Want to make passive income from your art? What is Print on demand?

Wouldn’t it be good if you could be making money even while you are sleeping or on vacation? Well, if you ask me, you can! It’s possible! There is a bunch of business models for passive income, but I want to talk specifically about the Print on Demand (POD) business.

Print on demand is a business model where your sell you art license for the company then to sell your art on various products and you get a royalty for the sales. You upload your artworks to these sites, format them to look good on various products, create good titles, tags and descriptions and wait for sales to happen. You don’t need to sell them yourself, the company does that for you. On most of these sites you also don’t need to do customer support as well, which is amazing for an introvert like me, who just hates it :D. And the best part of it is that you retain all the rights to your artworks and you can upload them to a lot of the POD websites or sell it to a customer later.

Below are some of the most well known POD sites:

CafePress

Zazzle

DesignByHumans

Redbubble

Teepublic

Teespring

Society6

Spreadshirt

Some of them are better that others and they all have different rules and royalties so make sure to research them first before jumping on all of them, just like I did :). You don’t want to waste your time, do you? Also, some of these sites interfaces are quite bad and outdated though, so pick carefully. Researching is also a must to know which of these sites have the biggest potential to sell your artworks. It’s best to choose a just a few POD sites in the beginning and focus on them to see how it goes, what sells and so on…

And just to get you a little bit inspired I will share some of my results from one of the POD sites that I am using. I will not say which one it is, go figure yourself though :), maybe a little ambiguity will motivate you to take action.

Of course, it’s not much, but think about that way – you can upload to every POD site that you can think of and you can sell the same designs on all these places, so the income can add up that way. Also sale can happen at any time, even long time after you stopped working on new designs and uploading. POD is like a tree when you plant it one time, give it some maintenance from time to time and it will give you constant fruits in the future. Now imagine planting 10 trees!

P.S. Around ~20% of the designs that are upload actually sell, that’s Pareto law right there :). At least for me, for some may be a bit less, for some a bit more. So research and think about what you are uploading to save time and get faster results.

Let me know what you think and if you would like to see more of the similar content or maybe you have ideas for posts suggestions?

Back to blog

Leave a comment

Please note, comments need to be approved before they are published.