Are you an artist who wants to learn how to make passive income from digital art? We all want to make a bit of extra cash. And being an artist is usually associated with being broke, or not earning a lot of money. Unless you’re extremely famous or successful, of course. But times are a-changing. And being an artist, specifically a digital artist, can now be an extremely lucrative career. The reason? The ability to earn money passively.
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What is Passive Income?
Passive income is essentially income that you receive which is earned through very limited (or zero) output from you. Effectively, passive income is money you could earn ‘while you sleep’.
For example, imagine you created a course outline that you’re going to sell for £100. You’ve decided to deliver that course actively, face to face, every day to people. This means that you’d make £100 per student taking the course, but you’d have to dedicate the time to teach that course to those students. This is active income. You are actively working to make it.
Imagine you created that same course, but you created in on a slideshow with videos and audio guides. Instead of teaching the course day in, day out, you could simply automatically email it to people that purchased it, and then go about your day as normal without having to do anything.
This is passive income. You have put in the initial work to create the course, but once it’s been created, you can sell it over and over again without having to do any extra work.
This is how you can make passive income from digital art.
Is Digital Art Less Valuable Than Traditional Art?
There has been a lot of noise over the last decade about digital art and its place in the art world. Some real traditionalists would certainly not class digital art as being as valuable as traditional one-of-a-kind art pieces. And there might be some truth to that.
Art created using more traditional means (by using canvas, paints, oils, pencils etc.) will always be unique. Unless you digitalise the original and create mass copies of it, it can’t be recreated. Even if you paint the same picture over and over again, it will always have its own unique-ness.
And for this reason, a lot of traditional artists charge a pretty penny for their pieces – and rightly so.
Saying that, we definitely can’t sleep on the value of some digital art pieces. One such piece sold for $69 million in 2021 by Beeple. A piece titled Every days: The first 5,000 days. And there have been plenty of other digital art pieces that have sold for eye-watering sums. Check out a list of 16 digital art pieces here, along with the amounts they were sold for: The most expensive NFT artworks ever sold.
Digital art can sometimes be seen as less valuable in terms of monetary value because it can be sold over and over again. But if you’re an artist trying to make a passive income from digital art, it can actually be a far more lucrative way of creating an income. Your art pieces may be sold for less because you’ll sell them as digital files, or print them out on paper, but you will be able to create a larger portfolio of pieces that can be sold over and over again without any additional work. This way, you can also focus more time on marketing your pieces and creating other income streams too.
Popular Passive Income Ideas for Digital Artists
We’ve covered what passive income is, and how lucrative it can be to make passive income from digital art. Now let’s dive into a few of the popular ways you can actually start making passive income from selling your digital art.
eCommerce Websites
Potentially one of the most obvious ways to make passive income from digital art. But perhaps also the most effective. eCommerce websites have been around since the 1980s and became extremely popular in the mid-90s when the likes of Amazon* and eBay came on the scene. Since then, eCommerce has grown exponentially and online sales now account for over 26% of all retail sales in the UK. (Source: Statista)
So why not take a slice of the pie?
Starting an eCommerce website is now extremely easy thanks to the host of different platforms available. (Think Shopify, BigCommerce, SquareSpace and Wix to name a few). With a few simple clicks you could have your shop up and running.
Before you decide what platform to use for your eCommerce website consider these things.
- Does the platform support selling digital files? (if that’s what you’re going to sell)
- What are the monthly costs, and are there any listing / transaction fees?
- How are you going to get buyers to your website? Will you need additional social media / marketing skills in order to drive traffic?
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Blogging
Blogging, often considered long-dead in terms of popularity is, in fact, a booming industry. Look at where you’re reading this article. It’s a blog. Once a place where teenagers would write their deepest darkest thoughts and feelings, blogs have evolved into something far different in 2024. They are websites where people can openly share information, thoughts and opinions.
And within the paragraphs of those thoughts, various streams of income can be woven.
So how can you make money from blogging? And how does this relate to making passive income from digital art?
If you have art to sell, but you need to drive traffic to your website, blogging is an excellent way to do this. In order to do this, you will need to be able to write excellent SEO copy (easily done with enough practice and research). But above all, you need to be able to add value to your readers.
Once readers trust the information you’re sharing (as a subject matter expert), you can direct them to your sales pages where they will be able to browse what you’re selling.
On top of that, you can use your blog for affiliate marketing and advertising (via the likes of Ezoic, Adsense, and Mediavine). This, along with the sales of your digital art pieces can all supplement your income in an extremely passive way.
Please understand, however, that blogging is absolutely NOT a get rich quick scheme and requires an incredible amount of groundwork and research. Creating a website and the content that is going to appear on that website can take weeks, or even months. And making money from it can take even longer.
Etsy
Etsy. The one website I’m sure all aspiring artists have heard of. Or in fact, anyone with an internet connection. Etsy has always been strongly affiliated with creators, artists and crafters. And it’s no different in 2024.
Etsy is a great place to start if you want to sell your art pieces, but perhaps don’t have the capital or audience to start something of your own. A lot of very successful shops have been created on Etsy and thousands upon thousands of people make their living from it.
It takes mere minutes to set up your shop, and then no time at all to start adding your listings. That’s what’s so great about Etsy. It’s quick, and it’s relatively inexpensive. (They may charge you a small store set up fee which is currently listed on their site as $15, and then 20 cents for each listing you post).
Taking a look around Etsy at other stores and listings, you can also get lots of inspiration about what’s working for other shop owners, and how they present their shop.
Overall, Etsy is a great place to start if you want to make passive income from digital art. But there is a hell of a lot of competition there, so you will need to make sure you’re doing your research to ensure you’re standing out from the crowd.
Print on Demand
Print on demand services have been around for some time but are often overlooked as a way to make passive income from digital art. However, in recent years it has become more popular. And that is because print on demand makes it extremely easy to earn passive income from digital art.
But what is print on demand? Print on demand is when you advertise something – it could be an art print, or a mug, or a t-shirt. And when a buyer decides to purchase that product, instead of having the item pre-printed, it’s literally printed on demand. There are a whole host of providers out there that allow you to hook their services up to your shop front (whether that’s on Etsy, Shopify, or somewhere else).
Once you’ve connected your shop to a print on demand service, all a customer needs to do is purchase your item, and the order is sent to the print on demand company. They fulfil the order by printing the product, and then they ship it out to the customer. You don’t have to do anything.
Naturally, these print on demand companies do take a decent cut from your profit, however considering you’re doing nothing to fulfil the order, it’s a pretty fair deal.
Courses
Online courses have been around since the 1980s (would you believe!) and have been an extremely effective way for people to learn a whole host of skills over the internet, without having to attend any classes (or even speak to anyone!)
A lot of people think that in order to sell a course, you need to be able to provide some level of certification to your students. But that’s not necessarily true. There are a hell of a lot of people out there that want to learn skills from someone who knows what they’re talking about. They don’t care about a certificate. They want to learn a skill or knowledge that you possess. You don’t necessarily have to be qualified in anything (although I’m sure it would be very helpful). But you do need to have a decent level of knowledge about what you’re teaching – and ideally have succeeded in what you’re teaching.
For example, if you’re a successful artist, selling your art online passively, you can create a course showing other people how they can do the same.
Courses typically tend to be very popular when they show someone how they can better their life in some way. For example how to make extra money, or how to learn an important life skill, or a business skill that they’re going to find useful in the future.
Selling a course about digital art would work very well. You could teach people about how you create your art, how you market it, and how you sell it. And then you could sell that course alongside your art work and make passive income from both.
Subscription Services
Subscription services are often forgotten about when it comes to making passive income from digital art, but they are an incredible way to build a community, and make money in the process.
There are a few popular subscription services available out there. But first of all, what is a subscription service?
A subscription service is effectively a platform that you post your content to. It could be digital art, or blog posts, or video content… or whatever else you want. Customers who like your work and what you do (perhaps they’ve found you on social media or somewhere similar) can then pay a monthly fee to have behind the scenes access to your work.
These fees can be whatever you want, but they’re not normally super expensive. Think the price of a cup of coffee. You need to make the amount small enough so that people won’t be deterred from signing up. But big enough so that you can make a meaningful income. And the price needs to directly reflect the quality and quantity of content you will be providing your loyal subscriber base.
It’s also very important that you outline the type and frequency of content so people know what to expect, and what they’re signing up for. You do not want to underdeliver to them, or create an infrequent posting schedule that people can’t rely on. If you subscribed to a magazine service, you wouldn’t expect it to show up whenever it felt like it.
Popular subscription providers include: Patreon, Substack and Unscreen.
YouTube
Last, but certainly not least, is YouTube. YouTube is an incredible way to make passive income from your digital art. Whilst you might not be actively selling specific art pieces on YouTube (or maybe you are?) it’s a great way to show your art process. What behind the scenes looks like. What a day in your life looks like as a digital artist. The content possibilities are endless. And YouTube is a fabulous launch pad to direct people over to your eCommerce website, or your Etsy, as well as making passive income from your video views. We’ve given YouTube a try over here at Sketch and Blot – check us out here.
Round Up
So there we have it, 7 ways you can make passive income from digital art. Make sure to check out some of our other useful articles. And if you’re interested in getting involved in digital art, then take a look at some of my recommendations on my Amazon Storefront.