Turning Your Art Into Cash — 12 Ways to Start a Side Hustle As an Artist

 

 

 

(This article may contain affiliate links.)

Whether you are a painter, you create drawings, you’re a photographer, a videographer, or a graphic designer, I want to talk to you about how you can make more more money than just simply working for clients or selling completed pieces of artwork. There’s a lot of potential for you to make additional income online, so I want to share with to you my 12 favorite ways for artists to make money online.

First, if you can digitize your artwork — if you can either take a photo of it or scan it in high quality and upload it to your computer — then you can create a Print-on-Demand business. Print-on-Demand means that you use a third party company that will print your unique design on to a variety of different products, fulfill the orders from customers, and ship out the completed products. Printful is my favorite company that does this service, and Printful integrates with a variety of different marketplaces and website platforms in order to create a seamless, efficient, and fairly simple shop to operate.

Once you create and upload your original designs, you then will be able to integrate it across many different varieties of platforms. You will still need to market your online shop or your items, but the best part is that once a customer finds you and they want to purchase from you, everything is automated from there on out. Printful will create the products automatically once they are purchased and then ship it out to the customer; you don’t have to do anything in terms of manufacturing or shipping.

Next is selling your artwork through digital downloads. Many individuals are on the hunt for digital pieces of artwork that they can print themselves in order to save money.

Next is selling your photos and videos as stock. Stock websites will allow you to create a profile and upload your photos or videos. Once someone purchases the stock photos to use, you will then receive royalties on each purchase made.

Next is creating a low content book through use of Kindle Direct Publishing on Amazon. Many of you may not realize that you can actually self publish on Amazon, and Amazon will directly fulfill the orders themselves through Kindle Direct Publishing. If you have a significant amount of artwork or photography and you want to create a book to sell on Amazon, then you’ll be able to do that through Kindle Direct Publishing.

Another way that you can make income through Kindle Direct Publishing is that you can create a low or no content book such as a journal. If you have original artwork, you can design a cover for a journal and then upload that cover along with blank journal pages. Kindle Direct Publishing not only publishes your book on Amazon’s website, but it also takes care of the print fulfillment and shipping to the customer. That means that once you have uploaded a book or a journal for sale on Amazon, you simply will just take in royalties once Amazon receives a sale. Using a software such as Book Bolt or Tangent Templates will be a way for you to generate or create the internal pages that will go inside of your book. If you have original artwork, if you do graphic design, or if you have beautiful photos that people may want to have on the cover of a journal or similar low content book available on Amazon, then this is a great way to collect royalties once you have created the product.

Next is selling your editing presets. If you are a photographer or a videographer and you have a set of specific presets that you use to edit on programs such as Lightroom, Photoshop, Premiere Pro, etc..,then you can actually sell those editing presets. You can sell these on your own unique website, or you can also use a marketplace facilitator such as Etsy.

Next is creating a blog. If you gear your blog content towards artists in a similar niche, then you will be able to not only upload photos of the process of making your art, as well as the final artwork and the technique, but you can then also make money off of that content. You can either use Google AdSense to place ads on your blog content and receive money that way, or you can also integrate affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is when you partner with a company and they give you a specialized link to input into your content. Any time that anyone utilizes the link and makes a purchase, then you receive a commission. If you’re an artist and you have certain tools that you prefer — for example, if you’re a photographer and you have a specific camera and lens series that you like best, or if you’re a painter and you have a specific type of canvas or paintbrushes that you like, then you can link to those specific tools. Anytime anyone finds your content online, clicks through the affiliate link and makes a purchase, because they saw you use that item in your blog, then you make commission.

To start affiliate marketing, you’re going to need to partner with companies and the easiest way to do that is to join an affiliate network. ShareASale, Clickbank, Racketon, and Amazon Affiliates are some of the most easy to get started with.

Next is selling your artwork, graphic designs, your fonts, and many other different things on Creative Market. Creative Market allows you to sell your artwork and creations with a commercial license. Individuals who are looking for original artwork, specialized fonts, themes, or templates can then utilize those products and download them digitally, implement them into their websites, use them on their own products for sale, and much more.

The last two are going to require a significant amount of additional work and are not just simply implementing work that you’ve already created in a new product. Websites such as Udemy, Skillshare, Outschool, and Coursera allow you to create and launch a course and sell it to customers that are already searching their database for your specific content. If you’re able to create an instructional video on how to either perform a certain technique, learn a certain skill, or create a certain type of work of art that you know how to do, then you will be able to sell it as a course.

Some platforms allow you to teach courses live, whereas others will have evergreen courses where you create the course once, upload the videos, and then students can download them on demand. If you want to create your own courses on your own unique website, and create a series of lead magnets and opt-ins, then I recommend using Kajabi.

Lastly, is creating a YouTube channel. Similarly to creating a course, if you’re able to share any sort of knowledge, how-to video, technique, or product review, then you can create a YouTube channel surrounding that topic. Additionally a big niche on YouTube that receives lots of views are time lapse videos of artists creating a piece of artwork from start to finish. If you are not interested in creating a tutorial video or talking to the camera, you also can film yourself creating the artwork piece and create a time lapse video to get views.

Now, creating a YouTube channel will take quite some time before you’re able to actually generate income from YouTube ads — it can take quite a great deal of time in order to get monetized. But while you’re waiting for monetization and trying to increase your reach on YouTube, you can implement affiliate marketing in order to try to generate some income.

Want to learn more about how you can make money online as an artist? Watch the video here!