- 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.
