Selling artwork to earn passive income in the form of digital products or resources is a growing attraction for many designers and artists.
It’s not a new concept though. Royalty free image libraries for example, have been going for decades. But things have changed since then. Dramatically. Now artists have more control over their work and how they sell it.
But given the relatively new nature of the digital product boom means it can be difficult to find information about the ins and outs of earning “passive” income. I’m often asked by other designers and artist who want to start selling online, “what should I sell”, “where should I sell”, and the most common “can I make a living from it?”.
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So I decided to write an honest article answering some of those questions and give you the pros and cons about selling artwork online in the form of digital resources or print-on-demand (POD) products.
It’s not a step by step guide that will take you through how to open a shop and upload your artwork. But rather it’s an article on my first-hand experience at selling digital products online as passive income, including the good, the bad and the ugly. And trust me, there’s a fair amount of ugly!
I’ll be focusing on selling illustration-type products, but most of the insights and tips below will apply to just about any online digital product. So grab a cup of coffee, I have a lot to say on the subject which I hope you’ll find useful!
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So many artists make the mistake of not identifying their customer. I know I know, we hate having to think about marketing stuff! But if you think about it, without a market you don’t have a business.
You don’t have to go deep into the boring stuff, just get a clear idea (and be clear, it’s important trust me), on who your target customer is and focus on their needs, wants and likes.
Don’t aim to please all the online buying customers, because you won’t no matter how hard you try. But rather aim to please the customer base you think is best suited to your style and type of products you love creating.
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If you don’t know what you love creating yet, then by all means experiment. But at some point you’ll need to buckle down and focus on creating products for a particular customer.
Maybe you love painting watercolour flowers, so your market could be designers who create wedding stationery. And possibly crafting customers who love dabbling and creating projects like cards, invites, etc. Creating lovely floral watercolour graphics suited for these projects would be perfect for this market.
Or perhaps you love designing logos. You could create pre-made logo templates and sell it to customers who are new business owners with a tight budget or designers who need a quick logo for a client.
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So you see, knowing your customer basically tells you what you should be selling! Do some research. Find out what your ideal customer needs, wants and likes.
The short answer is, you don’t! Every time I invest time and resources into creating a product, I have no guarantee that it will sell. But what I do have is experience in my customers’ wants, needs or likes. You don’t have to solve all three of these areas in the same product.
My genuine aim every time I create a product is to help my customers with their own work or projects by creating resources they will find useful and love using. Plus I don’t create work I don’t love creating myself. For me that defeats the whole purpose, and I believe people can pick up on your intention behind what you create. If you don’t love it, no one else will.
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And the last, but very important tip I can offer regarding the success of a product is, be unique. Just because you saw another artist’s product do well, doesn’t mean by creating something similar, or worse identical, will mean success for you. I don’t believe that’s a sustainable business model. You’ll build a following much quicker and stand out a lot more if you focus on creating unique goods in your own style.
Make an effort to come up with your own concepts instead of piggy backing off others. Do you want to lead or follow? That’s the number one marketing strategy you can apply to fast track your success.
You could upload a few products, sit back and wait for a few sales to trickle in. But that’s the thing, it will be a trickle. The chances of you having success with little to no effort on your part are very slim.
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To give you an idea, I ran my own graphic design business which was quite successful. I earned a good living doing that. It only took a year of proper, dedicated focus on my online business to quit my graphic design work and focus full time on illustrating and selling digital products.
Essentially I started earning the same income as my graphic design business selling digital goods by the end of that year. But be warned, it took huge commitment, sacrifice and serious hard work.
Think about it, if you’re a one man show as a graphic designer selling your services, your entire business relies on you, the service provider.
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Your earning potential is directly related to how many hours you work. But selling online allows you to scale up without the need for more staff. Because you’re creating something once, and selling it over and over, possibly forever, your earning potential increases hugely.
You’re not relying on what you can achieve in an hour anymore, you’re relying on your product to earn you income long after you created it.
Many people believe that having a “passive income” business means you barely have to work to earn a living. How hard can it be? It’s called “passive” for a reason, right?
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Well this may shatter all your dreams of earning a fortune for doing nothing. I’m afraid the only passive part about passive income is the automated sales. “Exactly!” You might be thinking.
Yes it’s true, you do earn while you sleep. But to get it to a point where you’re earning enough while you’re in deep slumber, takes a lot of hard graft which is the opposite of passive!
And when you’re awake, you’re basically working all the time. Ok, that’s not entirely true. But essentially I work 7 days a week. Some days longer than others.
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There isn’t a day that goes by that I haven’t attended to something related to my business. Whether it’s answering emails, attending to customer support queries, writing a blog post, researching trends, preparing product files, creating product preview images, etc. it’s all related to building a successful “passive” income. And this of course excludes the main part of the business, which is creating products.
How much you put into all the above areas of your business is entirely up to you. That’s the beauty of being your own boss. But as I’ve mentioned several times already, effort = outcome.
One of the concepts you might struggle with when first starting out is, you’re essentially selling work for as little as $10 that took you weeks to create and prepare. This can be difficult to wrap your head around.
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But it’s a business model used by many successful companies. Your earnings come from selling the same low priced item over and over to hundreds, and hopefully, thousands of customers. Given that, it may take a while to make money back for the time you put in.
But once you’ve reached that point, anything earned after that is profit. And it can continue to give you returns for years to come if your product has longevity and isn’t too trend driven.
It’s becoming increasingly competitive to sell digital products. Customers have more and more choices, plus they’re constantly bombarded by really cheap, all-in-one bundles that seem too good to be true. The sad thing is, sometimes they are. Often quality is compromised when products are churned out so they can be bundled and sold for a song. This kind of business strategy can work, but it’s one that I chose not to follow early on in my online business.
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I made a conscious decision to not try and compete with the mass, super-low priced products, but rather concentrate on creating quality over quantity and focus on building my own unique style and use that to help me stand out.
I feel undercharging for your work in the hopes of attracting more sales will be damaging to your business in the long run.
Do you want to be seen as the cheap clipart store? Or the quality, unique digital resource artist? It also damages the overall perception of this industry and the value of art. It creates a “race to the bottom” culture among designers and artists which is counter productive for all of us.
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It is a bit of a balancing act between charging too little for what your work is worth, versus charging too much which could turn customers away. But as your confidence
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