7 Ways to Make Passive Income as a Graphic Designer

How's it going ?

Everyone in this video , I'm gonna be talking about ways to make passive income as a graphic designer , everyone could benefit from a little side cash .

So I thought , why not give a little bit of insight on the topic ?

First thing I just want to preface this by saying nothing is completely passive because everything takes some kind of work to do the startup and work to maintain it along the way .

But with that being said , let's get into it .

So the first side hustle I want to talk about is selling prints .

This is a popular one in the design community .

And for good reason , there are also different levels of passiveness to this and two different avenues I've seen , you can go down .

So the first option and what I've seen most people do is print on demand or drop shipping .

Basically , you have an online store , you set that up , you upload the artwork and you market it to your audience .

Once the print is purchased , the fulfillment company does all the work , shipping , packing it and all that and then they send it to the customer and give you a cut this is a very hands off approach to selling prints because all you really have to do is design the artwork , upload the file to the site and when people purchase it , the rest of the work is done by the company ways you can do this are setting up a Shopify store and then using a print on demand integration like prodigy or print full .

Another way is to go directly to a site that does our ecommerce like artist sourced or society six .

There's also a bunch of other options .

If you search online with varying different commission rates , I really recommend this option for anyone shipping internationally or anyone who doesn't have the resources to hold products at their house or print pack and ship them themselves .

Option two is the exact opposite of that , produce packaging and shipping your own prints .

And one of my last videos people kept asking me about the process on this and I wanted to make an in depth video about how to set up a print store and selling prints .

So , comment below if you want that anyway .

So for this , what I do personally is I get my artwork ready .

I print them using a friend's printer .

I figure out all the desired sizes have my website set up and I ship them out the tip .

I've learned with this option and a way to keep costs down is only print orders as they come in .

It lengthens your fulfill time a little bit , but it helps with not having unnecessary overhead and spending a lot of money up front .

I really like this strategy over the print on demand if you're able to do it because I hand sign all my prints , it has a more personal touch to it and I can ensure the quality of the artwork comes out good and the prints are safely shipped when I send them for my apartment .

However , to ensure this level of quality control , you do give up a lot more of the passiveness , having to patch it and go to the post office .

In my case though , I think it's well worth it .

I think it's something to consider if you have the means to do it .

So this next one , I'm sure you've bought some yourself or know people who sell them and it's selling digital assets .

This is a go to passive income source for a lot of creatives .

I see online you have everything from selling textures on the side , on a site like creative market to people who have made this all the way into a full business .

Someone like black market or true grit texture supply , selling digital goods is a great way to make side money with very little startup costs .

All you really need to invest in is a website and whatever resources you need to create the digital products similar to selling prints .

There are two avenues you can take here .

Option one is selling through a digital goods site .

This is a safe strategy but overall kind of a flooder market .

You can use sites like gum road or creative market to name a few how this process works is let's say you create an asset pack of icons , some textures , mockups , a new type face .

All you do is upload your products to the site and then when people discover and purchase your products , you get a cut .

And so does the company , this can be a very easy and safe way to make some side cash .

However , like I said , it is a pretty flooded market .

So you do need a good product because these sites are already filled with every photocopy texture or grunge asset pack .

You can think of if you want to be a little bit more hands on than option two is for you .

This approach requires taking the products you create and turning it into an online store like black market .

For example , the hardest challenge with this approach really is having a good website overall , good marketing and discovering a niche that hasn't been oversaturated overall though , if you have a good idea , know how to do some good marketing online selling digital goods can be very successful .

Patreon .

Patreon is probably my favorite side hustle for myself as a graphic designer .

I know it's a little bit more on the content creation side of things , but I think it can work for all kinds of graphic designers and other types of creatives .

You don't know about Patreon .

It's basically a site where people pay you a monthly pledge to become a patron and you can upload exclusive content just for them .

I like Patreon because not only is it a decent side hustle , but it allows you to further connect with your audience and for people to pay you for valuable or entertaining content .

If you have a specific style or something you think you can offer and are interested , you can start a Patreon and offer exclusive tutorials or can give patrons access to digital goods .

They can't get anywhere else .

There are plenty of other things you can do as well , live streams , chats with your fans , community voting and things like that .

I think it's an amazing platform honestly and it was created by a cool guy named Jack Conti who had the benefits of the creator in mind .

I personally use it to give you all access to bonus podcast stuff , wallpapers , high versions of my word source project files and more the biggest disadvantage to Patreon is you probably have to have at least a small audience on another platform to be able to migrate those to Patreon .

If you do have a following though on youtube , Instagram , Tiktok , Twitter or any other social site .

Really ?

I do recommend you figuring out how you can get paid for all your hard work and offer some awesome stuff on Patreon .

This next one is online courses .

As a designer , we all have skills that other designers want to learn .

Some of these things are more in depth and aren't well suited for short form content or things that are super fast to digest .

So for that reason , I still think creating tutorials online or online courses is a great idea .

You can use sites like creative fabrica or skillshare to create more in depth online classes .

I've seen a lot of designers succeed with sites like skillshare .

It does have a lot of upfront work though .

However , with recording the videos , editing and marketing .

However , if the online course is quality , it'll live on those sites for a long time and it will make you money over time as you sleep .

If you have a specific style or some kind of valuable information that you think would benefit from more long term class , I definitely recommend checking out something like skillshare last but not least is youtube .

My favorite side hustle is definitely youtube , you can create free youtube tutorials and videos like I do .

However , I definitely want to preface this by saying you most likely won't make money for a while until you grow your audience .

That's how it was for me .

At least I do believe though that youtube is still one of the best things you can do online for long term growth and stability .

The growth does start to compound over time though .

And I personally think by the end of this year , I have a decent chunk of side cash from youtube content creation .

I also have recently got enough subscribers to kind of entertain brand partnerships and sponsorships , which is nice because it's another little side of cash as well as it helps fund future videos .

I think it's good when you start making money on a site like youtube to put money back into it , buy better things to further continue the long term growth instead of taking the short term profits .

Like I said before , though youtube is probably one of the least passive ideas on this list .

It does take a lot of work and you need to maintain it to see continued growth .

However , it is super rewarding and it's awesome to connect with you all .

And once you start having a backlog of content , all the ad revenue over time from those videos is basically passive income .

I hope this information was helpful to you if it was do me a huge favor and hit that like button .

If you want to support one of my side hustles , check the description for links to my print store and the Patreon .

That's it for now .

Thank you for watching and I'll see you next time .

Peace .