Are you in search of methods to generate substantial passive income? Then search no more, because we’re going to discuss one of the most profitable methods to earn money online, and that’s by trading journals.
We are going to talk about selling printable journals on Amazon specifically because this is the most profitable and most passive way to run a low-content business.
All you have to do is to create the journals and Amazon will automatically print and ship them to your customers. So, if you have a little bit of passion for design and are willing to put in some work, this type of business may revolutionize your life.
In this article, we will guide you on how to start selling journals for free, including doing niche research and product creation. But before that, let’s discuss what journals are, and how much money you can make selling them.
Some Quick Resources:
- Book Bolt – Best All-In-One KDP Tool
- Publisher Rocket – Best Advanced KDP Keyword Research Tool
- Creative Fabrica – Best KDP Interiors & Graphics
What Is A Journal?
Journal is a type of low-content book, which typically contains very little or no written text, but mostly just the design elements. People use them to write down their thoughts and ideas, and, they are also great for studying and tracking things.
Journals are relatively easy to make because they typically consist of the same interior pages. Compared to written novel books of 30,000 words, creating journals can be an effortless task, and the customer demand for them is huge.
There can be lined or blank-page journals, and they can come in various niches, like gratitude, meditation, cooking, exercise, business, and many others.
Journals are great products to sell if you are just starting out. It’s because they are very easy to make, and their market is still not over-saturated, so there’s definitely a space for you to squeeze in.
Whereas the notebooks, are also easy to create, but you would have a hard time selling them because there are just too many of them on Amazon.
Can You Make Money Selling Journals?
Whether selling journals on Amazon is profitable or not, entirely depends on the work you are willing to put in. But to directly answer the question, making money with journals is absolutely possible.
In fact, there are many successful sellers who have been making thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars per month from selling journals alone.
This is evident just from looking at many journal listings on Amazon. For example, just take a look at this one:
This journal is being sold at $9.95 for a copy, and it has over 40,200 reviews, meaning this product alone has been sold at least 40 thousand times!
But the best part about it – only 10% of customers on average will leave a review after the purchase, so it’s mind-blowing to think of how much money this product actually could have made in total.
Of course, this particular journal is more complex than a typical one, and you probably won’t be as successful as this seller is. However, this listing gives a good perspective of what is possible when it comes to selling low-content printables on Amazon.
The sky is the limit of what you can earn and everything depends on the strategy and consistency of your efforts.
Benefits of Selling Journals on Amazon:
Just before we get into the journal selling process, let’s cover 4 key reasons why you should sell journals and other low content products on Amazon. This will give you even more inspiration to start this amazing online business.
Passive income: You only have to create a journal once for it to be sold hundreds if not thousands of times. But the best thing about it – Amazon prints and ships your printables to the customer, so you don’t need to run to the post office every time you make a sale. Since Amazon gets millions of monthly visitors, you also don’t need to market your products outside the platform. Just create many high-quality journals in the right niche, sit back, and watch the sales coming in.
Easy to create: Compared to traditional books, journals are super easy to create, especially if you enjoy designing stuff. In fact, you don’t need to have knowledge in advanced design software, because today we have fantastic tools, like Canva, which can drastically simplify the entire design process. What’s more, journals can be designed only with two pages – the cover, and the interior.
Costs nothing to start: You don’t need to have a website, or money to invest in expensive tools to create and sell journals. You can list any low-content book on Amazon for free, and Amazon will only deduct printing and shipping costs once you make a sale.
High-profit margins: Unlike a physical product, which involves manufacturing, packaging, storing, shipping, and many other costs, low-content products, like journals have none of that. This leaves more space for profit margins.
Selling low-content books has many benefits compared to traditional physical products, but the biggest one is a piece of mind.
Everything is automated and smooth when it comes to digital product transactions, and the only thing you have to worry about is how to produce more quality content.
Check Out: Journal Collection – Over +77 No Content Book Interior Templates for Amazon KDP
How To Make Money Selling Journals:
Hopefully, you are convinced that selling low-content books on Amazon is an amazing business opportunity for any creative individual.
Now since we covered what journals are, and what are the benefits of selling them, it’s time to go into the entire process of selling and making money with them.
We will discuss 3 essential steps of the low content publishing business – finding the right niches, creating the books, and listing them on Amazon KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing).
So here we go:
Find The Right Niches:
Finding profitable niches is a key to success when selling low-content books on Amazon. Profitable niches mean not only the ones that are on-demand but also the ones that are not too competitive.
The biggest mistake that many beginners do is they create too general books with loads of competition, and they never get seen by the customers.
Imagine creating a general journal for women, and competing with other 70,000+ listings on Amazon…There’s no way you going to make money like that.
What you should do is come up with specific journal types in narrow niches, that are targeted to a specific group of people. For example, it can be something like a gardening journal for children, or a pink dream journal for women.
But to come up with specific book ideas is not enough. You also have to make sure that such books are selling well, and they are not too competitive.
And for that, you will have to do keyword research.
Related: Best Low Content Book Niches & Ideas
Keyword Research:
Amazon is a massive search engine where people use keywords to find various products to buy. The keywords represent your product title, as well as the exact type of product you are selling, and you have to make sure that they are relevant and serve the customer’s intent.
Keyword research is a critical process, which will have an impact on your journal’s discoverability on search, so you have to do it right.
Keyword research involves two steps: finding keyword ideas and analyzing the search. Both steps are going to be completed with the help of two free keyword research tools.
Getting Keyword Ideas:
At this stage, our goal is to get as many as possible specific journal-related keywords that we could create the books on.
To start, type in the term “journal” in Amazon’s search bar, and you will see 10 Amazon search suggestions, which represent what people are mostly looking for related to that term.
As you can see there are not too many keyword ideas, and none of them are relevant to us. So we definitely need to see more suggestions.
For that, we are going to use a great free Google Chrome extension called Huge Amazon Search Expander by Self Publishing Titans which will expand the suggestions to 100s of results, and that will give us a way bigger spectrum of ideas.
To find even more keywords you can add additional variables to the journal phrase, such as style, color, occasion, size, etc. Write down as many appealing keywords as you can, so you can later analyze them individually.
Doing Search Analysis:
Once you have a list of potentially profitable keywords, it’s time to analyze them individually. For this part, we will need another free Google Chrome Extention by Self Publishing Titans called KDP Keyword Research Tool.
To start, simply run a search on Amazon with your desired keyword. Remember, we are searching from the buyer’s point, so make to search in ALL DEPARTMENTS, instead of just in the book department.
Once you run a search, a keyword research tool will generate the data. This tool will calculate and extract important data from the search results, such as the average Best Seller’s Rank, number of results, number of reviews, and price.
The most important metric you should pay attention to is Amazon’s Best Seller’s Rank (BSR). This determines the seller’s position in the rankings according to how many copies of that book the seller has sold.
The lower the BSR – the more copies of a book the seller has sold.
For example, if a book’s Best Seller’s Rank is 300.000, it means that the book sells 16 times per month on average, and you can check that by using the KDP Sales Rank Calculator. While such selling volume may not seem very high, it all adds up, especially if you have loads of books.
When doing the search analysis with KDP Keyword Research Tool, ideally you should aim for a keyword with an average BSR lower than 300,000. Finding a keyword with such a rank may indicate that the books are selling well in this niche.
But, just looking at the average BSR score is not enough and there are also other important criteria you should follow, such as:
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Keyword Niche Score: That’s the Self Publishing Titan’s overall score given to the keyword. This feature calculates all metrics and gives you an average keyword score, which should be higher than 50.
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Average Results: The more results Amazon search returns the more competitive niche will be. Ideally, you should focus on getting  250-1000 search results per keyword.
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Average Reviews:Â Having products on the first page with too many reviews will make it hard for you to compete with, therefore the fewer reviews the books on the first page have the better your chances are. For the best results, you should aim for keyword with under 2000 average reviews.
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Average Price: Amazon takes a fee from your sale for printing and shipping a book, so, the higher price you will sell a book for, the bigger royalties you will make. For that, it’s best to focus on the average price of at least 7 dollars.
Here’s an example of a perfect keyword meeting all the necessary criteria:
Not everything has to be perfect, but if you manage to get at least get 3-4 factors right, it might be a great keyword to go for!
Create Journals With Canva:
Once you have some profitable journal ideas, it’s time to design them.
If you don’t know how to use advanced graphic design software like Photoshop, Illustrator, etc – don’t worry. There is a fantastic online design tool called Canva, which is not only super easy to use but also free.
Although Canva is very straightforward, it has very large capabilities. In fact, the majority of sellers on Amazon create journals and other types of low-content books with the help of this tool, and you can do it too.
The reason why Canva is so popular and loved by many creators is that it provides hundreds of pre-made and well-designed templates, which you can easily use to create new designs.
You also get access to plenty of backgrounds, fonts, illustrations, clipart, and other design elements.
For the journal, you will need to design a minimum of 3 pages – the front, back, and the interior page, which you can duplicate as many times as you want.
But if you want to go the extra mile, and put more value into your journal, you can also design the “belongs to” page, as well as different interior pages.
Here’s a quick tutorial on how to design a basic journal with Canva:
Hire Someone To Create A Journal On Fiverr:
In case you don’t have time or passion to create journal designs, you can always outsource it by hiring a graphic designer on freelancing platforms like Fiverr.
If you have a little bit of money to invest, and you have some good ideas for your journal, you can build the low content publishing business with your hands-off.
Fiverr is the largest freelancing marketplace packed with skilled and talented individuals who are willing to complete any digital task for a good deal.
What is great about this platform is that you have so many services to choose from, especially when it comes to graphic design. And since the platform is packed with sellers from developing countries, you can really get the work done for a low price.
To start, head over to Fiverr and type in “Journal design”, and you will see hundreds of services offering journal cover and interior designs.
Then all you have to do is to find the best service for the best price, and wait for a day or two until the work is done.
But before you order any types of services on Fiverr, make sure that the seller has enough of reviews proving that he is a reputable and reliable person to work with.
List Your Products On Amazon KDP:
Once you have your beautiful journals designed it’s time to bring them to life by uploading them to the Amazon KDP website.
There you will be required to submit the details of your journal, such as the title, subtitle, description, keywords, etc. At this stage, you will also have to optimize your listing for the search, and you can do this by using the relevant keywords.
You will also have to select your journal’s print options, trim size, and bleed settings as well as submit two documents of your journal in PDF formats – the cover, and the interior pages.
This is a relatively easy process, however, there are some nuances that you should pay attention to.
Here’s a great video explaining how you should upload your low-content books to Amazon by also optimizing it for the search:
Related: Pros & Cons of Selling Books on Amazon
Final Words:
And that’s about it! That’s the whole process of creating and selling journals on Amazon.
Once you manage to find the right keywords (specific journal types) and produce high-quality books, you won’t have to put effort into the marketing part, and the business will become passive.
The journals are easy to create and great to start with, but of course, you should not be limited to them. Once you get more familiar with publishing, try to diversify your book library by creating other types of low-content books, such as planners, recipe books, coloring books, etc.
The key to Amazon’s low content publishing success is consistency. There will be a lot of failure in the process, and the majority of your published journals won’t even sell.
But the more books you are going to publish the bigger your chances will be to come up with really successful books. So never stop publishing and sooner or later you will see the results!