Want $500 per Year in Passive Income as a Creative? Here Are 3 Options

It’s not always a good idea to monetize your hobbies. But if you’re a professional creative, there are ways to turn your acquired skills into passive income that can boost your earnings.

First, however, it’s important to recognize that passive income often requires upfront investment and work.

Still, once you get past that initial phase, your budget may be able to reap the benefits for years to come, so it can be well worth the effort.

Here are three options to turn your creativity into $500 in passive income to pad your savings account each year.

1. Create a guide to help others break into the industry

If you’ve been working in your industry for several years, chances are good that you’ve created your own systems to get things done successfully and you’ve learned a lot about how to best navigate your career.

That kind of knowledge may feel like second nature to you, but to someone who’s just starting out, it can be invaluable. So if you have the time to put together a guide that includes insights that can’t be found for free online, you can profit off of your experience.

Let’s say you create a guide (packaged as an ebook) that’s priced at $20 per download. If you use Shopify, which charges a per-sale fee of 2.9% plus $0.30 for the basic plan, you’d have to sell about 27 copies in order to reach $500 in passive income per year.

(There can be other fees, such as an annual membership fee, which can also cut into your profits. So shopping around for the best e-commerce platform is crucial to maximize the impact on your finances.

)

Some of the topics you might want to consider covering include:

• Breaking into your industry, making connections, and landing clients
• Tips for dealing with the back-end of a creative business, such as invoicing
• Mastering one critical skill that supports your creative work, like marketing
• Templates to streamline repetitive tasks in a creative business, like client management emails

These guides can be anywhere from 30 to 50 pages to provide value and deliver on the promise of your guide’s title and description. And you may want to connect with others in your industry to get feedback (and potentially good reviews) on your guide before releasing it.

2. Licensing your art

If you’re a visual artist, you likely already have a backlog of artwork that never found a home. If so, you can opt to allow merchandisers or individuals to sell that art (which can include both prints as well as products that include your artwork) for a specific period of time in exchange for paying you royalties on any sales. This way, you’d also retain the copyright to your artwork.

For example, if you were to license a single piece of artwork that sells for $50, and you earn a flat 5% royalty rate per sale, you’d need to sell 200 products to earn $500 per year. Ideally, you’d be working with a bigger brand that has the capacity to sell hundreds of products per year, and licensing multiple works can help you reach that $500 threshold faster.

You may license your art by pitching your work to art licensing agencies that can connect you with larger clients. But there are also websites, like ArtLicensing.com, where you can more directly license your art if you don’t want to go the agent route.

3. Use a print-on-demand service

Another option to earn passive income as a creative is to turn your artwork into physical products via a print-on-demand service. This would create the product only when it has been ordered by a customer, rather than having to purchase products ahead of time based on your assumptions of how many products you’ll sell. This can reduce the upfront costs of selling physical products.

You might, for example, add a phrase using a custom font you designed or a small illustration to products like coffee cups or sweatshirts. The number of products you can sell will depend on how many designs you have or are willing to create for this purpose. But you can turn a single piece of artwork into several products to maximize your earnings with minimal effort.

Some examples of companies that offer print-on-demand services are:

• Printify
• Shopify
• Redbubble
• Society6

Each of these will have their own fees to use their print-on-demand services. But, as an example, if you sold a $6 coffee mug on Society6, you’d pay a fee of $0.60 per sale, you’d have to sell 93 coffee mugs per year (or about eight per month) to get to $500 in passive income per year.

Earning passive income does take investment, whether that’s time or money. But if you have unsold work or you have a wealth of knowledge to pass on, you can turn those assets into passive income.

Alert: highest cash back card we’ve seen now has 0% intro APR until nearly 2026

This credit card is not just good – it’s so exceptional that our experts use it personally. It features a 0% intro APR for 15 months, a cash back rate of up to 5%, and all somehow for no annual fee!

Click here to read our full review for free and apply in just 2 minutes.

We’re firm believers in the Golden Rule, which is why editorial opinions are ours alone and have not been previously reviewed, approved, or endorsed by included advertisers.
The Ascent does not cover all offers on the market. Editorial content from The Ascent is separate from The Motley Fool editorial content and is created by a different analyst team.The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

The post Want $500 per Year in Passive Income as a Creative? Here Are 3 Options appeared first on Retirely.