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Info | Passive Income For Freelance Designers
Editor’s note: This article is contributed by Stelian Subotin. Stelian is an enthusiast and design fan who is working on his new design-related blog called Rocket Graphics.
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.
The one true weapon a freelancer has is total freedom on how to manage their time and work. That can be put to good use to diversify the income streams. There is more than one way to make a buck on the Internet.
Some of these methods may need you to work outside of your comfort zone but they are great ways to help you hone your craft, reflect on your own skills, pick out your weaknesses and strengths and utilize that to increase your income pool.How to make extra passive income as a freelance designer.
1. 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.
With all the tools the Internet has to offer, you can get your own design blog up and running in almost no time regardless of whether you can code or not.
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.
Guest Post On Various Blogs
Many big design blogs out there are willing to pay you a good buck for your top-notch articles and sometimes even more for welll-written tutorials. The payment ranges from a dozen of bucks to hundreds, depending on many factors. Guest posting is an good way of generating extra income, butthe effort you put in must be high as well.
Write A Book
Many designers have proven that e-books are a very good source of income. Sacha Greif, a reputable designer in the community reported an income of $40,000 for his latest e-book over a period of a few months, while Nathan Berry reported that his last book made him over $28,000 in the first day alone!
There are various ways to get your book out. For printed versions you can try Amazon Publishing Services and for e-books you can definitely try services like eJunkie.
2. Stock Graphics
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.
Based on the analysis of 30 files submitted a month ago in the PSD Templates category, I can conclude that the worst-selling template ended up making $20 for its owners, the best-selling between these made $300, so it’s up to you to decide whether you want, or do not want to invest your time into stock graphics, and PSD templates in specific.
Another pro for selling there is that you can find a developer to work or build a team with, here.
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.
There is no review process and no prices based on categories at Creative Market. Once you are approved as a seller, you have the possibility to upload as many items you’d like, set the prices, and see them for sale fairly quickly.
3. Side Project
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.
Some tools that can be given as examples are:
4. 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, such as Ugmonk to cater to the demand.
5. Design Contests
Design contest websites have been around for a very long time, and many designers out there have gotten their start from there. Websites like 99Designs would pay you well, starting at $249 for a logo design, $599 for a website design and $199 for a postcard or flyer.
The best thing about design contest websites is that there is always work to do. Hundreds of projects are set as open and you have the opportunity to earn a few hundred of dollars for a “design piece”. The bad part is that there are thousands of others like you hunting for the same bounty. You have to really impress the contest creator and show that your work is the best, otherwise you are simply wasting your time working on a project that you’ll never get paid for.
Conclusion
To conclude this article, I wanted to say that there are a lot of ways of creating a flow of side income, and you never know how this side income will turn into your main source of income or even your main job. Try to put focus on a category that fits you most and start “digging” for your best way to earn yourself a great passive side income.
Leveraging Twitter For Your Freelance Business
Social media applications such as Twitter can be effectively utilized as a tool for freelancers like yourself to promote your services. In a time when the world is connected through the internet, failing to employ such a simple strategy to connect with your potential and existing clients is a waste of opportunity. Remember that you are promoting to the rest of the world each time you post something in Twitter.
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The content then, is what matters. You can update your existing clients on your latest projects and network with freelancers like yourself. In your Twitter, you may link your followers to your professional blog where they can further explore your work and even better, re-tweet it to their own network. All these can bring you more business in the long run as these people go on to recommend you to potential clients.
Here are five possible ways to make good use of Twitter for your freelance business:
1. Connect With Relevant People
As you would probably agree with me, social networking platforms like Twitter and Facebook have definitely facilitated our access to such opportunities to exchange knowledge and insights to an unprecedented level. To effectively utilize such access, you must first connect with the right people to obtain valuable information from. For instance, following the tweets of designers would update you with some of their latest work, from which you may find inspirations or ideas for your own design.
Besides, there will always be things you can modify and improve about your business, be it the design of your work, marketing strategy or even the capacity of your web server. Twitter, being a great tool to network with people of the same field, is your key to refining your business. This is because freelancers like you are now able to share tips and critique each other’s work and approach. Such online relationships, although casual, can do wonders for you by widening your perspective on how things can be done.
2. Draw People To Your Blog
Twittering is a good way to inform your followers on any updates to your portfolio blog. However, the benefit of using Twitter goes beyond the purpose of simple notifications. Each time your followers get informed about your latest work or design, they may also send out a Tweet after checking out your site. This is especially when your work shows extraordinariness and your followers want to comment and compliment about it.
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Through a networking apparatus like Twitter, your blog gets promoted exponentially. This way, your blog, along with your awesome work, gets free publicity to more prospective clients. Also, supposing you have set up a Twitter account solely for your freelance business(which is advisable), then those who follow your Twitter are likely to be those relevant people you want to associate with your business. Once these people tweet or re-tweet about it, their followers are also the target audience you would want to promote your business to. In this manner, your blog isadvertised freely and specifically to those that matters.
3. Find Prospective Clients
A major component of Twitter is its search function that enables users to search for other users to follow. There, you can search for specific topic or interest and get a list of Twitter accounts for your consideration to follow. If you are looking for prospective clients, then this is great tool for yourself to get acquainted and develop a professional network with other freelancers or potential clients. Strike a conversation by replying to their tweets. It works the other way round as well. Having a Twitter account yourself, people are able to search for you and request to follow your tweets.
Don’t be surprised to receive messages requesting for your freelance services. They might have come across your tweets after combing through potential freelancers on Twitter, saw your work on your site and got impressed. Either that or they might have seen some random tweets of users who were following you and subsequently check out your blog.
In any case, such bi-directional search between yourself and other potential employerswould no doubt open up doors to more opportunities.
4. Establish Your Brand
Once you have a decent number of followers, it becomes a must to update them on your latest work so that they get constant reminder of your business. Focus on your specialty from the various services you provide and your followers will know what to expect from your updates. If, for instance, you’re a freelance web designer who is an expert in doing up creative typography for sites, then perhaps you can emphasize on the font design of your latest works in your tweets.
At the end of the day, it’s all about creating that association between what your business does best and your business brand. Once people can tie your brand to your brand’s selling point (in this case, the typography of web design), then you have established your brand well. As your followers consist of existing clients and potential ones as well, it is crucial to build a good reputation for your business and let the good words get spread throughout the entire network.
5. Be The Expert
If you want to get more referrals to clients through the internet, you need to build a name for yourself. To do that, post insightful updates to your Twitter and give your audience what they want to know. Providing meaningful comments on other’s work as well as your own will impress upon your audience that you’re passionate and serious about what you do. Besides, sharing your thoughts about designs is the first step to getting priceless feedback from other freelancers.
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Not all of us will eventually be considered as experts simply by giving our personal takes on designs and such. But if you managed to get there, your personal work will be taken more seriously. Your followers would be more likely to tweet the work of someone who is deem as the expert or the leader of the field. The end result is that you’ve earned yourself a good reputation, and that’s great because more people will hear of your work. This includes potential clients for your business.
