Go pro with 6 ways to make money on the side
Let’s be honest: designer work is not the best paid out there. We work hard, often extra hours, for little pay, so how do we make ends meet when earning so little money from our day job?
Many of us have been forced, at one point or another, to find side hustles to make extra money. In this week’s Designer Lifestyle post we are sharing our favourite ways to earn money on the side while keeping your fulltime job.
1- Activate your portfolio and upload it to a stock site
Most designers have hundreds or even thousands of images just sitting there in a folder somewhere in their computers. Uploading them to a stock site would help you activate those images and put them to work for you. You could be earning hundreds of dollars a month from those files you had forgotten about. The best thing? You wouldn’t even have to give away the copyright to a third party!
Our favourite stock sites for designers are:
and, of course,
- Freepik.com: collaborate with the Leading Website in Free Graphic Resources – More info
Key tip here. Make sure your designs are versatile, the more versatile, the more useful, the more sales they will get! For example, a very specific vector will never get more downloads than a background gradient or a pattern.
2- Find work online
There are several minijob sites with hundreds of dialy job offers for designers from clients from all over the world. In these kind of sites, you charge a pre-accorded fixed amount per hour and, most of the time, the payment is secured, to prevent clients from running with your money after the work is done.
You can also work fixed price projects but, for these, payment is not always guaranteed, so be ready to react if the client doesn’t want to pay.
Some of these sites are upwork.com (probably the best), elance.com and peopleperhour.com. Fill in your profile, take some exams to text your skills and start sending quotes to clients!
3- Start your own freelance business
If you like adventure, consider opening your own business under your own brand. Create your personal brand, find your first clients among your connections (don’t be afraid to reach out and offer free consultations) and get the ball rolling.
However, be ready and willing to work 10+ hours per day, probably on weekends as well. Freelancing is not for everyone, especially when mixing it with a fulltime job.
Why do it? Not only you will be earning more money, but you will diversify your income sources (key!), work on building something that ultimately will generate money for you, and not for your boss and, who knows, maybe one day you could make your business fulltime.
4- Sell posters and T-shirts with your designs
If you are designer, chances are you have a great taste for clothing in general. What if you started printing your designs in clothes and sold them to local stores or directly to the end client online? There are several services online, such as imagekind.com who will print your shirts and other items on demand, without requiring you to pay upfront for a big order.
Designed by Freepik
If your content is good enough, you could even start your own clothing line, and sell under your own brand. Promote your site online and make sure you are ready to ship when the first orders come. If you don’t know where to start, check out this book, which includes all the keys to creating a successful clothing brand.
5- Start a blog
How good are you at writing? If you are good at it and have some knowledge and insight on a particular niche, you most likely could start your own blog and share your content there. There is a lot of potential on this, since you could not only earn money by showing ads (through Adsense, for example), but you could also sell products, both your own (your clothing line, maybe?) and from others.
Develop a network of shops willing to give you the right to sell their products and earn a comission (often times of 30%+) from that.
Having a blog is also a wonderful way of increasing your personal brand awareness and potentially getting new clients for your freelance business.
6- Teach
If you broke into the design world is because you have skills and knowledge. What about sharing that knowledge with up-and-coming designers? Teaching is specially lucrative if you manage to break into you local university as a part time professor. You could also give ocassional talks in events or hold one yourself.
Opportunities to are endless for those that chase them, so take the leap and start making more business today!
