These 8 art revenue streams make me $83,893/month

If you think artists and creative people can't make money, I'm here to tell you they can. I'm going to share with you the eight ways I make a full time income with my art and have more money left over to go into my other passions and for savings. The first way I make money with my art is through my polymer clay food jewelry business.

I started Tiny Hands in 2006, so I've been running that for a long time now. Generally I make $150,000 to $180,000 per year selling this jewelry through my Shopify store and Etsy. Between the two, most of my sales come from my own Shopify store.

I know it sounds crazy because when I tell people I have a jewelry shop online, people automatically think it's just a hobby shop on Etsy and that I just do this on the side. But it's like, no. I'm making a full time living from selling my jewelry.

This was my first endeavor into anything creative for myself. And when I started, I didn't know anything about business or marketing. And frankly, I was still learning so much about art in general.

In fact, when I started, I didn't even have a focus or a niche. I was making all sorts of things under the Tiny Hands name. I made handbound journals because I really loved paper and journals.

I made beaded jewelry from projects I learned after attending my first jewelry making class with my mom at the time. And when I discovered polymer clay, I made different things like video game items, animals, stars. I didn't hone in on just food and making them scented until actually a few years later.

So it took me years to figure out a lot of things out. The first three years was definitely a struggle in terms of making money, but I was having so much fun with it and I felt so proud of the things that I made. So I would share them on online forums and on message boards, which were a lot more prevalent back then.

These days we have things like Reddit and Facebook groups, which are basically the same thing. And I would share my work with other people in those communities. Some of them would show an interest in my work and buy my things.

So over the years I learned a lot more about the business side of things and got really passionate about that as well. I also have another shop I started in 2019 where we sell personalized vintage map art. Everything is digital for creating the products and then we use print-on-demand services like Printful and Gooten to create the actual physical products for us, such as framed prints and canvas wraps.

And then they handle the printing and shipping the products straight to the customer for us. For the last year, we made a $508,000 in revenue just for that business. So my husband runs and manages this business now.

He took over running it a few years ago and I kind of just sit in like one of his board of directors. The story behind the shop is actually pretty funny and interesting. I had always wanted to have a personalized business because that's always trending.

People are always shopping for anything that's personalized, right? So it was the fall of 2019 and my husband had quit his job for a couple of years at that point to develop a video game. It took a lot of manpower to get it going.

So it was a slow start. And in the meantime, I wanted to show him how he could make some side income online from freelancing. But he was resistant to it because he didn't have a passion for that.

So the holiday season was just around the corner. So I rushed to set up the shop and asked my husband for help. He didn't know anything about how to start an online shop, so I taught him from scratch.

He did influencer outreach. He did product description writing, I design, and came up with the product ideas and set up the Shopify store. And the year after that was 2020 where we made $1,000,000 in that first full year of business, which was really incredible.

It was mostly just us fulfilling orders, doing customer service and marketing, and eventually we built up a team of other people to help us make orders. But for several years I would jump in and help make orders too, because we were just getting so overwhelmed with sales that our team couldn't keep up. Now this business has kind of matured a bit and my husband is taking a more hands off approach to focus back on his video game which is his dream.

And I'm taking on a more active role in that shop again, particularly with the marketing for the Shopify side of things. Another way I make money through my art is from selling courses. So I started Creative Hive in 2014 where I teach other people what I learn from my own businesses and help other creatives start and grow their own online stores selling their handmade products online.

For last year, this business made $414,000 in sales, primarily from selling a larger program called the A Sale A Day Business System. Selling courses and coaching is definitely very lucrative because the market for selling information specifically on how to make money is always in demand, right? However, it is also super competitive and hard to make a name for yourself because it takes a lot of trust building to make a meaningful income as a teacher.

A lot of people have had negative experiences with so-called coaches that can't deliver on their promises, so people are naturally a bit more suspicious and defensive around creatives who are also coaches. This business takes up most of my time, even though it's not the biggest business we have, because I have to constantly produce free content for my audience, whether that's for this YouTube channel for example, like with this video you're watching right now, or if it's for an email, social media post or blog post. While I know there's a lot of appeal in selling courses or turning to coaching as an additional income stream, I think you have to really love teaching and helping other people because otherwise you're likely going to create a course that's not very good.

And if your product isn't good and you can't help your students get results, then it's hard to have long term success with this. It's not passive income the way a lot of other coaches make you think it is. It is highly scalable in that the amount of work you do to get one student is not too different from getting a hundred students.

But don't forget that you have to be present to answer questions, coach your students through their challenges and be there for them. Okay. Another way I make money online through my creativity is with yet another jewelry shop.

Yes, a big chunk of my income comes from having multiple businesses and having the diversity is not only fun for me, but also help stabilize that roller coaster feeling with sales. So I started The Bright Jewel a couple of years ago. I source the jewelry components from wholesalers online through primarily Alibaba, and I assemble them myself.

This line is definitely not nearly as handmade as my polymer clay jewelry line, but it still fulfills a creative need for me. Coming up with the designs, curating the product line, even taking the product photos, creating the branding. All of that to me is super creative work.

This is the smallest business of the four. It's only made several thousand dollars at this point. But to be fair, I give it literally zero attention.

So when I make sales, it truly is almost passive income and it takes me like 5 minutes to put the order together. This shop's is actually picking up in momentum, so much so that I actually just invested it in a huge box of custom printed jewelry boxes. There's so pretty and I'm so proud of them and I feel like I need to pause here and run and grab some to show you.

A few moments later. Oh my god, here. Isn't that so pretty and it's got the gold foil and it's a slide out box.

Ooh. I feel like such a big business girl with custom packaging. Okay.

Now, related to my coaching business, I do also make some revenue through monetization of my YouTube channel. I started running ads only pretty recently and frankly, I regret not having done it sooner. I was actually really afraid I would make a lot of my subscribers angry for turning on monetization, but it really hasn't been the case.

It seems for the most part that people are really understanding and they're familiar with how YouTube works. So finally I did it and it now generates a consistent $700 to $1000 a month in ad revenue. I, of course, have to work really hard to create videos like these and to get as many views as possible, which is all super time consuming to do.

Researching video ideas, coming up with video titles, what to say in each video, then editing them, designing the thumbnails, and then promoting videos later on when they go live. It's a lot of work to do. Thankfully, I have a team that helps me with many parts of the process, but being a content creator is definitely a lot of work and not for everyone.

Each video takes an average of 10 to 15 hours of work for me and my team, and I think that's on the short end of things. I know other YouTube creators spend way more time than that. It can easily be a full time job.

I think being a creator can be really good for you if you have something to share with other people, you're not afraid to voice your opinions and you enjoy articulating them. I had a lot of trouble with this in the beginning. You can see some of my earlier videos.

I had to script everything and I was so stiff and uncomfortable. And back then, I was too scared to say things that people didn't want to hear but needed to hear. So another thing I do with my polymer clay jewelry is wholesale.

Now, I consider this an entirely different income stream than just having a Shopify or Etsy store because it is quite different. Selling wholesale is selling products at generally a 50% lower price than your regular retail price to stores. So these stores then resell your products to their own customers.

I used to do wholesale a lot more for Tiny Hands. At one point I had a sales reps in the Midwest and the East Coast who would take my jewelry in their cars and drive from store to store to pitch my work to store owners. I had done trade shows which are like craft shows, but specifically only for store buyers.

So the people shopping there are shopping for products specifically for resale purposes. At the height of my wholesale business, I was in over 100 stores across the United States. But because my jewelry is scented and it's so niched that most people don't even know such a product exists, it was hard for retailers to sell them.

So it's not the perfect product for wholesaling. I scaled everything down. I fired my sales reps, stopped doing trade shows, and now when I do wholesale, I do it on my own terms.

I definitely don't make as much money from wholesale now as I did then, but at the same time, I have a lot less pressure. Plus, the few retailers I sell to are really good fit ones that I love working with and I make zero effort in finding them. Instead they find me through the marketing I'm already doing.

So it's making sales without any extra work, which is great. If you're interested in doing wholesale for yourself, definitely check out sites like Faire. com.

It's a wholesale marketplace where store buyers shop for products to carry. A few of my core students from A Sale A Day Business System use Faire. com with some really great success.

I also make money through acting. Now I know some of you might be thinking, acting isn't an art, but it's called performing arts for a reason, right? So I've been pursuing acting out here in Los Angeles since 2017, and the more I learned about acting from all the classes I've taken, the more I'm reinforced in thinking that it really is an art.

When I don't know anything about acting. I used to think acting was imitation, which I think a lot of people may think that, but knowing what I know now, it is so, so creative. It's expressing your creativity using your body as the instrument, like a painter, using a paintbrush or a musician with a violin.

Another misconception people make about acting is that they think it pays a lot. And I'm here to say that unless you're part of the 1% of actors who are A-list celebrities, the pay is just okay. Many working actors can make a living from acting but the majority of actors have second and third jobs to support themselves with.

I am so proud I have made over $50,000 for my acting so far since 2017 through commercials and TV show work, as well as residuals, which are from checks you get when shows are on gets rerun or shown again later on through like international platforms or online media and so on. In a sense, it's almost like passive income because I may get paid $1,000 to be on set for one day, but then make thousands more dollars later on over time in residual checks when the show actually gets run on TV. Speaking of residuals, I also make money from teaching on other platforms.

The most notable one was in 2016. I taught several highly produced courses on a platform called Creative Live. It was such a cool experience.

I work with their people to create the courses. They fool me out into San Francisco to film over three days and I had a live audience, a moderator for an online audience as well as a whole camera and sound crew. They put me up in a hotel, paid for my food, got me a professional makeup artist.

It was all just so cool. And this happened really early on in my teaching and coaching career, and I got so many of my earlier coaching clients through Creative Live. Showing people that I had the competency to teach really helped build trust with people who then later became paying clients.

And it was also really great for introducing me to thousands of my ideal customers. It's been a while now since I taught there, but the way it works is I get paid a percentage split based on how many people bought my course for that quarter. I've been paid tens of thousands of dollars in commissions for teaching with them at this point, but since it has been a while, the checks have gotten a lot smaller.

That's another example of doing work once and then getting paid over and over again for it just like with acting. I call that leveraged income. Every now and then I would also get paid to speak at conferences or panels.

I used to do this a lot more, but less so these days because it involves a lot of time to travel, to location, find accommodation and all of that, often only to be paid a few hundred dollars so it's just not as worth it anymore. We also invest our money into investment funds. We use Betterment and our money basically makes money for us, although at a much slower rate than all of the other ways I just talked about.

I'm all for creating new diversified income streams. I think this is so important. And 99.

9% of creatives making money as a self-employed person has diversity in their income streams. That way we're spreading the risk, right? If one thing doesn't make money, that month you have all of these other ways to make money so you don't have to stress so much.

But of course, these income streams also take time to build up. Some take months, if not years. Starting a business can be fast if you know what you're doing, and that's definitely my wheelhouse, which is why I run so many of them.

And I'm always looking for new businesses to start. Moving forward, I'm also working on writing and publishing a book, so when that happens, that will be another form of income. I know a lot of creators also do affiliate marketing and sponsorships.

That's something I never really got into. I get so many emails from brands wanting to sponsor a video on my YouTube channel. But if I haven't used a product myself, I just don't feel comfortable recommending it.

And the trust that I've built with my community is way more important than a few hundred bucks. So that's a big reason why I haven't gotten into it very much. Previously, when my businesses were still babies, I also did freelance web design work.

That really helped pay the bills when my business wasn't making that much money yet in the early days. I always say there's no shame in having multiple income streams or having a part-time job to allow you to focus on your art with less pressure.