It is said that the average millionaire has seven different income sources. While the following advice might not put that many zeros at the end of your bank balance, it will sure provide some handy extra income to boost your cash flow. Here are a few ways to make money online with your graphic design skills.
Sell your services
There are plenty of platforms online for you to farm out your freelance services, actually too many. One that stands out is Envato Studio. Customers can vet you as a service provider based on criteria that suits them (i.e. jobs done, price, recommendations) without making contact with you. Once chosen, they give you a brief. If you accept, they pay your service fee to Envato for holding. Through the platform you liaise with your client till project completion where the client confirms that Envato can release your money. Other platforms you can explore include Freelancer, Elance and Odesk.
Aggregate content
If you have a bookmark list that could cover the south facing side of the Carlton Centre, this one is for you. Android Weekly is a free newsletter service that aggregates links to useful Android development content in a well organized, headlines only style format. You could take the same model for your profession and charge for job postings and sponsored links. With tools like Mailchimp to manage mailing lists and newsletters, this couldn’t be easier. Genius isn’t it!
Sell digital assets/designs
If you have some great unused designs lying around your desktop or would like an outlet for designs that won’t be butchered by the nit pickiness of your clients, digital marketplaces are a great option. Their business models are simple. You upload your client ready files and set a price, they make them available for sale on their marketplace; when people buy your designs, they takes a cut of the sales, you get the rest. Check out Themeforest (website designs and themes), Graphicriver (logos, fonts, textures, stationery, etc) and 3docean (3D models, textures and shaders).
If you’d rather not give a third party a cut of your sales income, then consider selling digital downloads directly from your own website. In order to do this you’ll need to host your site with a web host that specializes in sites that make it easy to automate the process of selling downloadable files. For this you’ll want to look into MadBeeTech, as their plans include a site builder, a shopping cart, and hands-off automated download file selling.
Create a video course
PC World points out that Udemy is a platform for digital course authors to sell access to the video lectures and course material they produce. Udemy helps by providing the course hosting, payments processing and marketing your course. If you have a niche talent like, “16 Photoshop actions for wedding photos” or “DIY Logo Design”, and trust that you can develop an interactive online course, give it a shot. You’ll be surprised at how many people in the world are interested in learning things that you too find interesting and will pay to learn them. Also check out Skillshare and Eliademy.
Write
Should you feel you don’t have enough knowledge or resources to create a video course, but have a few worthwhile pointers you can share in small chunks, article and tutorial writing should do the trick. Many of the top skills blogs like Sitepoint, Tuts+, Smashing Magazine and Tutorial 9 have open calls for anyone to submit awesome valuable content for their readers. Not only will you earn some extra bucks, writing can be a fantastic learning experience, provide great exposure and does wonders for your resume.
For more on web hosting take a look at this article.
