- There is definitely more than one way to make money
as a designer or an artist.
Hey everybody, this is Roberto Blake at robertoblake.com,
helping you create something awesome today.
Today we're gonna talk about how to make passive income
as a graphic designer or as a web designer or artist
and I'm gonna try to cover that range
because I know that everybody in the audience
has different skills, so I'm gonna give you at least five
ways that you can make passive income pretty much
right now using the skills you have as a creative pro.
Usually this is the kinda thing I save for Small Business
and Social Media Saturdays,
so if you've only been watching the graphic design videos,
there's a lot of business stuff and ways to make money
that I talk about on Saturdays,
so you might wanna check out that playlist.
I also talk about how to market yourself
and that plays a role in what we're talking about here
because ya kinda need people to sell to.
Passive income is about having ways
that you make money when you're not actively working.
There's active income and then there's passive income.
Active income is what most of you who are
watching this are doing.
You design a website for a client,
you create a logo for a client,
you're spending tens of hours to get paid once.
With passive income, the idea is this,
you might design a website template,
put that into a network like Invodo or Creative Market
or what have you, and then you can sell that template
for 50 bucks a thousand times in a year
and make some real money.
Or even if you only sell it a hundred times, or 20 times,
the reality is this, you have the ability to sell it
as many times as possible throughout the entire lifetime
of that piece of intellectual property
and you spent the same amount of time on it.
If you spent ten hours and you get paid once,
you never make money again for that effort.
But if you make a product and you can sell that product
over and over and over again, then you have a way
to make money off of that time forever.
So it's a more practical investment to make a product
or something that can be resold for time to effort
and sell that multiple times than to sell something once.
When you look at the most profitable companies
in the world, they're product based companies
instead of service based companies.
Creative service professionals can use their skills
and hedge their bets by working a nine to five job
or doing freelance work, and then, at the same time,
taking a little bit of extra effort to make products
that they can resell or by selling products
on the behalf of other people.
So let's go ahead and jump into five examples of this.
If you have skills in typography and hand lettering,
then you have a tremendous opportunity.
You can sell some of your hand lettering
as stock media using popular phrases
or quotes and people will buy that.
Another thing you can do with that is
you could put it on t-shirts,
you could put that on merchandise,
and you could sell those products online
through print-on-demand services.
So really, I just gave you two ways,
but I'm just gonna count them as one.
If you happen to have skills in hand lettering
and typography, this is tremendous opportunity for you.
You could also make your own fonts.
You can use programs and make your own fonts if you have
skills in typography and hand lettering
and you can sell those fonts.
So while I'm counting this as one,
I just gave you three different ways that you can make money
if you happen to have skills
in typography and hand lettering.
If you're a web designer, then you can sell templates,
you can make website templates
and you can sell those online.
If you happen to have skills with WordPress,
this is a great opportunity,
people wanna buy premium WordPress themes all the time,
but if you don't and you're just good with HTML,
you can sell email marketing templates.
People like me who run a business
have to grow their email list.
I pay 75 dollars a month right now to MailChimp
to be able to mail my newsletter out to my email list
and there's some affiliate things in there
that sometimes make that worth while
and I make money off them, so it's very practical for me.
If I wasn't a designer, I would absolutely buy a template
from a great designer that lets my email newsletter
look better than all of my competitors and contemporaries.
So you can either sell outright website templates,
WordPress templates and themes,
eCommerce templates and themes, or, very simply,
you can sell email marketing templates
if you're a web designer and all you do is HTML and CSS.
So that's extraordinarily practical.
If you have the ability to do JavaScript or PHP,
maybe you can create some simple WordPress plugins,
and you can sell those or incorporate them
into your WordPress theme that you're selling
as a bonus or an add-on or an upsell.
So these are ways that you can make money online.
If you're a print production artist
and you do a lot of print and layout work
and that's more of your thing, then guess what?
There are plenty of people who want brochure templates,
who want magazine templates, who want presentation decks
and it will save them time.
The market for this is not just the people
who would normally be your clients.
You might be thinking,
why would I do that, Roberto, and let them buy that
from me for ten or 20 dollars, when I can get them
as a client and I could make money off of them indefinitely?
This is not for the person
who wants to hire a graphic designer.
This is for somebody that might be a marketer,
that's a solo-entrepreneur,
it could be any number of things.
It could actually be another designer that's working
as an in-house professional that's not getting paid enough
to do things from scratch and needs to buy back some of
their time or has a budget to actually buy stock templates,
so you wanna take advantage of this existing market,
you're not competing with yourself, not really.
The people who want something specialized and customized
to them, are still gonna hire you for that
and not gonna want a cookie-cutter template
that a hundred people might have.
The people who want to buy those templates
are buying it for a reason.
They have a specific vulnerability that they're trying
to address and this is gonna help them.
So, if you're not selling it to them,
there's somebody else who is.
So, if you have a background in print and production artwork
then you can sell great illustrator and in-design templates
that people are more than happy to buy
and that is a great opportunity for you.
If you're a digital illustrator,
or you're somebody who's fantastic in Adobe Illustrator
or CorelDRAW, or anything like that,
and you do vector artwork,
then you can do vector graphic packs,
and these could be anything from variations
of social media icons, these could be characachers,
these could be different symbols and iconography,
and if you sell these as packs and bundles,
you're more likely to get someone to buy them
than if you just sell them individually.
This is fantastic.
It doesn't have to be a very time-intensive,
some of it doesn't even have to be very complex.
Before having a membership with Adobe Stock
and with GraphicStock,
I was buying things like this all the time
from Can Stock Photo and from iStockphoto
and from Photodune and from Graphicriver
and sometimes if I find something special,
I still will go out and buy it individually from those sites
even though I have memberships.
So, I think it's really worthwhile
for you to take advantage of those skills.
If you're someone who has a background in
digital illustration and vector artwork,
this is great for you and there are a lot of people
that can make money from it
and it's great for your portfolio if you wanna get clients
that will have you want to create
individual things for them.
If you create a character set,
there are people who will want a custom character set
of them, they won't wanna have to do it themselves
or tweak what you have, they'll want you to just produce
that for them because they've seen
that you've actually done it.
There's no downside to this because you can create a
portfolio and body of work that will let you get real
clients that you can do active income
and charge the highest amount you can for.
And at the same time, you have some stuff that's maybe a
variation of that or has a little less effort behind it
and you're selling that and making some great money
on the side while you sleep.
So this is not fluff, this is not hokey,
this is not anything that's a scam,
this is not not valuing your work.
This is practical business sense
that you can apply as a creative
that will make you money, scale your public profile,
and get you actual clients on top of it.
One of the last and final ways that I'm gonna give you
to make passive income is to sell presets
and to sell assets.
What I mean by this is custom brushes
you might've made in Photoshop,
custom textures, custom backgrounds, but also presets.
Maybe you made a Photoshop action that automates a process,
maybe you made some Lightroom presets that'll allow somebody
to edit their photos and have an interesting look
or color wash their photos.
Those things sell all the time
and there's no limit to it.
You can sell Photoshop styles for
texturizing a font, any number of things.
So you can make custom assets and you can sell those
and people do pay good money for that all the time.
So, I've given you more than five ways to make
passive income as a designer, as an artist, as a creative,
and I really hope you take advantage of this.
If you have questions about how to
make passive income online,
I've done a couple of great videos about that
that you should check out, I'll link them up here,
also in the description below.
Also, I wanna know if you have any more questions about this
or if you've ever done it before.
Let us know in the comment section,
let's have a conversation about that.
Have you been able to make passive income online
using your creative skills?
What have you done that I didn't list?
Or have you done anything from the list that I brought up?
If you guys like this kinda video
and you want me to cover even more ways,
I could cover easily another ten ways
that you could make passive income online as a designer
or as a creative,
then let me know in the comments and also let me know by
getting 300 likes on this video.
The sooner we get 'em, the sooner I can
make that next video.
Anyway, Like this video if you like it,
don't forget to Subscribe,
check out the other awesome content on the channel.
Remember, graphic design videos are typically on Mondays,
unless I'm late.
As always you guys, thanks so very much for watching
and don't forget, create something awesome today.
And maybe make some money off of it.