Each day, more and more freelancer
designers are looking for a way to earn more money than the usual client work or full-time position they have. In the following article we will discuss a lot of ways how you can earn more from being a freelance
designer.
Here are several ways to make extra passive income as a freelance designer.
sTART WRITING YOUR OWN BLOG
One very good way of creating a cash flow-in is to start writing about your experiences or design topics you are interested in or have a background in and share it with people. If you have the right skills, you could also prepare tutorials which are on a high demand in blogs that publish them on a regular basis.
If you have decided to start your own blog then there are various ways of earning money, the most common being the adverts you can display on your website. With the huge numbers of pay-per-view and pay-per-lead advertising systems, you won’t have a hard time finding a suitable network to work with, if your content is top-notch
SELL YOUR DESIGN ON STOCK GRAPHIC STORE
It’s been getting more and more popular in the last year, and still it is. Selling stock graphics on various markets doesn’t sound like a very easy job but many designers could actually make nice amounts by working on their own products and putting them up for sale.
There are actually various way of selling them, and you can easily choose between a marketplace, or your own web store. Again, creating a web-store isn’t as hard as it sounds, whether you can code or not. You can totally unleash your creativity and create whatever kinds of files you’d like.
Stock items that you can usually put for sale include, but are not limited to: icon sets, photoshop filters, fonts, web layouts – basically anything that you have expertise in creating will do the trick.
Below are a few markets that can help you start out.
ThemeForest
ThemeForest is the leading site for selling and buying web templates and WP themes. If you cannot code, you can also focus on the PSD template category. PSD Templates here are priced from $8 to $10, depending on the sub-category. A single-paged template is usually at $8, while a 5+ pages template comes in at $10.
GraphicRiver
If you are a graphic designer, then GraphicRiver is probably the most suitable marketplace for you. It is the place for business cards, icons, fonts, photoshop actions & filters, flyers and other stock items. GraphicRiver has grown much in the past few years, so you should be aware of the competition and a huge number of (similar) files. Unique items would probably sell better here.
Creative Market
Creative Market is a “newborn” in the design stock community, even though it has some very good “parents”. Built by the guys at ColourLovers, the place sells any kind of stock items but the very best thing about Creative Market is that it considers authors’ opinions most and gives them a lot of freedom.
Side projects are usually small tools, utilities, services, products and probably membershipsthat help you solve or make a task easier for you and the community. Depending on the popularity of these tools, they can earn somewhere from a dozen of dollars to a few hundreds, not including services and products that vary from one to another in their income
PHYSICAL GOODS
Another way of building a stream of passive income, which has been quite popular in the last years is selling physical goods such as posters, t-shirts, compilation books or other similar items. There are many creative people out there who are constantly looking to revamp their wardrobe and walls with cool and strange things!
I’ve seen both agencies and freelancers succeed at selling their stuff to the masses, and often times they end up building a massive shop.
Editor’s note: This article is contributed by HONGKIAT . He is an author who inspired me a lot.
