Hello, and welcome to design and business conversations for creatives. I'm Cheyney
and today I'm chatting with you about how I make money as a graphic designer.
I'm going to list out five ways that I make money as a graphic designer and
start with the way that is the most income generating and work my way down
to the least income generating. I'll also talk about, within these, what I do and
don't like about each, pros and cons and yeah I hope you enjoy. So let's jump
right in. Number one, design services. So this is probably where I spend 80% of my
time and make 90 percent of my money as a graphic designer. So, I am self-employed,
I work for myself, every bit of income that I earn, I generate. So, this is super
important for me to run my business, and this is design services. I offer my
design services for clients, so I create everything from logos, to websites, to
print material, to packaging design, and everything in between. Without this, I
wouldn't have this business. My clients are what help me
pay my bills, and live my life, so I'm super thankful and super grateful for
this. This is something I'm hoping to maybe put lower down on my list in
terms of time spent, just because offering my services means that I am
trading my time for money, and this is great, however I do want to, one day in the
future, have a family and I am under no illusion of how hard that's going
to be to run my own business and start a family and raise children. So, I'm trying
to plant little seeds everywhere, multiple streams of income, to help
income stream in and hopefully it's not always time based like design services
is. So that's number one, design services. Number two,
offering a product. So, a product based offering, and this is something that I
did, before I started Design by Cheyney, I ran another business called Camille Co
which is, was, a business where I designed all the branding, and all the
packaging, and worked with contract manufacturers to create soaps and
candles, luxury New Zealand made soaps and candles, to sell within New
Zealand on a website and also into stores around the country. This was
fabulous but I ended up having to dissolve it couple of years back to
focus on just Design by Cheyney because I was running it as a one-woman show and
it was a lot. I made a decent income from this, however
it was a lot of time and energy to run and in hindsight, if I were to do it
again which I probably will in the future, I would run it from the start to
be more hands-off where I don't have to be so involved. Another way to make money
as a graphic designer is to offer a product. So, yeah, that could be anything,
that could be an e-book, it doesn't have to be a physical product. Number three, as
a graphic designer how do I make money. A couple of years ago, I wrote an
illustrated children's book, it's called "Thank you for feeding Freckle" and it's
due to be published in June this year. Yay. That is just another way that I've
used my graphic design skills in order to pay my bills. This took a lot of work
and it wasn't that easy, I don't want you to be in any kind of illusion. I think I won
the publishing lottery here. It doesn't have to be a traditionally
published book. It could be a self-published book, you can self publish
a book, you can market it, and sell it, and make income from that. Number four, print
on demand. So, another way that I make money is through uploading my artwork to
print on demand websites to sell. If you don't know much about print on demand,
they are basically websites that allow you to sell products and it's all
digital so they literally print on demand. I use Society6 and Redbubble. You
upload your artwork and sell it to your customers, superimposed on
and it's not actually a physical tangible item until they click it in
their cart and purchase that and then Redbubble or Society6 will manage getting
it printed and shipped and deal with the customer service and then you get paid a
commission. I also have artwork on Etsy, only digital downloads. So this is a way
for me to be able to sell my products without having to deal with the shipping
and the logistics, which I learned when I did Camille Co, my product based
offering, was a huge commitment. So I offer digital downloads on Etsy and yeah,
I make a little bit of money off these, I would like to make more. I
don't put a lot of energy into them yet, but I'm probably going to ramp that up
soon and drive more people to those platforms, so they can buy my artwork and
the beauty of these things is it's just a hundred percent creative freedom, so I
get to create what I want, when I want, and put it on whatever I want, and if
people like it, great, I can earn some commission on it. The fifth and final way
that I make money as a graphic designer, and this is the smallest amount of
income out of all of these, is through AdSense, my Google AdSense account. If you
haven't looked into it, I suggest that you do, it's something that I'm looking
to work on and grow over the coming months. It's something that having this
YouTube channel, provided that you know it gets a certain amount of subscribers
and followers or whatever, it'll start generating a little bit of income and it
works basically on advertising. So on my website on www.designbycheyney.com,
I have ads placed on there and the ads are automatically uploaded by Google and
whenever somebody visits my website, and the ad makes an impression on them, and
if they click on it, in particular, I get a little tiny bit of income and I mean
cents but it all adds up. I think last month I earned fifteen dollars, I mean, I
don't know if that's, you know, it's better than nothing that's probably like
on the low end of AdSense or whatever but it all counts, it all counts when you're
generating your own income. Something I'm going to work a little bit more on I
think and something that's piqued my interest, at the moment there's a global
pandemic, Covid-19 is going on so I'm at home, I am currently not working with
many clients, people simply don't have the money right now to be spending on
graphic design so I'm using this time wisely to create YouTube videos and to
streamline my business. So yeah, AdSense is something that I'm looking further into
at the moment. So anyway, some other ways to create income as a graphic designer
which I haven't personally done but are just worth mentioning, are through ebooks and
courses. This has been really successful for some of the graphic designers that I
know. I haven't, yeah as I said, personally done it but yeah. Anyway, thank you for
watching, if you like this video, give it a thumbs up, or subscribe by clicking the
button below and I will see you next time. If you want to leave me a comment, I
will do my best to answer. Bye.