September 8, 20248 min de lectura

🤑 How to Earn an Extra $500 as a Designer (7 Viable Project Ideas) · The Bunker #100

Hi friend 👋🏻!

A Newsletter in which we talk about UX Design and the Freelance Journey, dedicated to those who are starting out in both worlds and who feel identified.

From The Bunker, we accompany you on the way.

Well, we've done it. We've reached 100 articles uploaded to The Bunker. Thanks for reading this newsletter all this time! 🎉

In today’s post, I'm going to give you 7 viable ideas to help you earn an extra €500 as a designer.

And when I say viable, I mean project ideas that I’ve personally used and that have made me more than €1,000 in a single month.

When we talk about money, I understand that many people get turned off because they think it’ll be the same tone everyone uses on YouTube/Twitter:

“If you don’t have a Lamborghini by age 23, you’re a failure.”

Okay, this article isn’t going in that direction.

And although we constantly hear financial gurus talking about money, let’s acknowledge that it’s something we all seek, it’s simply essential for our business.

Whether you have a job or not, it’s obvious that money is necessary, and earning an extra €500 a month is something no one would turn down, it’s always welcome.

Something I want to make clear from the start is that if you’re someone who has never earned an extra €100-200 outside your salary, this might be a bit harder for you than usual.

Let’s normalize the fact that making money isn’t easy.

Bills don’t print themselves. And if anyone tells you it’s quick and easy, don’t listen.

We shouldn’t normalize the idea that making money is super simple.

The 7 ideas I’m giving you today come from hard work. You need to keep some things in mind: once you know how to make €100 or €200, you’ll know how to make €500.

And when you know how to make €500, you’ll know how to make €1,000. But well, we can cover that topic in another article if you’d like.

That said, let’s get into it:

Today we’ll be talking about digital products.

First of all, in today’s article we’ll mostly be covering 7 ideas all related to digital products.

Digital products are a great way to make money because they’re one of the few forms of passive income that can truly be passive.

Plus, they’re highly scalable, the bigger the audience, the more sales. There’s nothing holding back sales, quite the opposite: they can multiply very easily.

Of course, there are tons of digital products you can make, but here’s what I do:

1. Wallpapers

Wallpapers are a great option to start with digital products.

If you like to travel and take photos, for example, you can turn those travel photos into wallpapers for tablets, phones, or computers.

And well, some of you might think: “But who buys wallpapers these days?”

The truth is, few people will pay €10 for wallpapers, but they will buy them for €1 or €2. Think about it, if you see a pack you like, wouldn’t you spend a euro to buy it?

That’s how many people think. If you sell it to 300 people, you could easily make €300-400 extra, which isn’t bad.

Another idea is instead of using your travel photos, you can create wallpapers with Midjourney. Generate a few collections and sell them all. I’ll probably leave some examples of ones I’ve made.

2. Prints

This isn’t really a digital product, but it’s a good idea closely related to all of this: just as you’re making digital wallpapers, you can do the same with physical prints.

Basically, you print your travel photos physically, frame them, and ship them to customers. Like I said, this isn’t truly a digital product, and there are other hurdles like logistics costs, but you can always use a platform to automate everything, even though they’ll charge you a commission for handling it.

I highly recommend it: you take your photos, turn them into physical prints, and let people decorate their spaces with your photos.

It’s also fairly passive, once you upload the prints, the platform takes care of the rest.

3. Quick Guides

Next, I want to talk about quick guides. Something that’s very profitable is knowledge, people really invest in education and learning new things.

Quick guides are great because you can create a guide that solves a specific issue in a niche and sell it easily for €30 or €40 as a PDF.

But it has to be a PDF that addresses the topic very well. For example, in my case, in the world of design, we know how "complicated" it can be to always choose the right typography for every situation.

So I made a quick guide exactly on that: how to choose the perfect typography in each situation. A quick and practical workbook, but with a lot of value.

What I like about quick guides is that, as the name suggests, you don’t need to spend too much time creating a landing page, sales funnel, or marketing strategy.

It can easily just be a Notion document or a PDF.

4. Books

Unlike quick guides, books do require a bit more work. The idea is the same, but instead of dedicating a couple of weeks, you can easily spend a couple of years on them.

But since it's truly passive until you decide to update it, books are great because they’re usually aimed at people who like what you do, how you do it, and who you are. You share all your secrets in the book.

You cover topics that would be impossible to address in a quick guide.

5. 1-on-1 Mentorship

If you create content on social media and are building an audience, think about it: why do people follow you?

They like the designs you share, so they’d probably like to do what you do (more or less).
They’re interested in hearing what you have to say, meaning they have some admiration or at least respect for you.

These two aspects are fundamental. And when you offer 1-on-1 mentorship, you’re helping people solve problems that you yourself have faced.

People usually come with problems like:

I can’t get enough followers.
I can’t scale my business.

If they’re asking you these questions, it’s because they know you’ve already done it or that you’re capable of it.

In other words, they’re asking how you’ve done it, so you just need to explain what you already know.

By the way, before continuing with the post, let me inform you that the wallpaper collection is finally live!

You can download them from here.

6. Selling Your Own Assets

I’m a UX/UI designer, and in my case, I could tell you: Make an icon pack and sell it. Design websites and sell those websites as templates.

If you’re more of a graphic designer, for example, something that became very trendy for good reason: You can create your own pack of resources for graphic designers. That’s the typical pack that includes: fire PNGs, flares, textures, brushes, useful objects, and so on.

In your niche, select a tool that you think would be useful, build it for yourself, and sell it.

Just like I did with koalaui.com or with the store in my website.

7. Affiliate with a Lead Magnet

This is, in my opinion, one of the smartest ways to make money. To help you understand this concept, let me explain it with an example.

I founded brandingwebsite.com, a product designed for designers to get branding inspiration applied to websites and products.

It’s something super useful that even I would use, it’s partly why I created it because I hadn’t found anything like it.

These types of websites, which are interesting to almost any designer, are relatively easy to generate traffic for, and they work well for attracting attention or as lead magnets.

Now, on this website, I share tools, resources, and the actual websites, right? So now you take it a step further and add affiliate links to each one.

The tools I’m sharing are really top-notch, but many of them have affiliate programs that give me a small commission for every user who signs up through my link.

It’s really a win-win: I recommend an awesome tool, and they pay me for the recommendation.

Other examples of affiliate marketing could be adding interesting links in the footer of your newsletter. After all, a newsletter is a very personal space, and the click-through rates tend to be very high.

Someone who consistently reads 90% of my newsletters, or at least opens them, is very likely to click on the links I put in the description.

Until next time,

Jordi Espinosa.

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