 Well, hello and welcome to this video. Today I'm talking about income streams. Yes, making money as an artist, how to make money as an artist, how to make money this year 2023 as an artist, what should you focus on specifically? What income streams are actually going to work best for you so that you really can build some stability in terms of creating that art business that I know that you dream of. So in this video I'm gonna share 10 income streams I think are gonna work really well for 2023 and 2024 to help you build that successful art business. Your job is to watch the video right to the end, really think about the pros and cons of each one of these income streams and then choose just one. Oh yes, I did say choose just one. You know I'm a massive advocate of focusing in on one thing, doing one thing and doing that one thing really, really well. Now if you're somebody who's gonna watch this video and think I wanna do four or five of those things, I'm not saying that you can't, I'm saying that perhaps you choose one right now and you put the others down for later. Once you've got that one working you can always pick up and add in the next one. And make sure of course to let me know in the comments which income stream you're gonna be focusing on for the next 12 to 18 months. In case we haven't met, I'm Sophie, artist, entrepreneur and art business coach helping you to build a profitable business from your creative passion. If you find my videos useful, please do consider subscribing to the channel so that you don't miss out on any future content. Okay, let's talk about these 10 income streams for artists in 2023. Now I expect you've seen a lot of these types of videos, 20 ways, 30 ways, 40 ways to make money, right? We've all seen them, we've all probably watched them too. In fact, I have such a video, 20 ways to make money from your art in 2023. So you might be thinking, well how is this video different, Sophie? It's completely different. That video actually is great for strategy. It walks you through the high level steps, a more holistic approach at making money as an artist. This one is absolutely down to the bone. It's just about the income streams and how you can make money, nothing else. So you definitely wanna make sure that you've watched that other video as well. I'll put a card to it up here right now and a link below this video as well. And I think if you have the two contents between that should give you a really good place to start. Okay, so I'm gonna cut to the chase and dive straight into how you can make money and 10 different income streams. Now I wanna let you know that although they're numbered one to 10, it's not a priority order, it's the way I wrote them down. I did have one thing running through my mind though and that is the potential profit margin that you can make with each of these things. Number one, and there's no surprise here on that selling original art online. Now I imagine a lot of you are gonna be saying, Sophie, I've got art on my website. I've got art on a third party site. It's not selling, all right? So just hang in there and hear me out. So if you are a painter and I'm aware that not everybody who watches this channel is a painter, but if you are a painter, then obviously selling your original pieces will give you the largest profit margin. So it makes sense to perhaps start out this way, right? And then work towards making other items that I'm gonna talk about in a minute in the video further on. Now you'll have that choice, whether you sell it yourself by your own website or whether you choose a third party site. And we've talked about this before. One of them is gonna need a lot more marketing than the other, and the other is gonna take a chunk of money in exchange for the marketing. So at the end of the day, you'll end up roughly the same. And if you've used my pricing video to make sure that you've priced your work correctly, you should always make sure that you're gonna end up with a profit anyway, right? I'll link to the pricing video up here so you can check that out. So you wanna make sure that when you price original art, it works for you no matter how you're going to sell it. So I've got a question for you. What if you put all your focus and attention onto marketing your online store, wherever that is? That's gonna mean that you're gonna make different choices, I imagine, in terms of your marketing. How often? What sort of marketing activity you do? Because at the end of the day, you're going to send everybody to those online listings. And as we know, when we focus on one thing, we get a much faster result. It's when you're trying to do multiple things. You put a bit of energy over here and a bit of energy over there, that it's all very, very slow. Of course it is. You just don't have the time or the financial resources to market five different things at once. So if you have a lot of stock, a lot of product, you make a lot of 2D or 3D work, what if you just focused on selling that and then looked at the results of that a few months down the line? Number two, selling limited edition prints online. So this is perfect for you if you have a smaller collection of work. Perhaps it takes you a longer period of time and you have a higher price point per piece. You're going to have members of your audience who would love to own an original but perhaps financially are not in a place to do so. So why not then give them the offer to have the image but have the image in a limited edition form? Who doesn't love a bit of exclusivity? It's not an open edition where there are thousands and anybody can buy them forever in a day. Perhaps you just do 10 or maybe 20 of these limited edition prints. And so the purchaser says, oh, look, I've got two of 20. How exciting. There are only 19 other of these prints available. This is really nice and it's a beautiful thing to do for your audience. Now let's look at it from a practical perspective. Say you sell the original, I don't know, $5,000 and then say over here you sell the limited edition print at $500 each. Now there is going to be a cost to produce that print but let's say for example, it costs $100 to produce the print really. High quality inks, beautiful paper and maybe a simple mounds, et cetera. You still walked away with a decent amount of money over here which let's face it, you've made off one image that you painted and already sold over here. So I feel like this is a really strong strategy, especially if you have a really good printer that you can use who you know will do a phenomenal job. So yes, there's an outlay. You've got to get your image scanned or photographed so there's a bit of a setup cost. But again, let's look at that. Doesn't even matter if it costs you $250 out of your 500 to produce that print. It's still extra money that you made off the one image over here, right? So let me know in the comments if limited edition prints could be your thing. Number three, income stream for artists, very popular at the moment and that is to sell an open edition print or poster via a third party print on demand company. Now what's the benefit of doing that? Again, you've made the one image over here, you've scanned it and photographed it, that's a done deal, right? If you decided to go this route, then it's pretty easy to set up. There's no outlay cost apart from getting that image scanned or photographed. Maybe you can do that yourself, in which case that's great. And then you're going to use a third party print on demand company in order to fulfill that for you. So at the end of the day, all you've really had to do is create that original image, make a really good copy of that image and then you set up with the company and every time the customer orders your print or poster from your online store, it gets fulfilled and mailed by that other company. While you're sitting at home, maybe in your studio working on the next piece. Now, should you do that for each one of your images? Definitely not. Do you want to select the images that you've noticed are super popular? Perhaps you post on social media and you're getting way more likes and engagement on some images than you might say to yourself, do you know what? I think that would be really good to create as a print or poster. I wouldn't recommend doing it to all of them. It's probably just way too much choice for people. Remember overall less is more. So for example, supposing you currently have, I don't know, 30 paintings at the moment. We're talking about paintings here for this example again. You have 30 original pieces. If you chose 10 of those maximum, the super popular ones or the ones that you know are really good. You're really proud of and you got those set up with the print on demand company and you created posters that way. Now your profit margin here, of course is going to be lower because the price you can charge for that is going to be lower and likely depends where you're selling it. There might be some sales fees. So a lot of people will do this through an Etsy store. So there'll be Etsy seller fees and then there'll be the margin obviously that you make via the print on demand company. So you might be left with a much smaller amount of money but you know what's great about this? This is what we call a passive income stream. You've created the artwork whether you've sold the original or not, that's over here. If you sold the original, great, you've made money over there, right? Now you have the open edition and suddenly you can look on your phone, alert, sale, sale, sale. You can be doing something else totally and that print is printing and printing and you don't actually have to handle it at all. So number four way to make income as an artist and that of course is to sell your artwork onto products. Once you have that original image created and scanned, well, why not use it for other things? So you might have your open edition art prints over here but that same image could be put onto t-shirts, sweatshirts, any form of apparel, bags, iPad covers, computer covers, anything that you want really. It's a great way to have your artwork and designs seen by a much larger audience. Again, so long as you're prepared to do the marketing in order to drive people to look at those listings and make those purchases. So of course again, your margin is gonna be super low. Chances are you're using the same print-on-demand company. They will set the price point and you'll look at the margin and go, huh, okay, somebody just bought my tote bag and I've made $8. But imagine if 10 people bought that tote bag or 100 people bought that tote bag then actually you painted that painting once, remember? So this is another great income stream. You'll love this strategy if you're really good on the computer as well with maybe the Adobe suite. So you've created your artwork, you scanned it in and perhaps you need to tweak the colors or tweak the file size or shape then that's gonna suit you particularly well. And again, this is a form of passive income. I've spoken about this on the channel before as well. You know, you set it all up once and the sales can continue to flow. So you're on holiday somewhere sitting on the beach, you get a few pings on your phone and you've sold some prints or some products. Pretty nice way to make money as an artist, I reckon. Number five and that's to create digital downloads. So you see we're going down a particular path here. So again, this is gonna suit somebody who's particularly good on the computer, might even work really well if you're a digital artist and you use things like Procreate. And the opportunities here are endless, quite honestly. You can go ahead and create your own simple posters, stickers, calendars, coloring in sheets, basically anything that somebody can download and print from home, right? So again, if those are your skills and you think I can create lots of little designs and I can set these all up as downloadables, now you're really gonna make a tiny, tiny, tiny amount of money. So again, it's a high volume. There's a lot of people out there right now that I've noticed are making a full-time income just from selling stickers. Now sure, you need to make sure that the sticker you're creating is on trend. It's something that people wanna buy right now. And you might be thinking, well, I'm a fine artist. I don't wanna make sticker, Sophie. But this is just a suggestion. There'll be somebody out there for whom this is the perfect strategy. And remember, like I said at the beginning, you only need to pick one of these income streams to focus on and ditch all the others, right? This is not a one-size-fits-all-at-all. Number six income stream for artists this year and that is getting license. Now, some of you are gonna love this idea because it takes you away from selling direct to the public. And it means that what you'll be doing is creating a collection and you'll be actually pitching to companies in order for them to license your artwork. Now, there's no quick win here, but having a solid portfolio, a clear niche and brand is gonna help you enormously. The opportunities are great. Again, if you focused on this one thing. So imagine again, like all of these other strategies, you take the one strategy and you put all your time, energy and effort into doing the one thing. You make a collection, 10 to 12 pieces. You focus on pitching that to different companies to get licensed. And you don't at the same time go, I've got some limited edition prints over here. I've got originals on the website here and I've got downloads over here. Right, there aren't the hours in the day to do that and you're just spreading yourself way too thin. So you take one and that's what you focus on to make your money. Number seven, get illustrating. Now again, this is particularly on trend right now. There are more and more illustrators and it's still far from being a saturated market. There is plenty of room for you. Now you might be looking at illustrating a book or magazines or travel companies if you love travel or there are endless different opportunities out there. Now here you can often end up working as a freelancer which can give you some financial stability. A lot of you are gonna love that. Others of you are gonna go, no that doesn't work for me and that's fine, right? So as we said, illustration is on trend right now. If that's your thing, I would focus in on it and go all in right now. Number eight, create workshops. Now this is perfect for you of course, if you already teach, you've been thinking about teaching. You love the idea of teaching or sharing what it is that you do. You can do this face-to-face or you can run a virtual workshop either of which works really, really well. It's quick and easy to put the content together and it's relatively super simple to market workshops as well. It's a chance to teach your audience one topic and find out what else they might like from you. Would they like a course? Would they like a regular class? Would they like a retreat? What is it they would like? Starting with workshops is a brilliant place to start. That's something that you like to do as an income stream. Now again, if we look at it from a profit margin sort of perspective, this is gonna depend on your costs. If you have your own studio and you've got room for, I don't know, six to 10 people in your studio and they're all paying at least $100, you haven't really got many outgoings apart from maybe power insurance and some materials. You can make pretty good money in a half day or a day. If you've got to hire a venue, again the venue costs come out of that but still you could be looking at walking away with at least a thousand pounds or dollars for a one day workshop. Pretty easy, right? Number nine income stream and that's the online course. So this is the next step for those of you that want to teach and share more content with your audience. Downside can take quite a while to put an online course together. You've got to plan it out. You've got to write it all out. You've got to film it, edit it, create the course in a course platform. So there's quite a bit of work up front. I typically recommend three months to get your online course done but once it's done, a bit like the original art, once it's done, it's done and you can continue to sell that over and over and over again. Now you'll need to have some good online marketing skills to make those sales. But again, imagine you could have a starter course for say $97 or pounds. You could have a more chunkier course for around the 500 or you could have a really high-end your entire process all in for sort of two to three thousand. Now those numbers start to add up if you imagine that you perhaps open the doors to your online course. Maybe you've been teaching for years and now is the time that you put together your entire process, all the things that you wanna teach into one big course. You deliver it, you perhaps have live support and that you put this out there for say two and a half thousand dollars. Well imagine if you had a hundred people sign up and buy that course from you. You can start doing the numbers and go this isn't too bad, Sophie, I don't mind this. Will you go from naught to a hundred people buying the course? It's gonna depend on your mailing list and how long you've been doing it. If you're starting out, it's not gonna happen. But if you've been down the track and you've been teaching for a while, you've got a fair number of people on your mailing list, there's no reason to say that you can't open that amazing course and have a ton of people buy it. It's a great strategy for income. Again, it's that all the work up front and then you can continue to sell it over time. Number 10, drum roll. And that of course is to create a membership. Now imagine pretty much everyone is watching is a member of something, right? Do you watch Netflix? Do you listen to Spotify? You're an Amazon Prime member? Are you a gym member? Chances are you're a member of something, right? You don't even think about it. That amount of money goes out of your bank account every month and you gain the benefits for staying a member for whatever it is. So once you have a keen audience, now whether you've created that online course or not, one option is to give them the opportunity to actually gain content from you from a month by month basis. And there are so many ways that you can structure a membership, but you know the real benefit for you as the artist, you might have to create new content every month for your members, but you're getting recurring income. Imagine that you've got, I don't know, a pottery membership. So for people, hobbyists would like to learn how to create pots at home. And each month you give them a different lesson, different demonstration and they get to play with different clay and they get to build things at home. And each month they're paying, I don't know, $25 pounds a month to be a member of your membership. They're really enjoying it. They continue to pay. They get a new lesson and on they go. Imagine again, if you had 100 people, 200 people, you can whip the calculator out and go, well, I'm doing the same amount of work every month, whether I've got 10 people, 100 people, 500 people in my membership. And that money is coming into your bank account every single month. Will there be a bit of time, energy and effort to set up your membership? Sure. Could you do it on something like Patreon to get started? Absolutely. Artists are doing it every day and you can have quite different membership levels within Patreon. I use Kajabi and that's where I put my courses and that's where I put my membership site. It's all in the platform and it's very easy to use and it also does all my email marketing, all my sales pages. In fact, it pretty much runs the entire business, one platform, all in one. I will give a link below this video where you can get a trial to look at Kajabi if this is something you're interested in, either the course, the membership or both. Have a look at that. If you've got any questions, you can shoot me a message as well. Now, as your membership grows, you might need a little bit of help to support you with the growth. You don't wanna be doing that all on your own worry about that when that moment happens. That's a high quality problem. I've got so many members, Sophie, I'm going to need a VA. Hallelujah, that's great, right? You'll be making the money to afford that so that won't be a problem. All right, so in conclusion, I hope you're inspired by at least one of these 10 income streams. Are there more ways to make money from your art? Of course there are, endless. These for me would be the key, solid, tried and tested ways to make money from your art. Some people messaged me and say, should I do this, should I do that? These strategies will work for you so long as you work them, all right? And like I've said before, don't try and do three at once, just focus on the one and put everything in. And you'll know as you listen to this video, which is the right one for you right now. The thing to remember here, it doesn't matter which one you choose because you can make money from any of them, all right? You just want clarity on the right one for you. You wanna commit to it and you want to remember that you will need to put a lot of work and effort into it and that's fine. Now, if you'd like some help and you're interested in a membership, you're interested in becoming a part of my membership, then I do have the Art Business Academy and that is a membership for female artists only to help them set up market and grow the business. It's based on my six step process to take you from virtual beginning to successful profitable art business. You can work through those steps whilst also getting monthly content and support in forms of Q and A's, group coaching calls that you can come on and get help and support from myself directly. It's your one stop shop for all things art business related. If you're at all interested then check out the link below this video. There's no contract you can join for $32 a month or you can take the option where you save yourself two months and join on the annual subscription. But why not come in and give it a try and see if you love it. There are lots of other members in there who are really enjoying themselves working through the different stages at the moment. The real benefit of the Art Business Academy you don't have to ask that question what should I do next because you just follow my simple six step process and you only focus in on the bit on that path that you are at right now. All right, lovely people. Thank you so much for watching the videos. Like I said at the beginning don't forget to check out this other one which is a more holistic approach 20 best ways to make money. It gives you all the strategy and all the big picture and I think is a good companion video to this one. And thank you so much for watching and I'll see you on another one.