generic superhero. You can do a trademark search at TESS.

Scrapbooking pages are another type of popular printable.

You can create scrapbook pages that are designed such as a rose print background or a four-leaf clover background. You could use stars or trees or showcase the season with fall leaves. You can use whatever you design or outsource to be designed to use as your printables.

Schoolwork pages are another type of printable that sells well.

These are booming in sales currently, with more parents choosing to take the homeschool or virtual education route. They can be pages that use connect the dots to help a child learn numbers and counting. You can create pages that feature toys to count – or that have kids counting shapes. These types of sheets can be alphabet sheets so that a child can practice his or her handwriting. Some printables have math problems to solve. Others have animals to color.

Some sheets will help with spelling or punctuation. They can teach colors or time and hundreds of other things that children commonly learn. All you would need to do is to look at what kids are learning at what age and set up printables targeted towards that age group.

Parents and teachers alike buy and use printables for kids’ schoolwork and instruction. Just look at popular sites Teachers Pay Teachers.

Wall art is one area under printables that can house so many different designs and themes.

These can be created for any room of the home or college dorm room. You can also create wall art for outdoor living spaces. Some types of printables under this heading could focus on phrases.

These can be simple phrases like “Keep Dreaming” or “I love you” or you can create ones that use longer sentences. Wall art printables can be made with initials surrounded by designs like flowers or other designs. Using last names and “established in” followed by date are popular wall art printables. Welcome signs and “Home Sweet Home” are a type of popular wall art printable. First names of family members are popular wall art décor, too – especially in children’s rooms.

So are things that pertain to stuff like coffee or cooking or pets. Family sayings and designs are a big seller in wall art printables. You can create ones that are made of abstracts or flower patterns.

They can be created with seasons in mind. For example, you could have a wall art printable with a pumpkin design on it and the words “Pumpkin Patch Ahead.” You can do the same for Christmas-themed wall art like images of Santa or reindeer or snowmen with or without phrases.

Wall art printables can also be images that you design or buy to use as printable artwork.

Journals and journal pages are also a type of printable.

These can be created with a variety of designs like hearts, flowers, or other cute images. What some people do is alternate lined pages with pages that have a quote or uplifting phrase on one part of the page. These are often designed with boxes. So you might have two square spaces at the top of a page to write in along with a rectangular box at the bottom.

It all depends on how the journal is set up. Some people sell journal page packages as refills to go along with a perpetual journal.

Stickers are a form of printables that people enjoy buying.

You can create these using stock art, self-designing them, and more. Stickers can be phrases, statements, colors, animals, angels, butterflies, hearts, books, or whatever it is that you want to create. Your target can be a specific audience or appeal to a wider group. Stickers can be made to use on computers, notebooks, or phone cases. Some entrepreneurs design and sell sticker pages separately while others sell them in conjunction with things like journals.

Invitations and stationery are other types of printables that can be used to make money.

These invitations can be created for a variety of events. You can create some for birthday celebrations, baby showers, or weddings, or wedding anniversaries. They can be created for holiday parties, retirement parties, and more.

Stationery is another form of printable people love. These can be designed however you like. You might create simple, lined pages or, you can create pages that have designs like flowers, fruit, rainbows, whimsical creatures, animals, and more.

You can use bright, bold colors or soft, pastel tones. Stationery can also be designed for specific holidays or events.

Checklists  and Worksheets

These can be used for personal or professional needs. Consumers use checklists for help remembering all the things that need to be done. These might be for events like a wedding. Or in business, it could be a checklist for a product launch.

Worksheets can be for any topic or niche. Some people use these to work through a problem such as debt or finances. They’ll use a financial planning worksheet.

The most popular niches for workbooks include health like self-improvement such as creating new habits, losing weight, eating healthier, and exercising. They can also center on financial health, which would be any topic relating to money including debt relief, budgeting, and investing.

Some printable workbooks are designed for relationships. These would have things on them to improve or strengthen the relationship. For example, one for intimate partners might have fill in the blanks following questions asking the consumer to write down something he or she likes about the partner.

These workbooks usually focus on how to develop a healthy relationship with the various people in a person’s life. Some workbooks are inspirational or spiritual and work on helping the consumer to find peace or to bolster their faith.

What Software Do I Need to Create Printables to Sell?

There are several software tools that you can use to design your printables. Which you choose to use will primarily depend upon your current skill set and personal preference. One of the tools that many people use to create printables in PowerPoint. Yes, the popular presentation software can be used to make custom printables with relative ease. For a printable, you will need to change the size from the typical presentation size to a more standard print size such as 8.5×11.

Another popular tool people use for printables is Canva. It's free to use but does have a paid version as well. You can use the tool to make any kind of printable but you want to be sure to use the terms of use. Plus, the site is pretty easy to navigate and it’s easy to learn. While Canva does have its own graphical elements many aren't free. So you’ll either have to import your own or buy them. To get started using Canva to make printables, you need to set up an account with the site. This site is easy because its templates are simple to work with.

Photoshop or Illustrator are popular Adobe software that you can use to create printables. The Adobe suite of products is the industry standard for this niche. However, there’s a steep learning curve for someone who’s not familiar with the program and the monthly subscription cost can be a deterrent.

It does give users a lot of control over every aspect of the design because there are so many tools in the program. But having that much information and control can sometimes be overwhelming to someone new to printable design.

If that’s you, then take a Photoshop or Illustrator course on places like Skillshare or use free YouTube video tutorials to learn how to use the tools. Taking the time to learn is an investment in your business. Although Photoshop leans toward the pricier resources for creating printables, you can use their more affordable Photoshop Elements option to make these.

With printables, you’ll be creating text and images. You’ll need something like Microsoft Word to create some of your designs if you don’t have any other programs or resources. This program enables users to create designs with things like shapes, lines, and more.

This is one of the least expensive ways to get started making things like journal pages, but it’s not the easiest. If you’re creating a design in a checklist format or something like budgeting pages that require columns, then you’re going to need a spreadsheet format to design from.

For this purpose, you could use something like Microsoft Excel. This program can also be used to create planners. If you haven’t worked with Excel before, there are tutorials available that you can use specifically for making printables.

Most people who want to create printables who are new to design will often think they have to buy expensive design software. This is helpful and it can make setting up a printable business much faster.

But you don’t have to have it if you’re on a tight budget. You can work with something simpler. Design software is something you’ll want to keep in mind for a future purchase as you start to make money and can reinvest in your business.

The reason that you want this software is because you can create better designs and you’ll be able to format your designs easier. If you feel that you must have some kind of design software, you don’t have to choose a top-of-the-line product to get started.

You can look for cheaper ones that allow users to pay smaller monthly access fees. A popular alternative to Adobe products is Affinity Designer and Publisher, which only requires a one-time payment. And you can often get them for half-off around black Friday.

Finding Commercial Use Graphics

One of the things that you will use often when creating printables is graphics. Adding pretty graphical elements and unique fonts can help your printables stand out and give them a more polished look.

When using graphics and fonts in products you sell, you want to be used to use those that allow commercial use. You don’t want to create something and then get dinged later for violating their terms of service. This can end badly for you and get your entire business shut down unexpectedly. A few places you can find commercial use graphics are:

• Creative Fabrica
• Creative Market
• Design Bundles
• Design Cuts
• Vecteezy
• Mujka
• Cocoa Twins
• Color Me Positive
• Etsy
• The Hungry Jpeg

You could create your graphics even if you don't consider yourself an artist. For example, Lori shows you how to use PowerPoint to create clipart and Yadisa demonstrates how to design your stickers with Canva. And Mesha teaches how to create and sell your digital designs using Procreate and other tools.

Your goal is to be as hands-off as possible once the design is created and the best way to do that is to leave the downloading and printing up to the customer. Making money with printables is easy to start up as a business.

For the most part, it’s a fun way to earn extra money or even make a living with it.

Your Fast Track to Selling Printables

Creating and selling printables is not very complicated. But you can launch your printables business and start selling printables even quicker by using private label rights (PLR) commercial use templates. It's the perfect way to outsource your printable designs and with just a few tweaks you can make them your own by changing out the fonts and graphics.

For a limited time, you can grab a full bundle of private label rights templates and images from the top PLR providers. The annual PLR Printables Extravangaza has everything you need to build your business and fill your new printables shop. With these templates you can:

Plus it includes training! You can launch your business with an investment of less than $50 but the number of products you can create is endless.

Starting your own printables business isn’t difficult or expensive. There’s a short learning curve and a limited amount of time required to create these low content items before you can start enjoying the profits from your efforts.

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