- Hello there, and thanks for joining me.
I'm digital artist Aaron Rutten,
and in this video,
I'll share some tips for making passive income
off of your digital art skills.
(instrumental music)
First, let's talk about the difference
between passive and active income.
Passive income is money
that you make constantly, consistently,
without really having to do something more than once.
So, for example, that could be a course that you made,
or a YouTube video that earns ad revenue.
Once you make that video, or once you make that course,
it's going to continue earning you revenue
for an indefinite period of time,
but you won't have to remake that course each time
to make that money.
It's just going to keep making money.
You could think of it like a plant or something.
That plant's going to keep giving you vegetables,
or keep giving you fruit,
as long as you do a minimal amount
of maintenance to keep it alive,
versus active income is something like
doing commissions for people,
or doing graphic design
where you have to do a job each day or each week
or each month in order to make that money,
and each time you want to get paid,
you have to do work.
So, it's lots and lots and lots
of different jobs to make your income.
Now, for me personally, I prefer passive income.
I'd rather make passive income,
because then I can do something once, I can do it right,
and it can continue to earn money
for the rest of my life, hopefully.
I've concentrated more on active income in the past,
and it's really stressful.
It's a lot of work worrying about getting work each month
and juggling 10 or 20 different jobs
and making people happy.
I don't like that.
I'd rather make a product for myself
and continue earning money off of it.
So, let's talk about some different ways
to earn passive income.
The first and probably one of the most easiest
is to sell your artwork as stock art or stock images.
You could use a website like Shutterstock.com or Dreamstime.
And these websites basically let you
upload an image of your artwork,
you can keyword it and title it,
and if it's something that people want to use
in a magazine or on a website
or for different publishing purposes,
they can download that image,
then you get a royalty for that download,
and they get to use the image for a specific set of terms.
Depending on how much you get as a royalty,
they might get to use it more
or they might get to use it less.
And this is a really great way to make income,
because you probably already have a bunch of images
on your hard drive already.
So, just think about that.
If you've got 100 or 200 images,
upload them, and there you go.
You'll start earning money.
Now, it's a small amount of money per download,
but it does add up over time.
However, I have to say,
as far as time versus the amount of money you earn,
it is really tedious to go in
and keyword all of your images and upload them,
and a lot of these websites
have these certain rules you have to follow,
and sometimes you'll upload a bunch of images,
and then they'll reject them,
and they'll say, well,
you have to give them better keywords
or different titles or something.
There's also kind of a hassle
where you have to upload a model release,
especially if it's an image of a person,
or you have to upload a property release for each image
to prove that it's your artwork
and not something that you just photographed.
So, that can be really time-consuming, too,
and if you're only making a little bit of money
off of your work,
it might not make sense to do that with all of your artwork.
But maybe just your top images.
The next way to earn passive income
is to sell digital products.
I use a website called Gumroad,
which let's you sell both physical and digital products.
They handle all of the payment options.
They process credit cards.
They process PayPal.
You basically just upload your files
or create a description of your product.
People can buy it.
They pay out the money to you, and there you go.
You can sell products off of your website.
You can sell products off of social media with links.
It's really super easy,
and I've had a lot of success with it selling my courses.
You can sell things like tutorials, PDFs, some music,
pretty much anything you can think of.
There's also a lot of different websites
that will let you upload courses, like Udemy, for instance.
I have a video you can watch comparing Udemy to Gumroad,
but basically, I like Gumroad better,
because Gumroad has a lot fewer rules
about how you upload things.
You basically just upload all the files to Gumroad
that you want to sell,
and Gumroad doesn't really interfere with you,
whereas Udemy wants you to fit everything
into a particular Udemy format,
and that takes a lot of time.
Another quick and easy way to earn some passive income
is through ad revenue.
You can earn ad revenue through videos like this on YouTube.
You upload the video,
and if you choose to show ads on that video,
if those ads get engagement from viewers,
then you earn a little bit of money per engagement.
Now, it's not a ton of money
unless you get a ton of views
and you have a ton of subscribers,
but if you have a lot of videos, it does add up,
and it helps your channel pay for itself.
There are lots of other ways to earn ad revenue, as well.
You can show banners on your website, for instance.
Donations are a great way to make passive income, as well.
You get donations through good old trusty PayPal,
and people can send you money that way.
You can just set up a custom PayPal link for yourself
where people can donate to you with a PayPal button,
or you can go the crowdfunding route
and you can set up a Patreon page.
Mine is Patreon.com/AaronRutten,
and it's a place where fans can support
people like me as artists who create content,
and then we can reward our patrons
by giving them exclusive content for patrons only.
In my case, that's things like special PSDs
with all the layers in my artwork,
and long-format videos that I don't release on YouTube.
It's uncommon to see people
making thousands of dollars a month on Patreon.
Now, in most of those cases,
those people are having to fulfill
some sort of reward or multiple rewards.
Maybe they have to send something,
or they have to make a certain amount of videos each month.
And so there is some work involved in all of these things
in setting them up and maintaining them,
but it's not like you're going to work,
and it's not like you're taking on a job each month
or each day or each week,
having to finish that job.
It's something that you set up once,
and it earns you money,
and you have to do a little bit of maintenance
here and there to keep it going.
Another great way to earn passive income,
especially if you're the kind of person
who uses a lot of tech and products and things like that,
if you have things you can recommend to other artists,
then you can make money off of affiliate links.
For example, there's Amazon Affiliates
where you can embed links in your blogs.
You can put links in the description of your YouTube videos,
or you can even shout-out the products in your videos
and then direct people to your website
to then purchase those products.
So, for example, I use the Wacom Cintiq 27QHD Touch.
That's the tablet that I draw on.
And if somebody asks me, what tablet do you use?
I can say, here I use this tablet.
You can also buy it on Amazon.
And if they purchase it on Amazon using your link,
then you get a commission for that sale.
And if you're like me,
you're constantly referring people to tablets,
and so it adds up.
With each sale, you end up making
a good chunk of money each month.
Now, there's also affiliate programs
that are company or product specific.
So, for example, I'm a Corel affiliate,
and that means that I have a special coupon code,
2017AR, that you can use to save $100
off of the full version of Corel Painter 2017.
So, having that partnership with Corel
means that, for the product
that I'm going to recommend anyways,
I'm earning some income off of each sale
and getting credit for those sales.
And the last tip I have for earning passive income
is to create merchandise
and digital print-on-demand products,
like this shirt, for instance, is something that I made.
And it's for sale on my Spreadshirt store.
So, each time somebody buys a shirt,
I end up making a small profit off of that shirt sale.
Now, you can make all kinds of clothing designs.
You can print phone cases.
You can make posters and canvas prints and mugs,
and there's all kinds of products
that you can put your artwork on.
However, I will say, very similarly to selling stock art,
it takes a lot of time to upload images of your artwork
onto products to build the products.
I mean, just imagine, this one design here,
if I wanted to put this one 10 different kinds of shirts,
I have to spend all that time setting up each shirt,
and if I'm not getting a whole lot of sales
off of all those shirts,
then sometimes you're ending up
wasting a lot of time doing something
and not making any money off of that time spent doing it.
And in that sense, it's no really efficient
to try to earn passive income that way.
And that's how I kind of feel about selling merchandise,
is I've spent a lot of time setting up my Zazzle store,
and there's a bunch of products on there,
but I hardly ever get sales.
And I don't spend a whole lot of time promoting it.
Maybe if I did, I'd get more sales.
But again, it's not bringing in the kind of money
that something like Gumroad is
for the amount of effort I have to put in to keep it going.
Besides Zazzle, you could use something
like CafePress or Society6.
And it is a good way to get your work out there
and to really easily create prints automatically
and then have them shipped to your customers.
You could do something like that through Gumroad,
but it wouldn't be quite as automated,
unless you use something like Printiful
to integrate with Gumroad.
So, there you go.
Those are some tips for earning passive income
off of your digital art.
If you found this information helpful,
take a quick second to like this video.
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I'd love to have you subscribe.
I have a lot more digital art videos like this.
Thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time.