[Illustration: formatbrain]

Just a little note before I get started. You might have noticed that Wage Slave Rebel has been a little quiet and a little inconsistent over the last month. This ends today! I’ll be going back to a Monday-Wednesday-Friday posting schedule.

As I mentioned in the previous post, I’ve been working since mid-December (which is why the blog has been less active) to develop a handful of digital products, including a weight loss ebook and a web design how-to video course. I’m happy to say that my first product (the ebook) is completely finished and is currently undergoing some final reviewing and last minute tweaking! As it is, we’re currently looking at a Friday or Monday launch.

Keep checking WSR over the next couple weeks because I’d like to get you guys involved as much as possible and maybe even give you a chance to make some money of your own. Look for the announcement soon!

Most of you know that I am a freelance web designer. I’ve mentioned it here and there over the last few months. I want to take this opportunity to let it be known that this is no longer the case. I’m officially retiring as a freelancer.

Why? Because freelancing just doesn’t make sense! If you are a freelancer, that’s all good and fine. If you enjoy it, great! But if you aren’t already freelancing, don’t bother starting unless you are absolutely in love with the work you do. And you should realize that just because you like doing something for yourself, doesn’t mean you’ll like doing it for other people. Freelancing has the ability to feel almost as oppressive as 9-to-5 wage slavery. It can be more soulless unrewarding work wrapped up in a prettier package.

No. If you want to live your life on your terms and have enough money to do what you want to do and go where you want to go, you need to focus on making your primary source of income completely passive. You need to focus on digital product creation!

The Problem With Service-Based Work

Service-based businesses are mostly disappointing in my experience. They are necessary, true, but they aren’t for everyone. Before freelancing I worked at a hospital making a meager $7.50 an hour. That’s $60 per day. But was my time and labor worth only $60 per day?

Sixty a day is all it took for me to force myself out of bed at 5AM, wear a stupid looking uniform, dawn the title “Housekeeper”, endanger myself by hauling bags of needles and organs, pick up garbage, make uncomfortable small talk with tragedy stricken emergency room visitors, watch people die, get reprimanded for the most ridiculous things by power hungry superiors and try to fit the rest of my life somewhere in between a rotating 40 hour work schedule.

Hell no that was not worth $60/day!

And this is the problem with service-based businesses. You are contracted to sacrifice your time and your effort for someone else’s benefit. While less extreme than the hospital situation, freelancing can still be just as miserable. While I liked to design websites, I really only liked to design them for projects I was personally involved in. I had no clue I wouldn’t enjoy making them for other people. Dealing with clients and compromising my own artistry for them finally took its toll on me and I had to start asking myself, “Is this sense of inferiority I’m experiencing and this lack of pride and these mind-numbing hours worth the price of these projects?”

The answer was, “No.”

The Benefits of Digital Products

It’s too early to say, but I think I might have found my actual professional calling. While I love design, writing, animation and technology, I’ve only ever had the passion for working on things that I have a reasonable stake in and for which I am completely responsible. I like having control of both the work I’m doing and the result of that work.

For a guy like me, the development and selling of digital products seems to be the ideal way to make money for several reasons:

1. You Get To Decide What You Sell You don’t have to wait for directions from anyone else and you don’t have to make a product you don’t believe in. You don’t have to find a market and just go with it. You’re actually given the opportunity to look at several possible options and choose one directly related to your interests and your abilities.
2. Complete Control of Development You get to decide how things look, how much they’ll cost, when they’ll need to be done. You answer to nothing but your own ambition!
3. Automation Digital products can be sold without any involvement on your part. You can spend time creating it and perfecting it and then just let it go. You don’t have to replicate your hours of work for each purchase. You just make it once and sell it as many times as you can. With help from the internet, you can set up a store that runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and earn money while you sleep!
4. It’s Inexpensive It costs anywhere from zero dollars to a few hundred to get started. If you’re strapped for cash, you can always find a way to cut corners by using public domain content.

These are the reasons I’ve decided to take a new professional route. As this experiment continues, I’ll offer more advice and observations about digital product creation and marketing and make everything as transparent as possible, including earnings. After the launch of my first ebook, I hope to publish what I’ve documented and learned through the whole process so that others might also succeed (or at least avoid failure).

Have any advice for me as a newcomer to digital products? Have an interest in digital products? I’d love to hear any questions or comments below!

Related posts

1. 4 Excellent Resources for Digital Product Creation
2. The Top 3 Most Successful Online Business Models
3. All It Takes Is Persistence
4. How to Find Your Core in a Shell of Ambiguity
5. Lessons We Can Learn from Failed Products