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One of the most exciting ways of setting up an extra income stream is through Printables.

It’s not something that will appeal to everyone. But if you are a visual person and like working with images, it’s an endlessly fascinating and varied way of splurging on your creativity while producing simple and easy-to-monetize products.

The options are so many and so different, from helping home schooling parents with maths worksheets or science fun facts, to adult colouring sheets, to useful journals and calendars, to information sheets.

Getting started is easy if you have a computer or laptop and a printer-scanner. it doesn’t require a lot of other equipment. You don’t need to buy inventory.

If you want to, you can make your product a physical product or you make it downloadable PDF file and which your customer can access as soon as they have paid for it. They download it on their own printer or laptop and off they go.

It’s even possible to produce interactive PDF’s which increases the ease of customer use. For example, a maths worksheet, which saves the stressed parent from having to go out and buy more ink before their child can do the school homework. It was an issue for some parents in the recent school closures keeping up with the amount of ink needed to keep their family going with all the homework sent from school.

A recent development in the laws relating to copyright and public domain has freed up a lot of content which was previously protected, making it available for use. The length of time copyright of material lasts varies slightly from country to country, the US and the UK have different amounts of protection for works produced in these two English speaking countries. However, there are huge amounts of “new” material became available in the US in 2020. And more will come each year from now on as the copyright period expires.

Another factor is that a huge amount of material which was previously only accessible in physical locations to view physically such as libraries or museums, has now been digitised and put on line. Some of this is only available for personal use or educational and research purposes, not commercial use. Some is freely available. So you would need to be sure what the terms and conditions of this newly published material were as some sources copyright their digital work to protect it.

This gives two additional ways that the resources have been expanded. Before lockdowns and social restrictions put a stop to traveling and socialising, many people looked forward to week-end trips to these special locations where they could see precious objects and paintings like those you find in the British Museum or the National Gallery, or holidays visiting family-friendly fantasy worlds like Disney Land or Universal Studios or Madame Tussauds.

Now you can bring them to people!

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Filed under: Biz Ops

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