Building Passive Income as A Creative

At some point, every person, creator, and otherwise, has dreamt of ways to earn income without having to be actively involved in the process of generating that revenue. Maybe the dream comes up when you have to deal with a difficult client, or when the work gets overwhelming, or moments when you could use a break or a vacation, but your income relies heavily on your presence, and you have not saved up enough to get away for a little while. Building functional means of passive income cannot be understated in any financial journey.

While there are conventional methods like savings with relatively high-interest rates, mutual funds, stocks, bonds, and even real estate, what if you could turn your creative outputs into another stream of income? Let’s take a quick dive into it.

First, building a passive stream of income that is connected to your creative expertise and strong points never looks passive at the onset. The right structure for passive income has to be built mindfully and actively for it to last through the years and really function as a passive stream of income. You have to invest time, skill, and often, money before getting a truly passive stream of income from your creative work.

Do the groundwork. Passive income that stands the test of time is one that is built mindfully over the years. You can create an informative video series or develop a valuable course to sell, but if you don’t have the right audience, your efforts won’t scale. You just end up with a project that you poured yourself into without getting anything tangible in return. And the best time to start laying the groundwork for what your passive income from your creative expertise would be is at the start of your creative journey.

• Document your work over time and get comfortable sharing it publicly.

• Host your work on platforms where it would compound over time. A valuable YouTube post can be found years after it is published. Your well-optimized guest post on a blog or online column of relevance can still be found organically many years later.

• Grow your audience from day one. And connect with them closely. Followers are great, but sometimes, it can be rather abstract, just numbers. You have only a little idea of who you speak to and how much your creative work means to them outside the like and share buttons. If you ever launch a passive income product that needs an audience, a personal mailing can get you more interest than your number of social media followers.

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When you have laid a path for the groundwork, and it starts compounding—you can see the growth in real time—you can then build other layers for your passive income. Figure out what you can do to make the creative work that you currently do to deliver value consistently, without being bound to one client or one transaction. Here are some ideas:

• Build digital products: These are relatively easy to build, so long as you have the fundamental knowledge and can communicate it in a valuable manner. Build presets, frameworks, reusable and editable templates, printable art, guides, strategy and workflow documents, and the like. These options cut across different creative fields. As always, build these mindfully and ensure that you are out to solve a problem that people would be willing to pay for because they find it valuable. In some cases, niching down helps build something that finds an audience.

• Licensing: For creatives in the media space, this is a cool way to make extra income without anything unusual. Look for platforms that give licenses to buyers in exchange for royalties, and upload your works there. Most times, it is a volume game. There are a ton of other creators who upload to these platforms just like you. The more work you have uploaded, the higher your chances of being found by users. Another thing would be to analyse these platforms and identify gaps that you can fill, and then create something to cater to that gap over time.

• Organize a workshop or develop a course: pre-record a workshop and sell it at different points in the year, develop a structured guide or compile a course that targets people who would genuinely want to pay for the value you offer. This is where documenting your work, process, and experiences over time comes in handy. Courses are great, but they can be tricky to sell when you don’t know how to communicate the value they offer, or when they are based on a premise that people don’t find interesting enough to buy into. Before you build a course, validate the idea. This can be done by a poll, conducting free sessions that tease what the course would be about to check the pulse, or developing a series of content around the topic to test the potency and relevance of the idea to the audience that you have in mind.

If you jump right into developing products without laying the groundwork as aforementioned in this article, there is a solid chance that your efforts would require a heavy marketing backing, which in turn ruins the idea of creating a passive source of income from your creative expressions. Build in bits, one step at a time, and when you stay consistent with growing, offering value, documenting your creative journey, and building an interested audience on your platform of choice, activating your passive income becomes significantly easier.

Have you ever sold a digital product? What was that experience like for you? Share with us in the comments.