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Print on Demand (POD) as a residual income

 
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(source)

This guy says he has submitted 700 designs in the past year to a site called redbubble.   He submits the designs and as people buy an item, redbubble creates it, ships it and gives him some coin.

And then comes this comment:

Standard designs go between 25 ~ 60 usd

700 x 45 (on average) = 31 500

You would make nearly 30x the money if you just sold your graphic design service



And the responses are:

Fair enough but the process to sell those designs would take time and effort in addition to creating the designs. It also assumes there are customers waiting to pay $45 for all the designs - POD or creativemarket.com might make more sense.



I have some designs laying around, where should I sell them?



Working with design clients is horrible. Everyone wants it for cheap or free. “This would make a wonderful portfolio piece for you” etc




I think when looking at it from the perspective of residual income:  what will be the income for the next 10 or 20 years?  So if he stops now, his income will be about $2000 per year with no further effort.   In 20 years that would be $40,000 - exceeding the direct pay.   And if one of the designs takes off and does 10x better than all the rest combined, it could be $400,000.  

Two huge things:

   - these designs are more fun for the designer, therefore soul building

   - these designs can be done on a whim on the side; evenings, weekends, whenever the mood strikes, therefore soul building

While working the old workee-job, develop the escape plan.  This person now has $180 per month coming in with zero further effort.  True passive income.  He can go to the middle of the ocean for a year and come back just to find his bank accounts are fatter.

Even more, this artist has these designs on eight different POD sites.  So maybe the income is already triple the $180:  $540 per month.   For many people $500 is the bare minimum to escape the rat race.  

And what if this person puts a little bit of effort into further expansion, and letting people know that his designs exist?  

Further, interest in his stuff grows exponentially with more art.  People that find one thing will search for more things by this one person.  If he doubles the number of submissions he could triple his sales.  So maybe after two years of doing this on the side, this guy could might have $2000 per month coming in with zero further effort.  Just watch the clouds pass and money keeps coming in month after month.


On a completely different track:  a person could sign up for the redbubble affiliate program.  And then post appropriate images and links here to permies.com.  And since permies.com is about perennial discussion, those links could bring income for 10 years or more.  


Other interesting bits:

One of the reasons I decided to start using Redbubble was because I was often using Photoshop, Inkscape, and Zbrush for 3d models. and I was spending time with each new update having to learn how to use each new feature so I started making designs that I could upload to Redbubble rather than discard.



When it comes to POD sites, Amazon Merch is the most profitable for be, but the most time consuming so I recommend Redbubble as It is quick to upload and then share a bunch of links on Pinterest etc and maybe once a Month look at Google Analytics to see what kind of traffic you are getting.



Amazon Merch is around 3k Society6 is almost at 1k Teepublic is at $800+ Shapeways is around $600 ArtofWhere is around $500 RageOn, Displate, and Fineartamerica are under $200



There are many people that use various affiliate programs and some use Redbubble and other POD sites. For me that kind of work is mindlessly boring, but thankfully some people don't mind that type of work and establishing a relationship with an affiliate marketer is essentially free marketing. There are many of them on Pinterest and they know the workings of Pinterest very well and some use their photoshop skills to create very nice pins that can really help sell a design. What some of them have done is create 50+ accounts and repin all their promoted designs while adding comments to boost the popularity. Some would call this a "Black Hat" technique which some sites are trying to eliminate, but from my observation it appears to me that this is what the core base of Pinterest activity is.



My sales went up after deleting about 400 designs that were mostly patterns that analytics showed no traffic and I think they cluttered my shop.



I know 1k is not really a lot of money, but the amount of time I have put into POD sites is not as much as it may seems. The amount from all the POD sites I make is between 8-9k a year and some of the sites like society6, I uploaded my library of designs in one afternoon and haven't done much since. The two sites I question whether they are worth it are Zazzle and Amazon Merch. With Zazzle I gave up on because of no sales and Amazon Merch Makes me around 3k a year, but it is time consuming and has cut into my personal time.

 
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You made Redbubble sound pretty promising. I like money. I'm a big fan of getting paid now for work I've already done, which is way better than getting paid in the future for work I gotta do now. So I'm trying it out. Designing and uploading aren't too tough, if you're moderately tech savvy. There IS a learning curve, but I'm about three days in and I feel like I'm getting the hang of it. Now I just need to sell some things.

My shop
 
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Hmmm... This looks like something I seriously need to look into.  Thanks for posting this Paul.
 
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