If you have ever thought about using your knowledge and experience in digital content creation, then you are in the right place. While most of the blog posts on this site relate to all things pediatric occupational therapy, this one is a bit different. It’s likely that at one point or another, you’ve accessed one of our printable resources, or purchased a digital product. Did you ever wonder if YOU could create a digital resource for others? Did you know that The OT Toolbox has a team of digital content vendors in our shop marketplace? Those creators started out just like you: wondering how to sell resources online! That’s what we’re talking about in this blog post! Read on for information on how to create a passive income using what you know, experience, and are passionate about!
We go deep into how to sell what you know on our Digital Product Professionals page.
Do you LOVE being creative? Do you make resources for the clients on your caseload and know that there are others out there that would benefit as well? Want to make money online but don’t want to deal with customer service, starting a website? Did you know that we love to support other therapy professionals by selling resources on our shop?
Digital Content Creation
Do you LOVE being creative? Do you make resources for the clients on your caseload and know that there are others out there that would benefit as well? Want to make money online but don’t want to deal with customer service, starting a website?
Let’s break down HOW and WHY to sell digital products on The OT Toolbox as a vendor in our marketplace.
First, you may or may not know about all of the contributing factors that play a role in running a website and selling resources online. Just to quickly cover all the bases, website management includes:
- Web hosting
- Building the technical side of a website including plugin management
- Managing costs of hosting fees, website fees, email list fees, etc.
- Managing customer service including the email management
- Content creation
- Coming up with a content marketing strategy
- Graphics creation
- Writing articles
- Editing and formatting articles
- Speaking to target audiences (Here on The OT Toolbox, we create content geared toward therapy providers, parents, and educators, as well as other professionals- counselors, administrators, etc.)
- Publishingblog content
- Creating and maintaining a digital marketing strategy
- Brainstorming content ideas
- Working with a graphic designer
- Building a following on social media platforms and working on social media engagement on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok, and YouTube
- Writing blog posts geared toward web traffic- Speaking to the search engines, or meeting search engine optimization (SEO) needs. This includes keyword research.
- Working among trends such as Tiktok, Facebook reels, or Instagram videos, etc.
- Creating infographics for social media posts
- Using publishing tools such as photoshop or Canva
- Coming up with a publishing schedule for the website and social media platforms
- Working on different types of content: articles in Google docs, video, digital products, etc.
That’s a lot to manage!
When it comes to running a website and managing all of the working pieces, there is a lot to juggle.
Digital Content Creators on The OT Toolbox
The mission of The OT Toolbox has always been to provide tools to support the healthy development of kids. We initially started out by supported occupational therapy providers with resources and tools to help their clients thrive. That audience has since moved on to other therapy professionals such as physical therapy, speech therapy, and mental health therapy as well as all of the types of readers. We did this by offering tools, tips, and resources that not only support their clients, but themselves as professionals.
Over time, we have started to support other therapy providers in additional ways, including offering our shop as a platform to sell digital content.
Selling digital products on The OT Toolbox as a digital content creator is a great way to not only make money, but also transfer your skills, knowledge, and experience to other professionals. It’s a literal ripple impact that can change lives!
There are other good things about creating digital content, too! These could be considered the “pros” to digital content creation.
- Earning money as an online shop
- Supplementing other income sources (especially true for new digital creators) This is great for the school based therapy provider seeking income over the summer months, or while on school breaks.
- Passive income. Much about digital content creation as a vendor meaning creators who host products on The OT Toolbox earn money passively.
- Using your creative resources to support other professionals all over the world to help others thrive
Plus, when you list your digital products on The OT Toolbox shop, we take care of all the details:
1. Hosting and listing the digital product- You don’t need to build a website and deal with the tech side of things or pay all of the hosting and plugin fees. We also list the product on our shop. You don’t need to worry about copywriters or target keywords on the product listing. We take care of that for you.
2. Marketing- we take care of the promotional side of things too. We have a digital content strategy in place so all you have to do is submit your product and sit back to wait for the payments each month. We market on our email newsletter, our social media platforms, and on the blog posts.
3. Customer service- Dealing with deliverability issues, refunds, and customer questions is a necessary thing when you have a shop and business. However, these service considerations take a LOT of time. We handle all of these aspects of product sales.
4. Credit card fees and taxes- When you sell on The OT Toolbox marketplace, we take care of the fees and taxes that are related to digital product sales.
5. Passive income- You can market products as little or as often as you like on your own social media channels, but there is no obligation to do so. When you list products in The OT Toolbox marketplace as a digital content creator, it can be all passive income. We’ll pay you at the beginning of each month for any sales that your product had during the previous month.
6. Your products will show up in our shop- If you’ve listed a digital resource on Teachers Pay Teachers or Etsy, then you know the pain of publishing a product only to have it sit somewhere in the depths of the website. There is just SO much content on those sites that it’s hard to get your product in front of eyeballs even with SEO tools or influencer marketing on social media. On The OT Toolbox shop, your product will show up by search and it will get in front of web traffic guided by our monthly search volume on the site.
7. Start now- If you have a product already created, you can start right away. If you don’t have a product and have no idea where to begin with making digital products, the Digital Product Creation for Professionals Toolkit is for you.
How to be a Digital Content Creator and Sell on The OT Toolbox?
The cool thing is that this opportunity is open to everyone. If you’re slightly interested in selling products online, and you have knowledge, experience, and a passion to create a resource, the creator marketplace is for you.
There are two options, depending on where you are in this process:
If you already have a digital product…
…and you want a place to sell it that has a hot audience:
This option is great if you sell products on Teacher Pay Teacher, Etsy, or your own website and you want to get it in front of The OT Toolbox.
Just send us an email at contact@theottoolbox.com with a copy of your product so we can make sure the item is a good fit for our audience. Then, we’ll get back to you with details and a contract to put all of the details onto paper. We’ll create a vendor account for you and list your item. Then, you earn each month depending on the sales of your product. At any time, you can log into your vendor account and see sales on your dashboard.
One other tip that I would encourage for vendors on The OT Toolbox is to write a blog post on the topic that your product covers. Our vendors that write blog posts promoting their product sell up to 3 times more than the vendors that don’t. Why?
- Blog posts cover a lot of the “why” behind a product, which is what people are looking for through search
- A blog post goes deep on how to support a specific need. Readers that arrive at that blog post are looking for answers to a specific question. Your product or resource can be the solution to that problem
- When a digital content creator covers the many benefits of a product in high-quality content of an article, you can go deep on why specific issues are happening, what the end user might see, red flags that are involved, and then explain in detail how a solution to that problem might be a product that was created by a professional with experience in that area.
- You can create different blog articles based on the various topic ideas that a product was intended to solve. For example, most professionals have created products based on years of experience working with a specific issue or problem area. And typically, those resources solve several aspects of the issue at hand. Blog content can go deep on these different issues through a blog series, which targets each aspect of the product. A series of articles related to a single product is an asset to the marketing.
In exchange for the services listed above (hosting, marketing, product delivery, customer service, etc.) we do take a percentage of the product’s pricing. Marketplace vendors earn 65% of the product price.
This percentage is consistent or better than other online marketplaces such as TPT or Etsy, plus you’ll have the additional benefit of reaching a consistent market and audience.
Even with that percentage of administration and hosting fees, we have digital vendors earning hundreds of dollars each month, all as passive income.
If you might be interested in writing a blog post related to your digital product, please reach out to us at contact@theottoolbox.com. We can walk you through the process and come up with some content creation tools that might help.
If you don’t have a digital product yet…
…and you would like to create one (but don’t know how):
This option is perfect for anyone wanting to explore their creativity, and use what they know, as well as experience, and zones of genius into a resource that they can sell to toothers. We’ve walked many creatives through the process and decided to put the instructions, the systems, and the step-by-step roadmap into a course. The Digital Product Creation Program is a creator academy of sorts. It’s a toolkit with blueprints, workbooks, and roadmaps to support your journey in getting started as an online creator.
In the Digital Product Creation Program, we have several stages of product development with resources, ebooks, and templates to support your journey to creating and selling digital products. It includes 5 stages:
- Product Development- This section of the toolkit includes types of digital content that you can make based on your experience, passions, and knowledge. This is a great brainstorming space if you know you want to make something, but don’t know exactly what…or how! You’ll also find tutorials on all of the tech so you don’t hit a stumbling block by not knowing how to manage the technology aspect of digital content creation. One tool that is especially helpful is “How to Write an Ebook in 30 Days”. So often, as professionals, we have amazing experiences and know-how that could be a huge resource to others in ebook format. We walk you through getting your information into a consumable format.
- Business Development – This stage of the process takes out the unnecessary tasks and streamlines the things you really need to worry about. We cover how to protect your product legally. We also include workbooks and planning books so you can stay on track to get your digital product completed. This is a huge time saver for the whole content creation process.
- Product Template Library- This section includes hundreds of product templates for everything from ebooks, to courses, to worksheets, to handouts, screening tools, forms, and so much more. You can use these templates and plug in the information you know and love to teach others about. These templates are literally done-for-you product templates.
- Sell Your Products- This section of the toolkit offers strategies for selling that supports all levels, whether you’ve sold products before, are already on Teachers Pay Teacher, or if you are just getting started and have no idea where to begin. We have created a blueprint for submitting your products to The OT Toolbox and Your Therapy Source, so you can submit your product once and be done.
- Digital Marketing- In this section of the program, we’ve put together a library of templates to plug your product into so you can start marketing on social media. Social media content creators will love this section because the design is already done for you. Open up the templates and start marketing.
- Bonuses- There are several bonuses included with this program, including frames and backgrounds for digital content creation. These include all commercial rights so you can use the materials in products that you sell anywhere. We also have put together a top secret, data-backed list of needed digital products. These are materials that are just not that prevalent out there in the market, but they are much-needed.
You can find out more about Digital Product Creation for Professionals here.
How to sell Digital Content Creations on The OT Toolbox
We love to support occupational therapy professionals and supporting professionals by allowing them to create and serve others, while building an income on the side is just one way to do that!
The process is really simple. Margaret from Your Therapy Source and I walked through this process (and had a great chat!) about how vendors can apply to sell their products on our websites, to our email lists, and on our social media channels. Check out our chat here:
Basically, the process to sell your digital content creations on The OT Toolbox is this:
- Send an email to contact@theottoolbox.com. Include your product name and attach it to the email. Tell me about yourself…I love to hear from other digital content creators out there!
- We will review the product to ensure it fits with The OT Toolbox. We’ll get back to you via email.
- If the product is accepted as a resource to include on our shop, you’ll get a digital contract. The contract basically says it is your product and you can sell it in other places online or in person, that the product is yours, and The OT Toolbox is only a marketplace to list the product. We also outline the percentage of earnings, and other information we’ve listed in the video above.
- You will return the signed contract along with a product description, a cover images of the product, and any other images that will help the resource sell.
- We will take care of the rest! We’ll list the product on The OT Toolbox shop, create a product listing, market the product in our newsletter, on social media, and in related blog posts.
- You will get paid. We pay through Paypal and will send out payments once a month.
It’s a great stream of passive income for professionals that love sharing their experiences and knowledge!
Latest Therapy Vendor Resources
Want to see the latest digital products that have been created by Occupational Therapists and Occupational Therapy Assistants? Our OT vendors are experts in areas like dyslexia, documentation, handwriting, sensory diets, and more. Check out the latest OT vendor additions to The OT Toolbox shop:
Colleen
Colleen Beck, OTR/L has been an occupational therapist since 2000, working in school-based, hand therapy, outpatient peds, EI, and SNF. Colleen created The OT Toolbox to inspire therapists, teachers, and parents with easy and fun tools to help children thrive. Read her story about going from an OT making $3/hour (after paying for kids’ childcare) to a full-time OT resource creator for millions of readers. Want to collaborate? Send an email to contact@theottoolbox.com.
