How to grow your Redbubble passive income sustainably and repeatably for maximum profit and minimal effort.
How's *that* for clickbait!! Ha! Okay anyway here's my final installment of Red Bubble passive income, which is going to be focused on growing and sustaining your profits. The tl:dr of this? The key to Redbubble success is a balanced and robust portfolio. But anyone could tell you that, so let's dive in a bit more on how to make a portfolio successfully balanced.
The Repeatability Factor | Template Niches
So my last post was all about creating your own niche instead of just hopping on one that's already full grown. And by that, I mean remixing a niche to make your own niche within a niche - some real inception stuff going on here. This is exactly what I did to grow my own business, and afterwards the next step was sustainability. And the trick to sustained growth is repeatability. ...Well, that and a balanced portfolio, which is somewhat related.
So you want a niche that has a collectibility factor and a repeatability factor. Let's use my stamp example. You can do stamps of places all across fandoms, anime and video game alike, you can do character focused stamps, or what about just stamps of yummy anime food? Lots of possibility, with very little lift once you've banged out the template.
Template based niche collections are obviously the gold standard of repeatability, but that's also a part of their downfall. Anyone can make these stamps with an editor and high-res images. You can differentiate yourself by having better quality, or better design chops (in this instance I guess that's just really knowing your typefaces) or just better taste in anime. But it's going to be a crowded market one way or another.
There are two ways to combat this. The first is to just have a broad portfolio of different template based niche collections. Color swatches and stamp locations are examples of this kind of niche. The sky's really the limit for template based niches, so have as many as you can possibly dream up. The second solution is in product placement. A lot of these drag-and-drop type stuff are really only made for stickers and t-shirts. You can slap them on any product, but it's not going to be optimal.
There's a third solution too. People find/make these sort of niches pretty frequently, so the ultimate solution is to go a step above.
The Creativity Factor | Creative Niches
Keeping in mind that we're still working off the basis of 'collections', the key to the design-based niche is to balance the creative workload with the repeatability of collections. The vintage park sticker example is more a design-based niche than a template one. Halo is hardly the only multiplayer game in town with various maps you could make park stickers out of, so there's plenty to choose from, but the act of designing them isn't as easy as just changing colors, text and imagery.
That being said, I call it a creative niche because it requires a level of skill above just clever templates and editing techniques. The park stickers needed some illustrative and design chops, and a lot of my examples require a bit of artistic ability.
This one can be a bit harder to pinpoint since it lies in the sweet spot between 'full blown work of art' and 'one step above memes'. It should still be something on the lower scale of effort, but with a level of creativity that gives it uniqueness. You could also call this the doodle-based niche, because that's the level of effort I'm thinking of.
Here's my example - my favorite anime characters as cats. Cats sell, and I usually have great taste in favorite anime characters so they tend to also be popular (insert Kakashi one-eye smile here), and combining the two in a simple doodle style can give it a creative spin without spending hours on it. Another example would be anime characters as limited edition bubble tea flavors, or milk boxes.
And although this niche requires a level of skill not everyone might have, it's still a pretty popular one. Redbubble is full of chibi character designs, and for good reason. They can be incredibly successful. And depending on what level you abstract them to (milk boxes, bubble teas) you can skirt pretty successfully around whether or not it's even really fanart.
While template niches are probably going to be the bulk of your portfolio, design niches are likely to take up the most of your time. They won't be as easy to push out as the former, but when you get a good one going the key is to capitalize on it and make the most of it. In my experience, this medium level of effort niche is the sweet spot. I usually spend about 1-2 hours at most on a single design.
That being said, while no one could say it's not creative or artistic, it's still not 'full blown art' levels. (I'm not trying to debate what is and isn't art here, I'm speaking of the level of time/effort involved.) And intentionally so. I see plenty of stunning, gorgeous pieces of art on Redbubble and while I'm sure the ones I see on the front page must make staggering profits, how many of them are there that we'll never see just because of some unknowable powers of algorithms and tags, and don't make a dime? It's one thing if you're posting works like this because you enjoy doing them/would have done them anyway and like the idea of selling them on the side. It's entirely another if your sole drive for them is to make money and you end up spending hours if not days on something that doesn't sell.
This leads me to my final (and most difficult?) niche.
The Unique Factor | The Art Niche
The only reason I even still call this is a niche is because I'm still working with the idea of collections to give some level of repeatability. The time and effort for this category is astronomical in comparison to the other two, but still critical for a robust portfolio. These products will be the pillars that support you, but they can be the most hit or miss and also require the most of your time and effort. Honestly about 10% of my portfolio goes in here, and a lot of it I did for other things unrelated to Redbubble otherwise I couldn't justify the time I spent on it to the potential earning capability.
Honestly I don't have any example works for this section because it's kind of the main star whenever you go to the main page of Redbubble. A great deal of them are one-offs however, and my advice would be to give yourself some repeatability with the collection you choose. Again this is based on your editing software, but as an example if you're doing a Shadow and Bone tarot card collection, a lot of the background embellishments, scrolls/floral motifs etc. you can drag and drop throughout your pieces and reuse. Tarot cards also have a fixed size and layout (border, scroll at the bottom with text) which also helps automate the process some.
Balance is the Key (to the Force)
Or so says Master Yoda. Anyway, trying to get the right ratio for your Redbubble portfolio is really the key to a successfully sustainable Redbubble income.
Bonus Advice: Turn your design into a pattern!
One of the reasons I prefer Redbubble to other print on demand shops is the ability to turn your print into a pattern. This is such a crucial selling point that I really don't think people utilize enough. You can literally click a button on a design and turn it into a pattern, and even change the background. Idk if people like these posts I might do a separate one entirely on how to create actual patterns out of your art the way fabric designers do.
コメント