The Most Profitable Passive Income Ideas for Creatives! My Top 8!
Not all passive income streams for creatives are created equal...
In this article we are going to talk about some of my favorite passive income ideas for creatives. Creative people have an awesome array of talent and how you share that with the world can generate some nice passive income for you. The following ideas are curated with illustrators, graphic designers, web designers, watercolor artists and anyone with a creative skillset in mind.
(note: some of the links below are affiliate links, but not all.)
First of all, let’s define passive income. Passive income can be made while you sleep and it does not require you to do a lot of work after releasing the product or content. Of course, this gets a little fuzzy as some popular passive income ideas do require your time to maintain a library of products and resources. The time required to maintain your passive income is nothing near the time it takes to offer a service for which you are paid for the exact time and energy you put into a project.
Building a library of different passive income assets takes time.
It is like a giant snowball rolling down a hill. At first, it is nothing to get excited about, a few dollars here or there, but over a long period of time that snowball gets bigger and bigger and eventually becomes something greater than you expected.
I am going to walk through in detail eight different income streams those with creative skills can easily dive into. Some of these may require several weeks or months to get started while others can take a few hours. By the end of this article I want you to find two that you feel like would be a good fit that combines both your talents and passion.
Making a really decent amount of passive income, the amount that could be life changing and allow you to do less client work, can take a bit of time to develop. That is why I want you to think about picking one of these passive income ideas and start working on it today!
There will be links to some of the websites and things I talk about in the article! So check it out.
Let’s get started with passive income idea number 1.
1.) Online Courses
A lot of people learn skills on Youtube, but sometimes they need more clear, detailed instruction in the form of a longer online course. There is a huge demand for something that goes deeper on so many creative topics. Even the things you learned in the last year could be useful to someone looking for content that has a fresh perspective.
I am starting with online courses because I personally have found this to be the most profitable of the passive income ideas I tried.
It is hard work, indeed, but video seems to be easily monetized through Youtube, Skillshare or other platforms where you are paid by each view or minute watched.
Video is not going anywhere anytime soon, so it might be high time to brush up on some basic video editing skills. The good news is that it does not take tons of money to get started. I created my first few classes on a free iMovie app on my Mac. I also purchased a simple $50 microphone and I was on my way. So, do not feel like this would require thousands of dollars to get started. That is why I like this passive income idea the most.
You will need to figure out a few things before you tackle creating and selling an online course.
1.) You need to figure out what topic or niche you want to teach.
Usually teaching basic entry level courses that appeal to a broad audience is best for getting larger amounts of income and sales, as you have a wider market of people. Then, creating more niche or intermediate topics to sell to the audience of your first course is the best next step. Eventually, you will build out a library of courses that can fit any level in your chosen field to maximize profit.
2.) Make sure your chosen industry has a demand for courses.
You can research this by looking at various keyword search tools. Is UX/UI design a popular topic? Or graphic design? How does that match up with my creative skillset and what do I need to learn to be able to feel comfortable teaching it?
3.) Next, find out WHERE to teach.
There are lots of options here. Udemy is a larger online course platform where you can easily create and launch a course. Their advantage is they have an amazing marketing budget where you may get organic traffic through their website. This is best for those without a following or have a low follower count. The downside to Udemy is that you do not get to keep the majority of the course sale, as marketing costs eat that up. I keep around 1/3 of my course sales, so the key here is getting a higher volume of sales.
The next option is Skillshare. Once again, you can just create videos and upload them as a shorter class. They also bring in organic traffic to your course. You get paid for every minute watched by a Skillshare subscriber.
The more minutes, the more income, so creating shorter more engaging courses works best for this platform. They do have higher quality control, meaning you have to have a certain quality of video and audio and course structure to keep your class on the platform. They have been getting more stingy about the quality control too, so really work on audio and visuals and have a strong class structure and project for students. Update: They also just required new teachers to apply to be able to teach on Skillshare.
Lastly, you can create a course on your own platform. I use teachable and had a lot of success with it. They even allow you to sell digital products and coaching, too. The downside to having it on your own platform is you are responsible for all of the traffic that comes there—there is no organic traffic here. This works best for those with a prior following or for those who are savvy at doing paid social media ads that drive traffic.
One last note for online courses: For the most part they are passive, but they do require some maintenance and student interaction to really go beyond that typical income.
2.) Selling Templates
You can make a lot of money selling templates. This person made over a million dollars in profit just selling templates for Canva. There is proof of concept here for sure.
You can sell them on your own platform that helps you sell digital products like teachable or on Etsy. Etsy has a wide range of products you can sell, too, like printables, where the user can download your .pdf and print them to use for weddings, budgets or other inspirations.
Once again it helps to have a following or an audience. So, if you still do not have an active social media profile, then hop to it and start engaging with people in your niche (don’t worry a separate article on growing your following is coming soon!).
You can also slowly build a library of assets on Etsy and slowly gain traffic by building such a large library of digital products. That way the success of one product can help sell others. You will also appear in search more too, thus increasing the chances of a sale. This of course takes tons of time to get started, but once you gain traction it will be easier to have a successful template launch. Once you build up enough templates for sale you can combine them into a mega bundle. This converts well on paid ads because the value you offer is huge compared to what they were as individual templates.
Once again, make sure to do keyword research to find in-demand templates. See what has high reviews and high sales. A quick review on Etsy will reveal that real estate marketing and budget templates sell very well.
You also have to figure out what software you want your template to exist in. Canva is popular to use for people to edit your templates, but so is Adobe Photoshop and Indesign, too. Find out what your audience will most likely want to use to edit their templates. Are you selling to these creative professionals? Good chance they may use more pro tools to edit their templates like Adobe. Wanting to market to small business owners? Then you might want to stick to an easy editing program like Canva.
As a side note: there is also an entire subset of digital products called “printables” on Etsy that are selling super well. These are .pdf files that users can print on their home printers. This can be anything from a setting financial goals worksheet to a wedding party game printable sheets. This is surprising as you would think less and less people would be using printers at home, but lo and behold, they all have high sales numbers on Etsy. Some of these are just fixed un-editable PDFs while others are edible in Canva or Illustrator. These are easy to create for you creatives out there!
3.) Selling Digital Assets
This naturally flows into number 3. What else can you sell on platforms like Etsy? Like I mentioned before, finding products that have high review numbers is a great way to know how they are selling to see what might do well for you. With a digital asset that generates great passive income you have to be able to know what your audience wants. If my following is into Procreate, perhaps I need to create a Procreate brush pack and sell it. You have to create products that have enough demand and are highly searched.
What is considered a digital asset? Well, a lot of things really. Things you might create every day for client work.
It is amazing the things you can create and put up for sale. Resumé templates, fonts, patterns, icons, illustrator brushes or infographics to name a few. A lot of these things you may have created before for client projects. A lot of rejected work you have or personal projects could have assets lying inside your project files just waiting to be monetized.
Once again, research is key. Visit the website you are interested in selling on and do keyword research. Find out what products are selling well. Usually you can tell by seeing the total review counts or searching by popularity. Ask yourself,
“What makes this product so popular” and “How can I create a product with enough uniqueness to compete?”
You can see in the above graphic that a lot of the money is made selling extended or commercial licenses.
A personal license means you can use this asset for personal projects, perhaps portfolio pieces. Commercial is a special license you need to use in paid commercial work and it commands a higher price. But even bigger than that are the extended or enterprise licenses, which allow the purchaser to use your asset on larger scale commercial projects with larger exposure rates (views, downloads, etc.).
That means just one purchase of an enterprise license for this normally $20 vector asset could go way behind $150 a pop! It just takes you selling one or two of these licenses to make a big profit for the year, let alone all of the smaller personal purchases.
The hardest part is making sure you focus on products that are already selling well on these third party digital asset websites. That’s easier said than done and can take a few months of testing products to find out what sells well for you personally. It never hurts to start creating one today.
A “wow” moment selling stock photos.
I had a fellow teaching buddy of mine who sold stock photography on Shutterstock. She made an occasional sale every once in a while that yielded a few dollars each sale and made a nice part-time income from it (she is a very talented photographer). She had a large company buy exclusive rights to the photo, meaning it cannot be sold again for a specific timeframe. She made $10,000+ from that license purchase. Of course she had to split some of that with Shutterstock, but they did bring in the client, so that is to be expected. A “wow” moment indeed!
Popular Websites where you can sell digital assets on are:
CreativeMarket.com
DesignCuts.com
Etsy.com
It is tempting to put your digital assets on all available websites where they are sold, but sometimes its best to stick with the largest websites with the largest traffic.
4.) Print on Demand
What about creating a physical product?
Print on demand might be for you if you ever dreamed of selling t-shirts. There are a couple of options here.
The big two are society 6 and redbubble. Both allow you to quickly create a design and load it on tons of different products. You can get a store up and running in just a few hours.
The big downside to these platforms is they rarely generate organic traffic. Perhaps a click or two, but nothing that is going to really drive up sales to make a significant income. The key to these platforms is to upload a few designs every week and stay consistent. That way those few clicks over many products can add up. These platforms, once again you should be seeing a theme here, require some sort of audience or following to market to. The good news is that if you already have a growing audience you should know some design styles, phrases or concepts they would love to wear or use in their everyday life.
You have to create something your target audience will want.
I teach graphic design, so it felt natural to create some awesome design theory posters as I could not find any good ones myself out there.
A lot of times the best ideas come when you want something for yourself and you just cannot seem to find what you are looking for. So far, I have sold several hundred of my design theory posters on society6. That means it is hanging on a bunch of peoples walls and sometimes that alone is worth it!
The downside is you have to sell quite a bit to real make money with print on demand. Because the cost of shipping, taxes and printing the products are higher compared to a digital product, my average take home for each t-shirt or poster sold is $1.50. That means I have to sell 700 posters just to make $1,000 on average. That is a lot of sales!
You are not going to get rich on print on demand if you play it small. Make sure to keep all your designs on file, you never know if someone might approach you with a licensing deal for your pattern, texture of design. So not everything goes to waste!
Once again research and see what products are selling.
I have done hundreds of hours of research (on YouTube) on what products sell best on these larger print on demand websites and I found out that stickers are a big winner and can give you consistent sales. Once again, you may not pay your mortgage bill by selling stickers, but if it can play a small part of your greater digital product library those little digital sales contribute to your overall income.
Speaking of which, I have a cool story.
I was emailed by someone at Marvel (yes, that Marvel!) who saw my color theory poster on society 6. They were interested in using my poster in the next big Marvel movie! I signed a contact and it was surreal. It ended up not being shown in the final scenes of the movie but the fact that they wanted to have it on hand to decorate a hero’s office was an honor all on its own!
Sometimes it is not the sales that give you opportunities with selling digital assets but the possible deals and connections with larger companies that win the day.
5.) Books and PDF Guides
Everyone needs to have a book.
Writing a book and selling it on Amazon is easier than you might think. Well maybe not “easy” and it takes a lot of effort, but books are amazing passive income steams. The problem with selling physical books, even self published, is a lot of the book sale goes to shipping and printing the book.
You may only get to keep $2 of the total sale of a $22.99 book. That is not very much.
You can however, sell digital .pdfs, guides and books on your own website as digital downloads and keep 95% of a sale.
Not everyone connects with online video and YouTube and some people need lengthy, detailed guides to read more about whatever topic you want to discuss. It could also be sizing guides, or a guide to web design, grids, really anything that provides educational and entertainment value.
I personally sell a 230 page .pdf design theory book on teachable and, so far so good. You can check it out and get $4 off here as an exclusive coupon! I created this book to align well with my courses, so it really hits my target audience well.
So far I have generated over $44,000 dollars in sales.
If I were to go through a publisher to publish my book I would only have made $5,000 or so as most of the money goes to physically printing the book and publisher fees.
What type of book, or guide should I write?
What do you want to talk about? What are you most passionate about? What do you think would sell the best? All three of those questions need to be considered before picking your topic. Of all of the passive income streams, writing a book is the most approachable because everyone has their own unique opinion on lots of popular topics. Here are a few ideas I have when I brainstorm about additional books to write:
An Educational Resource
A Personal Memoir
A Technical Guide
A “How To” Guide to Popular Software I Use
A Freelancing Guide
Where can I publish my book?
Platforms that let you sell digital .pdf books direct to your audience
Teachable (allows digital downloads)
What makes a self published book successful?
It is marketed to a large audience.
Yeah, I know you are tired of hearing about how having an audience helps with digital sales, but it does! But, also collecting an e-mail list to help market these products to them is very effective! You can create a newsletter sign up using campaign monitor to slowly build your list. This is the website I have personally used.
It adds tons of value.
Go that extra mile and pack that book with all the nuggets of info that you feel other authors are lacking in their books.
You kick up your marketing a notch with paid advertising.
Some of the more successful digital products (millions of dollars of profit?) are made with paid social media ads. It takes money to make money, as they say. Start off testing different ad strategies and focusing on which campaigns work best. Sometimes hiring an expert team to assist you is required to really start scaling well and understanding the complex world of paid ads. That means you have to have some really polished mockups of your digital or printed book.
They use Youtube to sell their book.
Some of the most popular digital downloads and books are sold by some of the top YouTubers on the planet. They know that selling books is easy when they have already won over their audience with video.
They cause a stir.
Your book may end up being very technical but in some cases creating a book that goes against super popular ideas can generate PR and additional site traffic for you.
6. YouTube, sponsored content and brand deals.
Youtube channels should be the star of your social media program. Not only can you generate an income using YouTube AdSense program, but you can also use your YouTube channel to gain a fresh new audience, market your other products, generate income using affiliate links and more. It is also a fun creative outlet to interact with potential future customers.
There is a lot of content on Youtube about growing a YouTube channel, so I won’t get into details here, but once you hit around 10k subscribers you start to get e-mails from companies who want you to create videos for them and will pay for you to do so.
Most YouTubers make more money from sponsorship deals or brand deals than they do from Youtube ad revenue.
It can take most people around a year to get to 10k and sometimes a few years, so it is best to start forming a content strategy now.
Ask yourself, who do you want your audience to be? How can I be interesting enough to keep people binge watching my content? Will I stand on high quality, a unique personality? Or a raw honesty?
The algorithm is kind of a big deal on the “Tube”.
A lot of people become a slave to Algos because ranking high in search is the best way to reach a wider organic audience. Some of the best ways to rank your videos higher is to do the follow:
Publish consistently (twice a week or once).
Post your link outside of YouTube (traffic needs to hit your video as soon as possible that is why your e-mail list is so valuable!).
Have an amazing story telling thumbnail (not word heavy).
Use popular keywords in your video title.
Engage people for longer in your videos and keep watch time length long (viewer retention).
Recommend relatable videos at the end of your videos (make sure to use end screens!).
Ask to subscribe (I hate asking but this does dramatically increase sub rates).
After 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours (which the watch hours can take several months to clear) you can apply for monetization in the Ad sense program.
As I mentioned before a lot of the opportunity comes with brands reaching out to do sponsored videos which happens surprisingly early in your journey. You do not have to have 100k subs to have a company reach out to you.
What if I am still learning my craft?
I think this question may be what is crossing your mind as you read through all of this. It is entirely possible to not be a expert in your craft and still make money through passive income streams.
A lot of times YouTube is the perfect place to document your learning journey and struggles. A lot of YouTube stars started of really young and really new and you can too.
7.) Social Media Sponsorship and Affiliate Deals.
This naturally flows into the next topic. Brand deals and sponsorships are not just for YouTube, they happen all the time for TikTok and Instagram.
This takes time and dedication but slowly building a following on socials will allow larger paying brands to reach out to you to create exclusive content for them. The key here is consistency and creating a content creation plan that allows you to figure out how many short form videos, posts, carousels you will want to do each week and the best days for publishing that content.
It has taken me 5 years to build up my following, so you need to play the long game here. Specific content has worked better than others, especially on Instagram. I have a YouTube video here that walks through my most popular posts including one that reached almost a half a million views (spoiler: it was a carousel style post) and there are some good tips and tricks about what type of social media content to post to grow your account. I will also be writing another article here on substack that details several tips on growing your following (because I keep mentioning how this is so important for passive income sales) and I will place a link here when it is ready.
Affiliate programs.
This can really be its own income stream. This is truly passive and you can participate in many different affiliate programs even if your following is zero. A lot of creators put affiliate links in their YouTube video with relatable content. Some of the most profitable affiliate placements I have seen is in YouTube product review videos. In one case a YouTuber placed an affiliate link to a green juice in which his viral video featured a detailed review of the product.
Let’s say you are a watercolor artist. Perhaps joining a few affiliate products that relate to your industry and doing a product review videos can slowly bring in some affiliate revenue. The huge benefit to affiliate programs is you do not have to qualify for the YouTube Adsense program yet to start earning money off your channel.
Affiliate programs I use.
Affiliate income can also apply to blog and website posts. This very article has a few select links to websites I recommend which are affiliate links. Like this link to Teachable, a platform I recommended earlier in the article. You do not even have to create courses to benefit from Skillshare affiliate program. As a teacher you can use a special link that gives you 90 percent of a student’s first monthly payment.
I do not even have to be an online course creator to make money off of courses. I can participate in the Domestika.org program and earn $2 for each course I sell through my link. This could be helpful for those not wanting to invest so much time into video and course creation but still want to benefit from a growing field. Some programs will have limits on who they accept while others accept everyone. Domestika program reviewed my social media numbers to see if I qualified.
You can recommend some of your favorite teachers and topics with affiliate links. I will be doing a blog post soon that recommends my top 10 courses on Domestika and on Skillshare, in which of course I will be providing my affiliate links.
A lot of effective affiliate programs will be assets you use yourself.
I can recommend Design cuts link here, which I will get a small portion of anything you buy here. Since it is digital resources that graphic designers use my audience can find this helpful. It feels less like advertising and more like helpful recommendations because I use them myself.
Also, do not forget about Amazon Associates.
With this program you can create lists of products and recommend them to folks. For me I have a list for those starting out in design but also my favorite design books. That way when I make recommendations to students I can send them a convenient list of books but also earn a very small amount of the book sale. What is great about this program is even if they do not buy a product in your one of your lists, if they decide to buy another unrelated product within a certain time frame, you still get a portion of the sale.
I have made money off of people moving on from the book list and buying cabbage! Yes, I made 10 cents off of cabbage!
8.) Newsletters, E-mail Lists and Paid Subscriptions.
This is one I am currently working on now and will have a lot more data on this as the year progresses. Some of these larger social media platforms like Facebook and even TikTok can delete or remove your content at anytime. They can close down your account or suspend you even if it is not your fault.
You hear these horror stories happen all the time. One thing they can never take away from you is an e-mail list.
You have a list of dedicated fans that are willing and ready to hear what you have to say in the form of a newsletter. E-mail is not dead and the conversation rates for e-mails are actually increasing over the years as per this article.
This is one great way to release a digital product and e-mail your list for some quick sales. I personally use Campaign monitor which allows me to create a link that I can place anywhere that allows people to register their email. I can use campaign monitor to craft an e-mail newsletter and send it out.
One of the other platforms I am currently using now is called substack, which allows you to publish a newsletter in a blog like format, it also allows you to import your email contacts and use those when creating a substack post. You can also charge people a monthly subscription to give access to your more exclusive content and blog posts. UPDATE: I decided after having paid subscriptions for a year to offer all my articles for FREE only. Because I am a nice gal!
You can offer different tiers to your subscribers and give more exclusive content to a specific higher paying audience including podcasts, chats and greater access. Even Instagram has recently added a subscription option for those with over 10k followers where they can give their followers exclusive posts and perks.
I am not going to sugar coat it.
A lot of these passive income ideas takes a lot of upfront work. I mean, months and months of work. The goal is all the upfront hours put into building your content library will eventually pay off with reoccurring income without significant effort. I cannot say my clients still pay me for work I did five years ago, but my content library sure does!
You really just need one of these income opportunities to pan out and there is no need to try every single one.
We can get really overwhelmed with choice here. What I want you to do is pick two income ideas that sounded really interesting that could align with your passions and interests. Do some more research into both and start creating a plan to move forward.
Once it does, put all of your effort into that one thing and do it well. Master it, dominate it.
Leave a comment at the end and let me know the two you are getting most excited about I would love to offer some personal advice to some of you, specially those who are premium readers!
One of mine ended up being online course creation. I slowly found out that I am not really good at creating short form content and found that my talents lended itself to the longer videos.
Because I stuck with it for so many years and tried to get better and better I have generated a solid return on my time investment from that passive income steam.
Some of it is passive income but I like to remain active with my students, so I stay busy every day with work, but because I choose to. So, keep at it, whatever you decide to do. Working at a company full-time or with clients can have its share of headaches and we all dream of working for ourselves and creating passive income while we sleep. I hope this article was helpful in getting some initial ideas for what you might be able to do with a bit of coffee, passion and excitement for your craft.
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Hi Lindsay, I jumped on the link and subscribed immediately.
I must say the article has a very comprehensive guide on building passive income. I liked that you noted--- “figuring out a niche” as part of the tips. It seems to be among the first things for creatives that wish to start passive income streams.
It was a quick read and has given me huge insight on how to start my passive income stream. I enjoyed the advice you gave for one to pick one or two streams and focus on them. I also liked the fact that you recognised building a passive income requires lots of upfront work.
This article serves as great resource for me. I will definitely save it and read it again for more guide. Wait, I saw where I need to upgrade too that I did my forget haha. Lindsay, you are amazing!
Hi Lindsay Marsh Design, I read your article in full. It was indeed worth reading. It included digital marketing and Graphic design insights (the most relevant topics to me).It comprises of different tricks, and techniques on how to grow the audience and target the right platform. The two ideas which clicked were creating online content and mastering one's skills and start doing something now rather than waiting for tomorrow. I don't know how to say thank you for writing such an enormous and informative article which I have never read before. Keep up the good work. We are waiting for more relevant articles.