If you have a design talent and you’ve got a knack for technology, developing design elements could be a great potential source of passive income for you. As a designer, you have the flexibility of options to increase your business without having to feel like you’re piling up on your workload.
What’s excellent about generating passive income as a designer is that it reduces your dependency on clients to get paid. When you work as a freelance designer especially, it can be stressful constantly trying to search for clients, pitching your ideas, hoping they like your proposal and then going back and forth negotiating on the terms of payment.
Developing design elements that you can put up for sale on various platforms and online marketplaces such as Etsy, Shopify, and even Instagram is becoming a popular option for designers and artists to create art their love and reach out to a specific target audience.
Using websites and platforms to sell your designs cuts out the bulk of your workload. You need to design the content put it up for sale, and anyone interested can purchase it immediately.
Who is it for?
This passive income stream is ideal for anyone who:
– Has got a computer to work with
– Is creative with tons of ideas, design software, and some spare time to work on designing.
– It is the perfect option for anyone who’s already working as a developer, or a designer
– Looking to make a little extra income as a side hustle.
How much money can you potentially earn?
How much money you can earn from this depends on the type of content you’re selling and how often your content gets purchased. Another factor that will affect your earning potential is the rates that you charge. More experienced, reputable designers have the luxury of charging slightly higher prices than those who have recently joined the scene. Design content can start anywhere from as low as $5 to $10 per content. It can also be as little as a few hundred dollars. This depends entirely on the quality and the intricacy of the work involved.
In the case of making passive income from developing design elements, the money you’ll be earning will repeatedly come from the sale of one job. Recurring revenue makes it passive since you no longer have to invest even more time working on developing and designing new content.
How to do this?
To start making passive income by developing design elements, here’s what you can do:
- Creating themes to sell on WordPress – Designing themes and templates for platforms like WordPress is one way to produce a continuous income stream. The most challenging part will be in the beginning, when you’ve got to come up with the ideas and put in the hours for the templates, but once you’re done, each time someone purchases one of your templates, that’s money in the bank for you.
- Graphics To Be Used on Websites – This is another excellent option to consider since new websites are emerging as new businesses and companies get formed. As long as websites exist, there will always be a need for graphics, and you could step in a fill that demand by developing these types of content and creating a nice income stream for yourself while you’re at it.
- Selling Fonts – Yes, there is even a demand for fonts. Develop and design fonts custom-made, hand-drawn, in vector forms, airbrushed fonts with extra characters, fonts that have embellishments, get creative and get designing.
- Developing 3D Models – 3D models these days are needed for all sorts of projects, so why not make a passive income option out of it? From animated models to architecture landscapes, if you’ve got a gift for designing and developing these elements, there could be a passive income opportunity in it for you.
- Selling Stock Photography – Design elements don’t have to be focused on graphics or Photoshopping alone. Selling stock photography is another way of producing a “design” element to sell online. The only equipment you will need is a good camera, a creative eye for making a good photo composition, taking a fantastic picture, and putting it up for sale. That’s recurring passive income for you whenever your images get purchased and used.
- Selling online short course on how to create- You’ve spent hours honing your skills and talent on a specific art. It could be creating fantastic buttercream cake art or how to use power tools effectively to make excellent home improvement projects. It could also be a step-by-step series of courses on building a furniture item.
One central element to remember in selling your art and design online is to make the customer service experience seamless. This includes having a website built for easy navigation, browsing the different content and design assets you have, and adding a fluid payments experience for your customers. No one wants to visit a website or a page that is hard to navigate and find the information they are looking for. Worst of all, a website makes it hard for customers to pay because this means the drop-off rate of new and existing customers visiting your site will be high.
Passive income through developing design elements can be a great income stream, but as with any other passive income stream, this is going to take time to build momentum. If anyone has told you that you could get rich quickly doing lots of design work, that’s a myth. The income you generate will depend heavily on how often your content gets purchased. Sometimes, you may get a high volume of sales, and then there may be times when you might not make any sales at all for several weeks. But this should not be a reason to give up. If you’re looking for a consistent passive income stream each month, you might have to consider diversifying your options instead of just focusing on developing design elements alone.