Earning passive income as a designer
Are you a freelance creative looking to increase your income? Have you realised that you don’t have any more time to trade?
A freelance designers primary job is to work with clients and provide a service. In other words, designers often trade their time for money in order to pay the bills.
However, further down your journey, you may find trading your time for money may not necessarily be such a great thing. Everyone wants freedom once in a while regardless what career they have. Everyone also wants to make money while they sleep. There are several ways that designers can use their craft to generate a passive income.
Discover several ways you can earn passive income as a freelance designer:
Sell Your Own Design Templates
When starting out as a designer, it is likely you hadn’t niched down and therefore was creating a bit of everything for anyone. You may have picked up skills along the way, as well as having some left over resources.
Other designers commonly make use of selling digital files that people need but may not have the time or skill to create themselves, these files are:
Mock-ups
CV’s/ Resumes
Business Card Templates
Presentations
Sell Your Skills
In 2019, the online E-Learning market in the USA was $1.84 Billion. Clearly this is a good indicator to get your slice of the pie. Selling your skills through teaching online courses is a another great form of income.
In my opinion, this is one of the most sustainable methods to generate passive income. A good course goes a long way, and as a product that you can offer to your creative audience.
Creating an online course is very time consuming and demands preparation. If you're a designer that is a specialist in an area, has an audience/ following AND importantly, has time; I highly recommend creating an online course.
If you're creating your first course, focus on great content and not something that is too overwhelming. Creating courses is a skill that can be learnt overtime.
There are many platforms that may give you a pay-out when receiving a lot of views. the best platforms to start teaching from are:
Awwwards Academy
Skill Share
Udemy
Teachable
YouTube
Sell Merchandise
Building your passive income may mean sacrificing some of your spare time. However, it doesn’t mean it has to be boring.
Luckily for designers, the creative field is naturally fun and requires a large amount of creativity and freedom. Creativity can be expressed on merchandise such as clothing, stickers, socks, watches and much more.
This is also a way to stay creative and work freely whilst building your passive income. Theres several platforms you can start from such as:
Red Bubble
Zazzle
Printful
Society 6
TeeSpring
Sell Custom Design Tools
As creatives, you certainly may have downloaded tools that weren’t available on the application/ software you were using. Weather you paid or not, its likely that these tools helped you out after downloading them. Have you ever thought of creating your own digital assets? Well if you have, it certainly is a good idea:
Grids
Brushes
Fonts
In a nutshell, there are several possible ways to build passive income.
There is also hardly any costs required when starting so don’t be worried about losing any money. you can even start today, as it is as simple as creating an account depending on which platform. It’s recommended that if your just starting out as a designer, you may want to sell digital assets or merchandise.
However, if you have a few years under your belt, then possibly teaching is a good option for you.