The No BS Guide to Passive Income for Designers

you might see many people throwing the word passive income around the internet and after all it is the Holy Grail of how to make money but it's not as easy as they all make it sound so today I want to share with you the no BS guide to making passive income as a designer and we're going to share with you real designers and animators and their results so let's get into it [Music] so nothing is truly passive you can't go to sleep one night and wake up and just have loads and loads of money in your bank account you have to do some work up front and you also have to do some marketing as a designer and animator you are exchanging your time for money because you're providing a service to a client service based business models are unscalable by Nature because you only have a limited amount of time especially if you're always doing custom work for your clients so bearing this in mind let's have a look at how you can actually earn money on the side of your freelance Business Without exchanging time for money the first way to make passive income on the slide is through digital products now this seems like the obvious way to start as a designer and animator because potentially you have unused assets that you could reuse and sell them on something like Adobe stock or embato but usually I found that this isn't really that successful you have to actually think about what the market wants so taking your unused assets from your projects and then just posting them on Adobe stock or embato isn't really going to help you and they're probably not going to sell very well unless you're really lucky takes a little bit more time and research and making bespoke assets which is okay as long as you're covering your day rate of what you would be getting paid from a client so let's imagine that you charge 600 a day to your client if you spend a week creating a template and it only generates you six hundred dollars in return this is obviously not a good use of your time however if over time it's going to help you to generate more money and also you wouldn't have been working on a client project anyway then it could be a useful thing to put your time into sometimes creating templates can be lucrative one of our students just an Archer creates After Effects templates for Final Cut Pro editors and he's made over six figures with this business which is pretty amazing and the interesting thing about this is that he did it without having his own audience he sold the template through embato and he invited small YouTube channels to help him to promote his templates this is pretty interesting because usually you need to have your own audience that you can Market to and you would have to do some form of content marketing like a YouTube channel or a podcast or on social media but what I like about what Justin did is that he utilized other people's audiences and we'll talk a little bit more about this later when we talk about courses and also going to affiliate marketing distance template business has allowed him to create his own motion design studio called bashwax where he's been a little bit more picky and being able to build the studio in the exact way that he wanted because he had income coming in from his template business the next way to create passive income is through physical products this isn't something that I personally had a lot of experience with but I interviewed Mary Hawkins and she has her our own Etsy store where she sells stationery she's generated over eleven thousand dollars with this and it's just helped to pay for a health care so it's had an extra little boost to her usual freelance income which I think is really awesome and it's reiterating what I was talking about earlier when we were talking about the lulls that you might have in your freelance work and how you can top them up with some form of passive income so next up we have teaching and teaching is a great way to make some passive income on the side and it's also really really great just to teach other people what you know I've personally really enjoyed doing this over the last few years and one of the main reasons that I do this YouTube channel is so I can teach all of you everything that I know about the business side of design and animation online courses and classes are becoming a big deal and by 2026 it is predicted that the online e-learning industry will be worth four billion dollars so you might be wondering well what can designers and animators teach and how can I stand out well let's take a look at Jake Bartlett as an example because he is a really well-known motion design teacher Jake Bartlett has multiple classes online as well as a YouTube channel he has multiple School of motion courses and also multiple skillshare classes there are actually two ways that you can create a course online you can either use a platform like skillshare or LinkedIn learning and many people think that this is the best way because they have inbuilt audiences and that is true but I'd still recommend that you make your own audience as well so skillshare LinkedIn learning are of course going to have their own audiences but they also have thousands and thousands of teachers as well so they aren't necessarily going to just Market your course so that's why it's recommended to have your own audience too the other route is to use a learning management software tool which helps you to put your courses online this is what we do at motion hatch we use a platform called teachable which helps us to put out our courses like client quests and balanced business bootcamp so the fourth way that you can make passive income as a designer or animator is through paid Partnerships or sponsorships now this is quite difficult if you don't already have an audience and I would recommend building an audience for a while before you reach out to sponsors because you need to have an audience that the brands or companies themselves want to get in front of and that is what they are paying you for so someone who I think is doing a great job at paid Partnerships is Caroline kulberg she recently partnered with Adobe and I think that people want to partner with Caroline because she is doing something a little bit differently we'll probably put some examples here and here but Caroline is doing lots of frame by frame animation with mixed media usually drawing over herself and making some pretty cool and interesting posts so when you're first starting you're probably not going to get sponsorships and paid Partnerships right away but even if you have a small audience you probably are going to be able to do some affiliate marketing affiliate marketing is where you recommend someone else's product and they give you a percentage of any sale that you make so even if you have a tiny audience you can still make some money through affiliate marketing and it's usually not as hard to get on the partner programs of big Brands and companies that you like so my good friend Ian padgent from logo geek makes one brand a month through affiliate marketing so how does Ian do this well he has his own podcast and he's built his audience so he recommends products and courses that he knows his audience will live meaning that he gets a percentage of each sale that his audience buys and he's identified products that align with his audience that he knows that they will live you should never promote anything that you don't think is related to your audience or that you wouldn't use yourself and ideally some thing that you would promote anyway even if you didn't get a commission building trust with your audience is vital and your reputation is really everything so you don't want to start promoting products to your audience that they're not going to live if you're sharing affiliate links with your audience it's always really important that you include an affiliate disclaimer either in your video or your blog post or wherever you're sharing these links it's really really important that you do that there's lots of templates and handy info about this online but if you want me to teach you more about affiliate marketing just pop a comment below this video in the description another way to make passive income is through providing a community or membership to other people and it's kind of debatable whether this is actually that passive because it definitely takes a lot of time up front to create a great Community or membership and you have to be in there providing a lot of value to your members and really helping to set the tone of the community especially at the beginning even if you go with something like patreon it can be really difficult to figure out what different tiers people want and how you can provide value to them I was doing some research for this video and I found the top categories on patreon and I think that you'll find it pretty interesting so I'll leave a link to the article below the video and also let me know YouTube has just launched its membership feature would you be interested in being a member of the motion hatch community on YouTube let me know Below in the comments I'd be really interested to see if you would like that and what tears and what value you would want us to provide on this YouTube channel I'm a big advocate for community and we have the communities as part of all of our courses imbalanced business boot can we do a live call every single week so one week we might have an expert call another week we'll do live coaching and then we do accountability calls in that Community as well so the balanced business bootcamp is where I spend most of my time so you can see how providing Community or membership can take up a lot of your time for me it is actually a full-time job apart from when I'm making these YouTube videos for you now you know what options you have to create passive income but how do you get started and which ones are right for you well I created a workshop for you to help you figure out just that I'll leave the link below this video in the description if you want to learn more about pricing then you should watch this video next

Channel: Motion Hatch

Views: 3,072

Keywords: passive income for designers, guide to passive income, designer passive income, make money online, how to make passive income, passive income, passive income ideas, affiliate marketing, adobe stock, after effects template, motion design, motion designer, motion graphics, mograph, hayley akins, motion hatch, freelance motion design, freelance motion designer, make more money in 2023, graphic design passive income, animation passive income, passive income motion graphics

Id: Wxd03ZtQiJ8

Length: 9min 53sec (593 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 15 2022