At the risk of alienating many a reader with what is somewhat of a “spammy” headline by default these days, we are indeed going to discuss how someone like a graphic designer can automate their income instead of having to rely on a per-gig remuneration structure. As you’ll know, unless you’ve perhaps landed a set of fixed contracts which are to be honoured over a specifically defined period of time, the work in this field can be very erratic. This is the case even if you’re perhaps employed full-time as a graphic designer, working for some kind of agency which makes use of your skills as part of their service offering.

So how does a graphic designer create a passive income stream with their skills then?

The rather “spammy” sounding headline was perhaps marred by the Internet Marketing industry, or in fact the Direct Marketing industry as a whole (MLM too), because when they’re discussing passive income, many of these marketers who are trying to sell you some course or programme make reference to the now popular story of a comic artist who instead of earning an hourly wage selling their time in the illustration field, they rather create one comic strip episode and then mail it off to a selection of different newspapers, each of which publishes and pays for it. Of course what the marketer telling you this story usually has on offer probably doesn’t actually go on to work out for you in the same way that the cartoon artist managed to create passive income streams from a skill which most other people sell by the hour.

Being that you’re in an area of specialisation which is in the same field though, you can look much “closer to home” in this regard and actually make it work for you.

So here’s the approach (or one of the approaches you can take):

Ask people who are active in the field of web design about how they make their designs look more “professional” and they’ll tell you about the use of pre-made templates, which are customisable to levels which produce unique-looking websites. The same can be done with specific graphic design projects, such as designing a save the date postcard for special occasions such as weddings.

What you can do is visit the online portal which allows you to customise these postcards as the user, iterate through all the different designs possible and then print out something of a catalogue which will essentially do all the selling for you.

Of course you’ll need to do some initial marketing, but graphic design targeted to specific markets such as weddings makes for the perfect example of just how effective word-of-mouth can be as a marketing channel. When it comes to the organisation of special occasions such as weddings, people like to interact with physical samples of what’s on offer and although they could very well go directly to the platform you used to create your physical catalogue, I can almost guarantee that they really won’t. They won’t want to.

[ssba]