Want $500/year in passive income as a creative? Here are 3 options

Monetizing a hobby isn’t always a good idea. But if you’re a professional creator, there are ways to turn your acquired skills into passive income that can increase your earnings.

First, it’s important to realize that passive income often requires an upfront investment and work. However, once you get past that initial phase, your budget can reap the rewards for years to come, so it can be worth the effort.

Here are three ways to turn your creativity into $500 of passive income that will add to your savings account every year.

1. Create a guide to help others enter the industry

If you’ve been working in your industry for a few years, chances are you’ve created your own systems that help you succeed and have learned how to best manage your career.

This kind of knowledge may seem natural to you, but to someone just starting out, it can be invaluable. So if you have the time to create a guide that includes insights that can’t be found for free online, you can benefit from your experience.

Let’s say you create a guide (ebook) that costs $20 per download. If you use Shopify, which charges a 2.9% selling fee plus $0.30 for the basic plan, you would need to sell about 27 copies to generate $500 in passive income per year.

(There may be other fees, such as an annual membership fee, that can also eat into your profits. Therefore, researching the best e-commerce platform is key to maximizing the impact on your finances.)

Here are some topics you might consider:

• Step into your industry, build connections and gain clients
• Tips on managing the back office of a creative business, e.g. issuing invoices
• Mastering one key skill that supports your creative work, e.g. marketing
• Templates to streamline repetitive tasks in creative businesses, such as client management emails

These guides can be anywhere from 30 to 50 pages long to provide value and deliver on the promise of the guide’s title and description. You may also want to reach out to others in the industry to get feedback (and potentially good reviews) on your guide before it’s released.

2. Licensing Your Art

If you’re a visual artist, you probably have a backlog of artwork that never found its place. If so, you can allow sellers or individuals to sell that artwork (which can include both prints and products featuring your artwork) for a set period of time in exchange for paying you royalties on each sale. This way, you also retain the copyright to your artwork.

For example, if you were to license a single piece of art that sells for $50 and you earn a flat 5% royalty rate per sale, you would need to sell 200 products to earn $500 per year. Ideally, you would work with a larger brand that has the capacity to sell hundreds of products per year, and licensing multiple pieces can help you reach that $500 threshold more quickly.

You can license your art by offering it to art licensing agencies that can connect you with larger clients. However, there are also websites like ArtLicensing.com where you can license your art more directly if you don’t want to go the agent route.

3. Use a print-on-demand service

Another option for generating passive income as a creative is to turn your work into physical products through a print-on-demand service. This way, the product is created only after the customer orders it, rather than having to purchase products in advance based on assumptions about how many you plan to sell. This can reduce the upfront costs of selling physical products.

For example, you can add a phrase using a font you design, or a small illustration for products like coffee mugs or sweatshirts. The number of products you can sell will depend on how many designs you have or are willing to create for this purpose. However, you can transform a single piece of art into multiple products to maximize your profits with minimal effort.

Here are some examples of companies offering print-on-demand services:

• Print
• Internet shop
• Red bubble
• Society6

Each will have its own fees for using print-on-demand services. But for example, if you sold a $6 coffee mug on Society6, you’d pay $0.60 per sale, so you’d need to sell 93 coffee mugs per year (or about eight per month) to make $500 in passive income per year.

Earning passive income requires an investment, whether it’s time or money. But if you have unsold work or a wealth of knowledge to share, you can turn those assets into passive income.