From Hobbyist to Entrepreneur: 3 Passive Income Ideas for Artists
Based on my own business experience - hence only 3 ideas :)
In my art career, I have tried out various platforms and sources of income, and in this blog post I’d like to share with you my top 3 ideas for generating passive income. I could write an SEO-friendly article about top 5 or top 10 passive income ideas and then just enumerate them and kind of describe them. Instead, I will give you 3 passive income ideas but they will be based on my real-life business experience and they will contain some numerical value income case studies.
As an artist, wouldn't it be wonderful to earn a steady income while focusing on your passion and creativity? Living the dream? I wanted to start this blog post with a personal story of how my passive income saved my back in 2020.
In May 2020 I published my Procreate online course about drawing isometric rooms: “Isometric Illustration in Procreate: Design Your Dream Room“. That was THE class that made me a Top Teacher on Skillshare one month later. It became very popular and it was an amazing source of side income of about 1,000-2,000€ every month for roughly one year, which allowed me (after paying taxes and insurance) to pay all my monthly bills. And boy was I lucky… because exactly one month after this big success I got pregnant, which I was absolutely planning, but the one thing I didn’t plan was the sickness! The unlucky part was that I suffered most of my pregnancy with hyperemesis gravidarum, a sickness where you throw up every day, to the point that at some point you need to go to hospital because you’re facing dehydration.
I needed to say good bye to all of my freelance marketing clients in my second month of pregnancy, where the majority of other women stop working just a few weeks before their estimated due date. That meant eight months of not being able to work for my living and not being insured against any unemployment, so the whole “cost of my pregnancy” was totally on me. And then my online course saved me…
I thought that the initial 1,468€ that I got paid out from Skillshare would end soon. But it kept coming, every month.
I spent most of the time over in my bathroom, worried about my baby. But hey, as corny as it sounds - I wasn’t worried about my income. I got lucky.
A blast from the past, one of my first Procreate online courses (May 2019).
Some say - she was earning in her sleep, but I couldn’t even sleep, I was sick all the time, especially in the evenings and at nights! Anyways, the point is - if you already think of yourself as a creative person, I believe that you also have what it takes to create some extra sources of income, alone because of your creative nature. You won’t be satisfied with what you already have - your current projects or your current stable job.
Chances are, if you are like me, you’re also itching to explore new ways to not only show yourself as an artist but also to try to turn your passion into a profitable business.
And on top of that, as freelancers, we often face different types of freedoms but also different types of risks compared to people with stable contract jobs. In my case, not only having multiple streams of income but also having a few passive sources of income has been working out very well. So it’s definitely worth exploring! Where should you start?:
Sell your brand
For starters, it's important to establish a clear brand identity that sets you apart from other creatives. This includes:
defining your niche - what is your specialization? or your most favorite topic? what are you good at?
identifying your ideal audience - who do you want to approach with your offerings and what are their “pain points” that you’re solving? which platforms can you meet your ideal audience on?
creating a consistent visual and verbal message that resonates with your target audience - a signature color palette, consistent fonts in your online communication, your logo, just to name a few.
You need to have something to offer and you need to have a clear vision of how you’d like to present yourself.
Once you have that figured out, and you’re ready to start exploring passive income opportunities, it won’t come as a surprise that my most recommended idea for passive income is: