Want to be an author? Write a pamphlet, manual, or book on a topic you know well. Save it as a Microsoft Word file (.doc) or Adobe Acrobat file (.pdf) and sell it online. What to write about? Whatever you know or do best. Write a "How To" manual about:

A local band with no label doesn't have many options for selling their songs. You can't sell your songs through iTunes, and producing and distributing a CD on your own is expensive. There are music-selling sites that will allow you to sell your songs online, but those sites typically keep 30% to 40% of the purchase price. Instead of giving up such a large cut of the money, record your songs in a popular music format (such as mp3), then sell the songs from your website. Sell them individually, or bundle several songs together in a zip file to sell for a higher price. You can even include lyrics (as a Microsoft Word file) and/or digital photos of the band (as jpg files) in the bundle. Don't forget that along with selling your downloadable music files you can also sell shippable products from your website, such as clothing with your band's logo silk-screened on it.

If you sew or embroider, and make your own patterns on the computer, you might want to sell those files online. You can sell files individually, or you can bundle any number of your pattern files together in one archive (zip) file and sell multiple files as a single download.

If you create your own electonic art, sell it as downloadable files. Just like sewing patterns, you can sell files individually or you can bundle any number of your clip art or other graphic files together in one archive (zip) file.

There are stock photography selling sites that let you upload your photos, then pay you 25 cents to one dollar per download sale. Why not upload as few or as many of your photos as you want and set the price per photo you want and keep all the money?

If you know a topic well enough to train others, then you certainly know enough about that subject to write a training manual, tutorial, or educational courseware and save it as a Microsoft Word file (.doc) or Adobe Acrobat file (.pdf). Supplement your training income by selling these files online.

The Internet offers thousands of ebooks written by other people — ebooks to which you can freely or cheaply obtain the rights to redistribute. Upload as many as you want, add your profit margin to the price of each, and make money from the work of others.

The Internet is a rich resource for royalty free files such as clip art and other images, website templates, and more. Gather it up, bundle it in a archive files (.zip) and sell the packages from your website. Or, visit one of several sites that provides free public domain books (such as older classic books that have lost their copyright) in plain text format and reformat some of these text files as easier-to-read Adobe Acrobat files.

Like musicians who sell their music through a music-downloading website, software developers who sell their own programs through a software-downloading website often pay that site 30% or more of the selling price of each download. Instead of paying that hefty fee, simply upload your program to your website, set the price, and keep the money customers pay to download your program.