I Tried Selling AI Art For 30 Days (Realistic Results)

this piece of art is made by Ai and about a month ago I opened an Etsy shop trying to sell AI generated artwork like this in digital format in this video I'm sharing my analytics how much money I made in a month and I'll show you three tools that help me upload 75 listings in just a couple of days now despite that there are some harsh realities with selling printable wall art so make sure to stick around if you want to see realistic results for context I'm selling wall art to generate it from mid-journey which is a text to image AI I pay ten dollars a month which gives me commercial rights and I sell the art in digital format more specifically as a digital file in five different sizes anybody who buys it can take it to their local printing service and have it printed and framed this way I don't have to worry about printing shipping and I keep a 90 profit the downside is I don't make as much money as with physical prints because I can't charge that much for a digital file so little background I opened the shop on April 4th and as soon as I did it was immediately suspended I didn't violate late any of etsy's policies and I wasn't given a reason for it naturally I appealed the suspension and even raised the ticket to their support team I heard this happens to a lot of new shops so I've included links in the description that can help speed up your Shop's reactivation in case you're ever in the same boat in my case Etsy reactivated the shop around three weeks later now my first mistake was that I didn't do anything while the shop was suspended I could have used this time to make products and I have the first listings ready to post by the time I was going to be reactivated so I only started listing my first products in the first week of May then my second mistake was overestimating the value of my first products which were pop art posters based on my research I concluded that these products would sell really well and as you probably guessed it they didn't I run another Etsy shop selling websites and canva templates and I got my first sale there in the first couple of days so I thought I could repeat the same thing here but turns out it's a bit more difficult than that so I did some more research and this decided to expand my offerings I added abstract art Contemporary Art and oil paintings after I did that I got my first order for three dollars this gave me motivation to keep pumping out new art and listings so I hopped onto creative market and bought some abstract shapes and started putting them together in Photoshop couple days later I got two more orders and now my total revenue was around 13 now considering I spent 18 on the abstract shapes on Creative Market plus the Etsy listing and transaction fees I was at a loss but that didn't stop me from continuing to make some art and uploading more listings however there was a serious problem up until this point I was doing everything manually upscaling the art resizing and placing into mock-ups wasting multiple hours every single day just to upload a couple of listings so after spending a few days researching how I could speed up my workflow I found three tools that completely changed my shop since mid-journey generates low resolution art I had to upscale it to make it suitable for printing I previously used upscale media but I had to do each image one by one so I switched to top as Ai and I could now upscale multiple images in one go the problem is the topaz AI is a paid too so I was now at an even bigger loss but I was pressing on and after upscaling I had to do the most exciting part of all our business placing the art into mock-ups I first did what most shops do I manually added the art into mock-ups at first I used canva but the mock-ups weren't that great there so I bought some higher quality ones that I could edit in Photoshop since I was doing around 8 mock-ups for a single piece of art it took me centuries to do it manually when I first found out that there are scripts and plugins that do it automatically for you I was just over the moon until I started using them maybe it's just me maybe it's my version of Photoshop but none of these scripts worked well for me I tried like four of them and they either didn't place the art into the mock-ups properly or would just completely crash for Photoshop several failed attempts later I just gave up and started resizing again manually while researching other tools on the side and I eventually found the perfect solution on Reddit this guy called Luca Dali built an online mock-up generator called mock city.com where you can add your Photoshop files and the two will place your art into mock-ups automatically this made my job so much easier I added my mock-ups added the art pressed a few buttons and it was doing everything in the background it was an absolute Game Changer but there was another problem you see printable wall art is usually offered in five different sizes or aspect ratios and it needs to be in specific pixel sizes to be printed properly so I had to find a way to resize the art generated from my journey into these exact sizes so I used Photoshop again I created canvases in these exact sizes and placed my art into those canvases again this was just a lot of manual work so I tried to automate it by recording my actions in Photoshop but this didn't work at all I just couldn't get Photoshop to place the image into the canvases properly and have it centered and looking decent so I just continued resizing manually and wasting a lot of time thankfully Reddit again had the answer I found this free tool called X and convert that could resize multiple images into all the different aspect ratios I needed you see other tools stretch the image if you force them to resize to these exact dimensions but X and convert can resize the canvas around that image and then resize the image itself to fit that canvas correctly and the cherry on top is that you can set up the dimensions once save the preset and just load it every time you want to do another resize this was super convenient and it now allowed me to upload at least 10 listings in a day in less than an hour so I got to work and after about five days of working on this I managed to upload 75 listings but several days later crickets I was getting visits to my shop but nobody bought anything thing so I set up a couple of summer sale discounts to attract buyers and again several days later absolutely nothing happened at this point I figured you know this is stupid this won't work what am I even doing and then the last attempt to push the shop I caved and just started running Etsy ads for one dollar a day and several days later a few orders started coming so now for the big reveal I've made 27 in 30 days which if you deduct all the fees I'm actually at a 15 loss so what happened is selling AI art really a fluke but complete waste of time I don't actually think so I mean don't get me wrong it's definitely not easy it is a lot of work but there are multiple things I could have done better and likely would have seen much better results first I think offering art in digital format isn't a really good idea I think by offering the same products in physical form that will allow me to Target a bigger audience and generate more sales so from next month I'm turning this shop into a print-on-demand business second you cannot waste time in this business you need to upload regularly even if there is no progress even when there are no sales coming in I stopped uploading listings mostly because I ended up doing other things and that killed all my momentum third you need to offer a lot more types of products to Target a wider audience for the time being I'm only selling around five types of art so I will need to do a better job from next month and expand my offering so am I stopping not a chance my goal is to turn this into a profitable business by the end of the year and the stable source of income so be sure to subscribe if you want to stick along for the ride thanks so much for watching and I'll catch you guys on the next one

Channel: Mark on Business

Views: 201,009

Keywords: how to sell digital downloads on etsy, etsy digital products, digital products, etsy digital downloads, how to make money online, how to sell digital products on etsy, how to create a digital product, how to make money with midjourney, how to make money with ai, making money with ai, selling digital downloads on etsy, how to make money on etsy, making money on etsy, digital products to sell on etsy, digital products etsy, etsy, mark on business

Id: GXPQ-fg507o

Length: 7min 46sec (466 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 21 2023