The BEST A.I. Passive Income Side Hustle 2024
In less than one year of being open for business, this shop has made over six figures selling AI digital download art.
Not revenue, but profit. I talked about a similar side hustle at the sometime ago, and since then, a lot has changed.
Now, a year later, we have brand new versions of Mid Journey that have come out, one just a couple of days ago.
The fact that still hardly anyone has tapped into this business model makes the New Year the perfect time to go over exactly how to use these AI tools to make some beautiful digital art and sell it online for some passive income.
The best part is you can start this business from anywhere in the world with just $10.
Process Overview
The process is very simple. We’ll start by making the image, and to do that, we’ll be using an AI image generator called Mid Journey.
It works by taking a text prompt, basically just a sentence describing what the image should look like, and it’ll take that and convert it into a usable, sellable piece of artwork completely from scratch.
We’ll modify our prompts to get the highest quality images possible. O
nce our image is ready, we can package it up into a nice-looking listing and post it for sale online, and wait for the sales to come in.
Since AI does all the heavy lifting, this is one of the most efficient side hustles you could start.
Monetization & Potential Profit
But before we go just making a bunch of artwork that doesn’t sell, let’s quickly look at what artwork does sell and how much money we can make with this business model.
This first shop, called Antique White Art, is selling these aesthetically pleasing painting styles digital downloads.
Most of them are a rustic, moody, vintage style with some sort of monotone colors, and honestly, nothing too crazy. Someone could easily justify hanging these on the wall, and it would look just fine.
They have a consistent, professional look, and considering the seller is quite familiar with AI generators, it’s no wonder why they’ve been able to make over 600 artwork listings.
Now, Allura shows that over the last 11 months, this seller has been able to bring in over 31,000 sales and over six figures in their first year in business.
If it’s possible for them, it’s possible for you. This next shop that we’re looking at has a similar vibe to the last one.
They’re again selling these moody, antique, vintage-style painting prints. They’re basically just using the exact same high-converting mockup on all of their listings, and they sell their artwork for a little over $3 a piece.
Now, since they’ve done over 377,000 sales, that would mean that they’ve made well over 1.3 million over the last four years, or an average of over $33,000 a month since they opened their shop in August of 2020.
Again, almost entirely profit since their only cost is the Etsy fees. This shop has made over 100,000 sales since last and $300,000 in profit.
If we look at their about section, we can see that they’re selling vintage design derivative works, meaning that these are remastered versions of original artworks.
They’re not doing anything special themselves, meaning that this is completely possible to do with AI.
Now there are more shops that have popped up recently like this one, Lexington Prints, that’s selling AI-generated art, and they opened only four months ago, but they’ve already made over 14,000 sales.
That means that they’re making close to $10,000 a month in revenue within their first four months.
Again, you don’t have to just trust me; you can go look at the numbers for yourself and see if it’s legit and something that’s worth your time.
It’s a super easy business model where you’re just selling artwork as a downloadable file.
Product Research
Now, while we’re here looking at shops with success that we would want to replicate, instead of making whatever images we feel like, we have to figure out what types of images sell.
Researching is very important so that we don’t waste our time. When we find a shop that’s selling digital download artwork, we can scroll down to the bottom of the page and see their reviews section.
Here we can click on filter and filter by the most recent to see what customers are buying and liking enough to leave reviews on.
If we click through to look at some of these listings, we can see whether it’s a bestseller or not, how many reviews this specific item has gotten, and we can see what the artwork looks like.
This one just happens to be a wildflower landscape in an oil painting style. I’ll go through and save a bunch of successful listings for later so that we know what style and vibe to go for with our own art.
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Now we don’t want to copy anyone’s listing because that will lead to legal issues, but we can use the same ideas for our own art.
A second option for doing research is to use a shop analyzer tool like Aura to analyze a shop that’s selling digital download art.
Then we can just come down and filter out their top listings to see what kind of art they’re successfully selling.
Again, just coming down here to collect concepts for the art that we can sell in our own shop.
Setup & Organization
Now accessing Mid Journey is super easy. To gain access, you’ll want to come to their website that looks like this and click on join the beta.
This will prompt you to join their Discord server where you’ll be able to make the images.
You’ll obviously need a Discord account, so make sure to sign up if you haven’t already.
Discord’s completely free. You can use Mid Journey for free in the beginning just to get started and see how things work before you fully commit.
But if you’re going to be selling the images, you’ll want to pay for one of the plans where you’ll have commercial rights to your images. So the cheapest plan is only $10 a month.
Now to stay super organized and make things super easy on yourself in Discord, just click this plus button and hit create my own for me and my friends, and then just give it a name.
Then back in the Mid Journey server, find one of these general chat rooms where you’ll be able to find the Mid Journey bot, and you can click on it and hit add to server and then just choose that server that you just created from the dropdown.
We can access the server we just made on the left-hand side, and this will let us generate images without seeing everyone else’s images.
Making Images that SELL
But with all of that set up out of the way, let’s finally start making some artwork.
So we’ll come down to the chat box section and type out a forward slash followed by the word imagine.
Now here’s where we can enter a prompt, so I could just make an image of a hillside filled with wheat and flowers.
Now I can also add a command to the end of this prompt like — a followed by an aspect ratio, maybe 4x3, to change the aspect ratio of the image that’s being generated.
After hitting enter and just waiting a few seconds, I’ll have an image that doesn’t look half bad.
This will give us four different options with controls below it. So the button on the very right will reroll the prompt and give you four new images based on the same exact prompt.
The bottom buttons will create more variations of the corresponding image, and the top row of buttons will enlarge or upscale the corresponding image if you like it.
So that’s the basics, but there’s things we can do to get even better art. Since we know what style of art already sells, we can tune our Mid Journey to produce those types of images.
Let’s type out a forward slash and this time type out settings.
Now this will open the settings page where we have several options to work with. First is the model that we’re going to use to generate images.
Now, even though version 6 is out and it does make high-quality images, version 5.2 is what we’re going to be using since it has better features at the moment of recording.
Then we have the settings for stylization. Now these options control how much flare or chaos the AI will be adding to your image if we generate the same prompt four different times.
You can see that the higher the stylization, the more wild the image looks, and the lower stylization, the more realistic it looks.
Since we know that the crazy AI style images don’t sell that well, we’ll just want to select medium or low for now. We can also set our generator to Raw mode, and this will give us a more realistic image as well.
The rest of the settings don’t matter that much, so we can just hit dismiss. Instead of just trying to craft the perfect prompt out of our imagination, the second strategy we can use is we can go over to Mid Journey’s website and just hit sign in at the bottom, and this will take us to the explore page.
From here, we can search for the concept of the image that we want to make.
So an oil painting of a field with tall wildflowers and wheat. Here’s a list of images matching our search that we can look through.
When we find one with a style that we like, we can click on it and then come up to the top and hit copy at the prompt.
Once it’s done generating the image, it’s much closer to that same style of image that we already know works so well.
Since we’re using a prompt that’s proven to work, you can obviously use this method and then go in and modify the prompt to dial in your images so that you get the right vibe.
The BEST Image Strategy
Now the third strategy is the most advanced, but it will get you the best results. It starts by finding a public domain image that fits the same vibe or idea similar to what we’re trying to create.
I use this website called raw pixel, which has a huge library of free public domain images.
When a good one comes up, like this one, just an image of a lady picking off of a tree, I just want to take a screenshot of it or download the image.
Back in Mid Journey, I can type out forward slash describe, and this will allow me to upload that image that I just found.
This command basically reverse engineers that image back into prompts that we can use to make more similar images. But here’s where it gets really powerful.
Instead of just clicking generate on one of these prompts, what I want to do is right-click the image that we uploaded and click on copy link.
Now when I go to generate one of these prompts, I’m going to paste that link in at the beginning of the prompt.
This uses that original image that we uploaded as almost a starting canvas for generating the new image. The generated result is almost always much closer and much more realistic.
We might still have to generate many different images to get the right one, but this method makes it so much easier to get great images.
Once we finally find an image that looks good, we can upscale that image, and then we’ll have new controls below to finalize it.
So we have the zoom controls, which will simply zoom out the image, which is good if it’s kind of too up close.
But for now, I’ll just use the upscale control that’s right inside of Mid Journey to upscale the image and make it as high quality as possible.
This gets our image almost completely ready to use, and we’ve still only scratched the surface.
I’ve been able to use AI to make a snowy winter tree, a snowy treeline landscape, rustic Rocky Mountains, and even some sailboats, all of which are proven to work and get sales.
At this point, before we can actually start selling the artwork for money, we need two things: to resize it into popular aspect ratios so people can use it however they want to and to get great mockups so that our images look really professional and high quality.
Resizing Images
To resize the artwork, there’s several free ways to do this. It really is easy to do. I can just open up the image in something like Preview on a Mac, click the edit button, and then select the crop tool.
Here, I can just enter in an aspect ratio, and also, I just want to make sure that the resolution is on 300 DPI.
From here, I can just save this file and repeat with any other aspect ratios that I want to offer for sale.
Now that we can make the artwork, all that’s left is to post it for sale somewhere online.
There’s a lot of options for this, but I think the no-brainer is to just post it for sale on Etsy since they drive hundreds of millions of monthly visitors to their website.
There’s more than enough demand to meet the current supply of listings. This will also ensure that we’re able to sell our artwork for the highest price and keep the business as passive as possible.
If selling on Etsy sounds like the right move for you since we already know that it works, you can follow my free quick guide, which will get your shop opened and ready to start selling in under 10 minutes.
This also has a link which will allow you to open your Etsy shop and get the first 40 listings that you post for free.
BEFORE Listing for Sale
Every listing after that just costs you 20 cents. Before we go posting our artwork for sale though, there’s one thing that’s super important to understand.
The shops that we’ve looked at that have been successful have always followed the same rule of posting their artwork in these professional mockups that are once again proven to get sales.
With this business model, we don’t even have to buy mockups; we can just use Mid Journey to make them.
All I have to do is repeat the same exact process for making the art except this time, we’re making mockups.
I can just describe what type of mockup I’m looking to make, and then after running through several generations and giving it some time to make the images, I was able to come up with some great mockups in just a few seconds.
Again, you can follow the same three strategies of testing prompts, looking at Mid Journey’s website, and using the describe image prompts to create some great mockups.
To use the mockups, we have to edit them slightly. This is also easy to do. We use this website called Photopea, which is a free Photoshop alternative, but you can obviously use Photoshop if you have it.
All we have to do is drag in our AI mockup image and the artwork design that we’re going to apply.
I can scale up the artwork so that it looks like it’s going to fit on the mockup. Then, I just want to hide this layer.
The PDF
There’s just one final step. These files will be too large to upload directly to Etsy, so what we’ll have to do instead is upload each set of images to a website like Google Drive or Dropbox.
This way, I can create a thank-you letter or have Chat GPT do it for me. Inside this letter, I can put a download link to that Dropbox or Google Drive file.
This is what I’ll be uploading as my digital download file instead of the actual artwork, since it’s a much smaller file size.
They’ll download the PDF and follow the download link so that they can download all of the aspect ratios that they might need for that image.
Scaling to 6 & 7 Figures
If you’ve made it this far in the post, you’re at least considering this business as a possibility.
So, here’s what I would do to scale this business to six and seven figures. First is, while selling digital downloads is nice, some people want to be able to just buy the physical print without having to download the image and get it printed for themselves.
We can do this by using print on demand. I’ve used a platform called Printify in my own businesses over the last several years.
Since it’s an Etsy-approved integration, setting it up for your shop is super easy.
Then, I can come in and select the poster or canvas that I want to sell my designs on.
I can just drag in the design directly onto the poster that I’m selling. I can choose all of the sizes that I want to offer for sale.
Once I’m done designing it, I can publish it directly to my Etsy shop. When a customer buys this physical print, Printify will have a warehouse print out the design and ship it off directly to the customer without you having to do anything.
You’ll just keep the difference as your profit. You’re basically just drop shipping art.
Now, I use the Premium plan since it makes all of the products a bit cheaper, which means I get to keep more profit.
But you can still sign up completely for free to try things out. When you use my link down below and you sign up using the code Alec, you’ll get 2 months of free Premium.
I personally keep separate shops for my digital and physical products, so that’s another thing to keep in mind.
I really do want you to succeed with this, like the businesses that we looked at earlier last year.
Only a few people actually took action on the post that I posted. So, this year, maybe you’ll make some changes.
I’ll have links with a bunch of free resources, coupons, and discounts down below. So, don’t be afraid to get started.
⌲ Quickstart Guide: Click Here To Download
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