Do you have a creative side?
Are you a budding artist, or a talented writer? Perhaps you have digital creative talents, and know how to create awesome graphics on your laptop?
Sometimes society doesn’t seem to value creative talents as much as other skills. We’ve all heard the stereotype of the ‘starving artist’.
But there’s no reason why you can’t use your artistic skills to make an income, as this list of creative ways to make money shows!
Whether you’re looking for a whole new career path, or perhaps a way to make extra money on the side, I hope you find some inspiration in this post. You might find a way to monetize an existing hobby, or perhaps a whole new avenue to explore!
Do you already use any of these artistic ways to make money? Let us know in the comments at the end 🙂
Just a heads up, most of my posts contain affiliate links. That means if you buy something after clicking one of my links I may receive a commission, at no extra cost to you. Thank you for supporting my site!
Etsy printables store
I love the idea of selling printables online. Printables are any kind of product that a customer can download and print themselves. There are endless ideas for printables to make and sell, but here are just a few examples to get you started:
- Printable wall art
- Printable planners or journal pages
- Games and activity pages
- Worksheets for teaching or homeschooling
- Invitations
- Recipe cards
As you can see, you can create printable downloads on almost any topic.
The true magic of printables is that once you’ve made them and uploaded them to your Etsy store, they create passive income for you!
Since there’s no physical product, you can sell the same item hundreds or thousands of times over for no additional work. Also, you don’t have to deal with any inventory or shipping yourself.
This is a great guide on how to start a printable store on Etsy in one night!
Make wedding favours
Wedding favours are a surprisingly huge business! I’m talking about the little gifts you find by your place setting at a wedding meal.
Most couples like to have something personalised with their names or wedding date, so their guests have a little memento of the wedding.
Wedding favours are often handmade, but this is the sort of thing that a lot of busy couples are happy to outsource to free up some time during hectic wedding preparations.
Why not set up a small home business creating personalised wedding favours? These could be as simple as little bags of sweets or jars of jam that you personalise with a label featuring the happy couple. Or if you’re artistic, there are endless ways to create something truly unique!
Sell at craft fairs
Do you have a creative hobby that you could monetise?
Whether you make jewellery, toys, clothes or anything else, a simple way to start profiting from your talent is to take a table at a local craft fair. This could be one of the fastest creative ways to make money on the side.
Search online for fairs near you. If you’re in the UK like me, this site is great for finding local events near you. You can also check with your local council, local Facebook groups or other online communities, churches and schools.
You will usually have to pay a fee for a table. Of course, there is always the option of selling your creations online on Etsy, but a craft fair gives you the advantage of interacting with customers and other creatives. You also don’t have to think about packaging or posting!
Make costumes
Can you sew? Perhaps you could use your talent to make money creating bespoke costumes!
Yes, these days it’s easy to find ready made costumes online. But lots of people are looking for unique outfits for cosplay, period themed events or other specialist reasons. You could also specialise in creating costumes for professional performers.
Intricate costumes can sell for hundreds of pounds each. You could also create a range of lower cost items such as masks and props. Just look at the cosplay listings on Etsy for inspiration!
Sell digital assets online
If you have some image editing software and can create digital design elements such as backgrounds, textures or clip art, you can sell these online on a site such as Creative Market.
These make a great product to sell, because like printables, you can sell the same element unlimited times and potentially make a passive income for years to come!
Wedding stationery
Here’s another idea in the wedding niche – it’s huge money!
There are all sorts of things you need printed if you’re having a traditional wedding. From invitations and orders of service, to place cards and table plans.
Creating and selling wedding stationery would be a fun and artistic way to make money on the side. You could offer affordable ready-made printables, or more expensive custom designs that you print and deliver yourself.
You could even start making these for free with a design program such as Canva!
Greetings cards
Here is a similar idea for a creative and artistic way to make money. How about creating greetings cards to sell? If you are an illustrator, you could draw them freehand and scan in to digitize your designs, or you could create them on the computer.
As with the wedding stationery idea, you could sell them either as printables (an online marketplace such as Etsy would be perfect) or print them out yourself and sell as a physical product.
In this case you could sell online on Etsy or Not On The High Street, or even take them along to a craft fair or ask a local gift shop to stock them.
Sell your designs with print-on-demand sites
This is one side hustle idea that I’ve been using myself for over a year, and it’s brought in a lot of extra money for me 🙂
With print-on-demand (POD) sites, you create a digital design on the computer and upload it. The design can be anything from unique artwork to a simple word or catchphrase.
The POD site lets you create a mock-up so you can see your design on different products – depending on the site, this could be T shirts, hoodies, phone cases, stickers or dozens of other products!
You can list this item for sale on the POD site WITHOUT actually creating a physical product. If a customer wants to buy your item, that’s when the POD company prints out your item and ships it to the customer – and pays you a commission, of course.
As with printables, this is a very easy, hands-off business model which is perfect if you have some creative design talents but you don’t want to deal with physical stock!
Here are some of the best known print on demand sites:
- Merch By Amazon (this is what I use)
- Redbubble
- Teespring
- Zazzle
Sell colouring books
Adult colouring exploded as a trend a couple of years ago and it hasn’t really gone away since, thanks to its therapeutic benefits.
You could jump on this trend by creating colouring pages or books to sell.
If you have illustration skills, you could create unique hand-drawn designs.
But here’s a secret for the less artistic: it’s also possible to buy colouring pages with PLR (Private Label Rights) which give you the rights to put together your own colouring book to sell with minimal effort.
I am really interested in this idea because I believe it could be very profitable, and with PLR it wouldn’t take too long to create a book!
Logo design
Here is another creative idea for anyone who can use some basic image editing software. How about offering logo design services?
Literally millions of new blogs, websites and businesses launch each year, and many of these are after a custom logo.
You could offer your services on freelancer sites such as Fiverr or People Per Hour.
Make gift baskets
This is an easy home business idea to set up if you like the idea of making a physical product to sell, but you don’t have the time or artistic talent for some of the more creative ideas on this list!
Gift baskets make really popular presents for Christmas, weddings, anniversaries, new babies and almost everything else you could think of.
They are easy to put together and you can sell them for quite a big markup since people are really paying for the presentation, not the individual items!
You would need to invest in packaging materials (baskets, cellophane, ribbons or bows), which you can buy in bulk quite cheaply on eBay. Then, of course you’ll need the items to go in the basket. Again, you may be able to buy these in bulk.
Gift baskets can be quite bulky and tricky to send by post. I would start advertising locally with some flyers and a Facebook page.
This is an interesting video which inspired me to write about this idea:
Run craft workshops
If you love crafting and you also have great people skills, one creative side business idea would be to run craft events.
You have a few different options here. You could run a workshop to teach a skill or make an item together, where you sell tickets to individual attendees. Or you could offer craft parties for children’s birthdays or hen parties, where the client would book you to run a bespoke session for their group.
Here are some ideas for sessions you could offer:
- Cooking or cake decorating workshops
- Scrapbooking
- Jewellery making
- Decorate your own canvas bag
- Decorate knickers or garters (one for the hen parties!)
You could run your events from home if you have the space, or go to your client’s home, or look into renting a hall or a private room in a cafe.
Blogger
Blogging is a great creative way to make extra money. You can start doing it in your spare time, but you can eventually earn enough to make it a full time career.
Many people think blogging is just writing, but there’s much more to it than that!
Many bloggers use a whole range of additional skills such as creating graphics, photography, social media skills, internet marketing and more. Because of this, blogging can be a really fun and rewarding job.
If you’re interested in starting your own blog, I have a detailed tutorial here.
Calligrapher
Calligraphy is an incredible skill and if you have it, you should use it!
You could sell your lettering skills for wedding invitations, wall art, hand addressed envelopes and more. Also, bullet journaling is huge at the moment and hand lettering is a big trend in the bujo world, so another idea would be to create stickers or printable inserts for journals.
As well as traditional calligraphy, other forms of hand lettering are in style at the moment so don’t just limit yourself to one style.
Here is an awesome article by one letterer who made a business out of her hobby.
Ebook writer
Here is another idea if your creative talents lie more with writing. Why not write and sell your own ebooks? These days anyone can make a book and you don’t have to have a publishing contract.
You can publish and sell your own books on Amazon with Kindle Direct Publishing. Or you could sell your books in PDF format from your own website with a platform like Sendowl.
You don’t have to be a prolific novelist to make money writing books. Short, practical books such as how-to guides often sell really well online because people are looking for the solution to a problem and are willing to pay to have all the information they need in one place.
Sell stock photos
Whether you’re a pro or amateur photographer, you may be able to boost your income by selling stock photos. Stock photography is another potential passive income generator – take the photo once, and get paid every time it sells.
These days there are even apps where you can upload photos directly from your iPhone, so there’s no excuse not to get started!
Here are a few sites to take a look at:
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