How to Make Money by Selling Digital Art

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Many artists and designers sell digital products or resources today as a way to make passive income. Selling digital products isn’t always that easy because customers have a natural bias towards physical products. Earning potential is directly related to the amount of time and effort you’re willing to put in. The main benefit of selling digital art online is that it allows you to scale up in a cost-effective way. Creating digital art that you can sell over and over can drastically increase your earning potential.

Know your target audience

Create digital art with a specific client in mind rather than making random artwork and hoping for the best. Try to solve a problem for them or give them something they can’t find anywhere else and do it in your own unique style.

Selling digital art and giving customers the option of buying physical products too will make you more money. Using a print-on-demand supplier like Printbest gives you the option of creating a physical product only once a customer places an order. You won’t have to carry any excess inventory or loss of revenue due to dead stock. Printbest is North American-based and orders take as few as two days to print. This is a low-risk, low-cost way to generate income without having to invest too much too soon.

Decide on the price you will charge

It’s often a hard realization that after all the effort you took to create digital artwork, you may have to sell it for as little as $10. It may take a while for you to make the money back for the time you put in. You can price your artwork by looking at what your competition is charging or you can take your experience, cost of materials, hours you spend into account.

The benefit of this industry model is that you can sell the same low-priced item over and over again for years to come. You need to find the crucial balance between charging too little for what your work is really worth and so much that it costs you sales. Competition is fierce and customers have so many choices that you must offer a quality product at a competitive price to succeed.

Choose a marketplace

If you choose to sell using an online marketplace, you need to read their End User License Agreement very carefully. Make sure you agree with what they allow the end-user to do with your work. Do some research and see what sells well on different online marketplaces so you can decide on one that should work well for your products. You can sell at more than one online marketplace but try not to spread yourself too thin at first.

Selling your digital art as stock images is one of the simplest ways of making money. When one of your images sells, you receive a certain amount of money. All you have to do is keep uploading your images to stock image sites and you can reap the benefits. At first, this will provide you with supplementary income at best but as the amount of images you submit increases, so your income will grow.

Exposure equals opportunities

You may think you’re selling out as an artist if you have to spend time promoting your art on social media. If you’re an artist wanting to make money online, promoting your art is an essential part of the process. The more people who see your art, the more chances you have of receiving donations, selling merchandise or getting commission work. Showcasing your work online may bring your clients for whom you can create custom orders such as logos, portraits, character designs etc.

An extensive market for digital art

The range of artwork you can create today is endless, from computer wallpapers to children’s books. Many websites need digital artists to create interactive products for them to attract visitors and there is so much other digital art required today that the market is huge. It all comes down to how much time you’re willing to invest and what customers want. There is also no one right way to make money and you may want to create an Etsy shop, create a portfolio on Instagram or run your own website.