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Last Updated on August 15, 2021 by Work In My Pajamas
With the power of the internet at your disposal, the possibilities are endless when it comes to earning money. One proven method of doing this is by selling your own design work to customers.
Depending on the approach you take with this, being a designer could be a full-time business or a side job where you earn a little extra cash. You might even decide to make a few designs, place them on a suitable platform, and leave them to generate a passive income.
Before you start dreaming of the financial incentives, you must take the right steps towards success. For help with this, here’s a quick guide on how to effectively sell your design work online.
Create High-Quality Designs
It’s an obvious place to start, right?
However, you might be surprised at how many people overlook this initial step. They’ll rush out a sloppy design or hire a low-cost worker from Fiverr to do the job, and think the quality is good enough.
Newsflash: the quality isn’t good enough. When people have an endless supply of designs to choose from on the internet, they’re highly unlikely to select one that looks amateurish at best.
Take the time to create high-quality designs, ones that are original and stand out in a crowded market. If you cannot produce the quality you desire, hire a design agency or reputable freelancer to do the work for you.
Start a Website
You want a portal for all of your designs. While it’s true they can all be contained on a platform like Zazzle or Redbubble, a website provides you with full creative freedom. It’s not just to make your designs look pretty in a portfolio, either.
In fact, you can use your website as a serious marketing tool. You can refine it with search engine optimization (SEO) in mind. You can create informative blog posts that show up in search results. There’s the option of posting on other blogs and linking back to your website. The possibilities are only limited by your creativity.
Choose Your Platform
There are many different places to sell your designs online. The Redbubble as mentioned earlier and Zazzle are ideal platforms if you only want to upload your designs and leave the manufacturing to another party. If you want to take a more hands-on approach, you could sell your designs/products on the likes of Etsy and Amazon.
Once you establish a dedicated customer base, it may also pay off to go it alone and sell the designs exclusively on your website.
Promote Your Designs
You might create designs that are more beautiful than any that have previously graced the internet. Yet this counts for nothing if nobody actually knows they exist. This is why marketing is essential for success.
For instant visibility, you could utilize pay-per-click advertising. For instance, if you enlisted PPC specialists Made by Factory, they could create an ad campaign that will maximize your online presence and bring in additional sales.
PPC is only the start. As another example, think about using social media strategically. This is a visual platform, so your designs – assuming they have eye-catching appeal – should naturally generate a significant amount of impressions and positive feedback.
