How Graphic Designers Can Earn Passive Income Selling On Creative Market
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How Graphic Designers Can Earn Passive Income Selling On Creative Market
A full rundown on frequently asked questions about Creative Market earnings, selling, how to find success and how much they take.
If you're a graphic designer, you likely have a collection of digital assets – fonts, graphics, templates, and more – that you've created over the years. Whether for yourself, or unused work that was created for clients, we all have a hard drive filled with work that’s collecting dust.
But what if you could be collecting money instead of dust?!
If you’re not already selling on Creative Market or other digital asset marketplaces, you’re leaving money on the table.
What is Creative Market and how does it work?
Creative Market is an online platform where graphic designers, photographers and other creatives can buy and sell digital assets, such as fonts, graphics, templates, and more. It's a great resource for designers who are looking for unique, high-quality assets to use in their projects.
Yes, you could probably design everything yourself. But do you really need to?
Vicarel Studios is a successful creative and branding studio. We certainly could make essentially anything ourselves; however, I constantly download and use assets from Creative Market. Not only are they beautiful and easy to use, but they save me hours and hours of time.
If you're interested in selling on Creative Market, the first thing you'll need to do is create an account—a simple process that only takes a few minutes—and once you have an account, you can start uploading your digital assets for sale. Easy as that.
In fact, you can even start making money on Creative Market without ever needing to upload a single product — you can use affiliate links!
Uploading a product to Creative Market.
When you upload a product, you'll need to provide some basic information, such as the product name, a description, and some sample images. You'll also need to set a price for your product. I’d suggest viewing similar products and price your product accordingly.
When creating images for your product, consider the intended or most common use cases. When creating images for Creative Market, you want it to be as easy as possible for prospective buyers to understand how your product can help solve their creative needs.
For example, our font, John Muir Sans, was made for logo designers and apparel designers to easily create rough, worn and vintage graphic design projects. So, that’s exactly what we show in product imagery.
How much does Creative Market take?
Creative Market does take a 50% commission on every sale, so you'll need to factor this into your pricing. Yes, 50% is a big chunk; however, with millions of active users, I believe that the reach and additional eyes you receive by using Creative Market is worth the commission paid.
Once your products are uploaded, they will be instantly available for purchase. Creative Market has a large community of designers and other creatives (around 9 million!), so your products will be seen by a lot of potential customers that wouldn’t have seen your products if just on your website.
Outside of making passive income through selling your digital products, another way to earn income on Creative Market is to join the platform's affiliate program. This allows you to earn a commission on sales that are made through links that you share.
If you share an affiliate link for a product, you receive a 15% commission on new customer purchases (someone who's never purchased from Creative Market) and a 5% commission on existing customer purchases made on Creative Market within 30 days of the referral link being clicked. You can do this for any products on Creative Market, so if there’s a product that you’ve used and you really enjoyed, consider promoting it with an affiliate link to make some extra cash!
How much can you make selling fonts and digital assets on Creative Market?
The top sellers are making over 6-figures selling fonts and digital assets on Creative Market. That’s right, over $100,000 in passive income per year selling digital assets! I personally made around $3,300 this year on Creative Market, and we’re hoping to double that next year.
Who should be selling on Creative Market?
All graphic designers, artists and creative professionals should be selling your digital assets on Creative Market. It’s a great way to earn a little bit of extra passive income, and it makes good use of digital assets that you’ve created in the past and aren’t using. The platform is easy to use and has a large community of potential customers who are hungry for new fonts, graphic kits, templates and textures.
Find below our Creative Market earnings for 2022:
Frequently asked questions about Creative Market:
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DescriptionMaking money on Creative Market is pretty easy as long as you focus on these 3 things:
• Create an in demand and quality product
• Price your product appropriately based on other products
• Make beautiful promotional imagery to showcase your product being used in real situations
Keep in mind that earning passive income on Creative Market isn't going to happen overnight. It takes time and effort to build up a following and get your products noticed. Some of our products sell less than 5 units a year. One of our products sells closer to 100 units per month. Be patient, and take notice of what’s trending.
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Creative Market takes a 50% commission on all sales. The money is put into a secure account, and you can make disbursements from that account to your personal bank account (or wherever you choose) whenever you like.
It’s worth noting that you don’t even have to sell products to make money on Creative Market! Creative Market offers an affiliate program that pays 15% commission for any new Creative Market customers and 5% commission for previous customers. Note that the customers must make a purchase within 30 days of clicking your referral link to receive your commissions.
You can link your bank account or PayPal up to Creative Market and set up monthly recurring transfers or log in to transfer funds whenever you’d like.
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Searching for what is trending or popular in the searches on Creative Market is the best way to see what people are looking for. Through creating in-demand, relevant, on-trend products you will see your sales grow!
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Selling on Creative Market is absolutely worth it! We profit thousands of dollars per year on Creative Market, and while that’s a small amount compared to our actual design work, the fact that this is fully passive income after the product has been created makes Creative Market very worth it. Additionally, the products we sell on Creative Market were often just sitting on a hard drive for months or even years before. All it took was a bit of time and effort to get the product ready, and we started making cash! But, remember, not every product will be a winner.
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It is completely free to start a shop, upload your products and start selling on Creative Market! You start “paying” fees to Creative Market when they start taking commissions from your sales (which is currently set at 50%). So if you sell something for $10, they take $5 and you get $5.
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You can sell essentially any digital product for creatives on Creative Market. Below are some ideas to get you started.
• Fonts
• Graphics
• Templates
• Photos
• Web Themes
• Textures and packs
• Plugins
• Extensions
• Actions
• Scripts
• Brushes