You can generate passive income for your interior design business by creating digital products, creating a course, selling pre-made design mood boards, placing ads on your website and becoming an affiliate.
But there’s a dirty little secret about passive income that everyone is forgetting to mention.
Passive income is a great solution for interior designers because you only have so many hours in a day and can only work with so many clients. And when the next recession hits (because they always happen) if you do the work now, you could be in a way better place than anyone was in 2009.
Here Are 7 Passive Income Ideas For Your Interior Design Business
Write an eBook - You've got a unique perspective on design and you could write a book on how something that you're always asked about. Maybe you're the color queen of the layout master.
Pre-Made mood boards - Every quarter you could create a curated mood board and shopping list. You could even create a few for the holidays. Ho, ho, ho!'
Teach a class - Do it live, record it and sell it again and again. You've got lots of things to share and lots of DIYers that need your help.
Membership Website - If you decide to go with creating a full-blown membership site (which I don’t recommend you do right out of the gate), you’re going to need a powerful website and host, additional plugins/or platform, a tech nerd and some cash.
Website Ads - This is only for you if you’ve got a decent amount of traffic coming to your website organically. You can place ads on your website by hand or use an online ad service.
Affiliate Marketing - Again, this strategy is for you only if you’ve got a decent amount of organic traffic coming to your website. You could sign up with tons of affiliate or just Amazon.
ShopStyleCollective - Sign up and start creating mood boards with their tools that you can share online.
There are lots of ways for you to add passive income to your design business. If you'd like to discover more ideas, then join us in the Society or schedule a Strategy Sesh with me.
Now that we’ve got the ideas out of the way, there are myths and some serious work you need to know about now before you’re sitting on a beach with a MaiTai in hand.
Myth #1 - Marketing Passive Income Products
As much as I thought, years ago, that just putting things up for sale would mean that people would instantly want to buy it, I was wrong. I still had to build awareness for my brand and then my digital products. If people don't know you have something for sale, they can't buy it.
Truth #1: You have to market your passive income product just like anything else.
But what does that mean?!
Marketing your business online can be done in many ways. But what most designers really hate to do and what actually works is content marketing.
Sure, the gurus tell you to snap a pic and put it on social media… but social media is a blip on the radar of your client. And do you think social media really wants to send traffic your way? They don’t.
They want to keep people trapped in a mind-numbing scroll fest on their platform.
This is why I will keep beating the drum, while the other gurus circle the drain telling you to do XYZ on whatever social media platform they're obsessed with, that you need to get serious about creating content.
I’ve heard it for years… people hate to blog. Got it. But you like to make money, right? Well, there’s no easy money to be made without content marketing.
Sure, you could buy a Facebook ad and direct it to your website… and then crickets. Because when people come to a website that has no meat to it, they leave because it doesn’t capture their attention (no matter how short their attention span may be).
If you don’t have at least 60 well written, keyword researched posts on your website I can pretty much guarantee that your passive income stream will shrivel up and die, if it even had life in it to begin with.
Myth #2 - Selling Passive Income Products
Getting rich overnight doesn't happen. While you will make money in your sleep, it's only after you've put a bunch of waking hours into marketing and making sure your digital product is something your client is dying to have.
Truth #2: Having a sales page that speaks about the client's problem and how you can solve it is crucial.
Here’s a client's buying process:
The client discovers they have a problem
The client researches how to solve the problem
The client weighs options to solve the problem
The client buys the solution to the problem
What problem can you solve or help solve for them? Depending on your niche there are a ton of ways that you can create a digital product that will help them move their ball a little further down the field.
Now that we know how they think, you need to sell them on your solution. And a sadly designed sales page or product listing will not do the job.
If sales pages and copywriting are not your zones of expertise, then hire someone who does this for a living.
I know when I hired a copywriter for my first digital product, it made all the difference.
But again, I want to stress that I already had organic traffic coming to my website before I hired a copywriter. Because there’s no sense in hiring a copywriter to write for a site that nobody visits in the first place.
Myth #3 Delivery of Passive Income Products
You shouldn't go cheap on the delivery of your digital product. While you can jimmy rig a solution to deliver your digital product, I don't recommend it.
How you deliver the product says tons about how you do business.
If you just patchwork some PayPal button and Dropbox combo together, what does that say about your business? Cheap. And if you want peeps to value what you're offering, don't do this.
Truth #3: How you deliver your digital product matters as much as the product itself.
If you’re delivering an online course, go find a platform to help you do that.
If you’re delivering a PDF, you can do that easily with your Squarespace website OR sign up for Sendowl and they will deliver it for you.
The key here is that you need to make sure this delivery system is stable and not confusing at all. The last thing you want is a confused buyer or tons of people sending you nasty emails because your delivery is sh*t.
Myth #4 Passive Income Products Shelf Life
While you could create a bunch of digital products for your design business to bring in extra income online, you need to figure out what your clients really want to learn from you, how they will best learn from you and what the goal of it all is.
Truth #4: Do research on how long your digital product's shelf life is.
For instance, if you wanted to create pre-made mood boards for the client who just needs a "look" but can take it from there - great. But there is a shelf life on that because the stores you're sourcing items from changing their inventory. So if you created a shopping list with links to the items and the item is now gone, guess who you're hearing from? The client who can't find the item you spec'd. Oops.
For an item like that, you need to make it a limited time only digital product, which means this isn't a digital product you could make money on for a long time. You'll have to make new mood boards every so often for this type of scenario to account for merchandise changes.
If your digital product is evergreen such has estimating paint or how to choose tile, then you won’t have this problem.
Myth #5 Passive Income Product Pricing
The beauty of creating digital products is that they can be fairly easy to put together (unless you're creating an extensive course). That doesn't mean though that you should charge pennies on the dollar.You are saving the person buying your product something, be it time or money.
Think about what you're doing for them and that will help you to see your own value.
Truth #5: The price matters. People buy first on emotion, then justify the price. That means to sell to the people who will value it, not the cheap asses.
While passive income is fabulous, it costs money to make money. You still have to pay payment processing fees no matter what you’re selling. You may have to charge tax. You may have to pay a platform or service to deliver your digital product. You have to pay for website hosting.
You get it, the list goes on.
Because you’re a wealth of knowledge… create something that helps people. Like something that people are really going to be in love with. There’s no sense in creating a product just to make something.
Here’s the best part of creating a useful passive income product… beyond all the work you do with your marketing, if the product solves a problem the word will spread about how awesome it truly is.
Therefore increasing your sales, attracting repeat customers for your next product and so on… which is what you want, right?
