How To Make Money with AI Art

AI art is everywhere. Ethical concerns and opinions aside, AI art has empowered people to put their creativity to work even if they don’t have traditional artistic talent. And people are capitalizing on this unique opportunity to turn this new art form into lucrative businesses. Let’s explore how to make money with AI art and a few important things to do before you start selling.

What to Do Before You Sell AI Art

I’m going to share some of the best ways to make money with AI art, but first, it’s important to do a few things:

Choose your preferred image generator
Master your prompts
Develop a “style”

At the end of the day, AI art is still art. You need to master the art of creating prompts that generate the results you want.

Let’s start with the most basic step: choosing your AI image generator.

Choose Your AI Image Generator

If you want to make money with AI art, I recommend that you choose an AI image generator and master it. Because once you understand how it works and responds to prompts, it will be much easier to generate the images you want quickly.

There are quite a few AI art generators right now. The most popular and advanced ones include:

Experiment with all three to see which one you like best, and then move on to mastering your prompts.

Practice Prompts Until You Get the Style and Results You Want

In the AI world, prompts are the key to getting the results you want. In a nutshell, a prompt describes what you want the AI bot to create.

It’s not as simple as saying, “a city in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.” Sure, you can use a prompt like that, but the results may not be exactly what you want. Prompts need to be refined with the right details. In fact, the more details you can add, the better.

Here’s a great tutorial on mastering prompts for AI art:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brmzDCvBR7s

How To Make Money with AI Art

Once you’ve chosen your AI image generator and mastered the art of creating prompts, you can start putting your talent to work and making money.

Sell Digital Copies of Your Art

If you’re just learning how to make money with AI art, one of the best places to start is with digital downloads. Not only is it really easy to sell this kind of product, but it’s also a great way to make passive income.

When you sell digital copies of your art, you’re essentially selling a ZIP file with your artwork inside. The buyer can then print the art themselves or use it for other purposes. You can decide whether the person has the right to use the product for commercial use or personal use only.

There are many platforms where you can sell digital downloads:

Etsy
Creative Fabrica
Creative Market
Artstation

How much can you make selling digital downloads of your AI art? YouTuber and artist Let’s Draw with BeeJayDeL made more than $100,000 in one year from his digital downloads.

Sell Prints of Your Art

If you prefer to offer physical products, you can sell prints of your AI art. You have a few different options here:

You can sell your prints on a marketplace like Etsy
You can open your own shop on Shopify and sell your items – Check here my guide on how to open a shop
You can sell your prints through platforms like Society6 or Redbubble

With sites like Society6, you only get paid a percentage of each sale. However, they do have a huge customer base, so it’s not difficult to get sales. Plus, they handle all of the shipping, processing and customer service.

If you go the Etsy or Shopify route, you’ll need to be prepared to print and ship each item you sell.

Create and Sell Print-on-Demand Products

Print-on-demand (POD) products are another great way to make money with your AI art, and it’s mostly passive income.

POD providers will take your art and print it on physical products, like:

T-shirts
Posters
Notebooks
Home decor
Mugs

The possibilities are endless.

All you have to do is create the art and prepare the product graphics (click-and-drag your design into their builder tool). Once you’ve created your product, the only thing left to do is make sales.

POD providers will take care of the order processing and shipping.

Some of the top POD providers are:

Printify
Printful
Gelato
Teelaunch
SPOD

Whichever platform you choose, make sure that you:

Understand the fees
Set your price accordingly to ensure healthy profit margins

The biggest challenge will be marketing your products. Make sure that you have a solid plan to build your brand and awareness. You can also sell your POD products on platforms like Etsy, which already have a built-in audience.

Offer Commissions

Want to know how to make money with AI art in a more lucrative way? Start offering commissions.

Buyers come to you and tell you what they want. You bring their ideas and visions to life with your AI art. It’s as simple and complicated as that.

If you’re going to offer commissions, make sure that you:

Have a solid portfolio of work to show potential clients
Focus on networking to build connections and spread the word about your services
Are active on social media to build an audience

With commissions, you can charge a much higher rate because you’re creating one-of-a-kind pieces that are exclusive to the client.

Offer AI Art Subscriptions

Want to know how to make money with AI art consistently? Offer subscriptions. You should try to offer a subscription to a bundle of clipart that keeps updating every month.

Why?

Even if it’s just $5 per month, you can have 1,000 people paying you monthly and enjoy steady, monthly recurring revenue.

You can find a few marketplaces (more below) that offer this option, or you can:

Create a WordPress site
Install MemberSpace or MemberPress
Start selling

Creating a YouTube Channel About Creating and Selling AI Art

YouTube is such a goldmine for everything. People go to the platform for everything from DIY crafts to learning how to create AI art. Luckily, once you make a YouTube (here are a few cool names for a YouTube channel), you’ll find that a lot of people don’t want to put in the hard work and effort to make their own AI art.

Instead, they’ll buy it from you.

A YouTube channel on how to create and sell your art is another revenue driver that will work well for you. I recommend doing this no matter what other option you follow on this list because you can make some extra money off the ad revenue, too.

Sell Clipart on Design Marketplaces

Clipart makes a lot of money, and it’s something that graphic and web designers need. You can make these small graphics around themes, such as:

Coffee shop clipart
Business clipart
Etc.

And you’ll find plenty of great places to begin selling your creations, too. Here are a few places:

Etsy

Creating an Etsy shop is something that I recommend everyone do because you’ll connect with buyers from around the world who want your product. I even have an entire guide on starting an Etsy shop.

And from a brief search, you’ll find:

Quirky Animal clipart for $2.80 and 20+ people have this item in their cart and 49 have reviewed it!
Unlimited clipart bundle for $162.50 that over 16 people have reviewed.

Creative Fabrica

You can open your own store on Creative Fabrica, where you make 50% – 75% of every sale, and you can create bundles. Store owners benefit from the platform’s subscription plan, which allows them to get paid when subscribers download their content.

Since Creative Fabrica is all about fonts and graphics, it’s a hyper-relevant and profitable marketplace.

You will need to:

Create a free account
Apply to open a store

You’ll need to supply a portfolio of designs for people to browse, and your store may not be approved. If you’re not serious about your AI art or don’t have a professional portfolio for the site to approve, you may want to try some of the other marketplaces on the list.

Artsi AI

Artsi is an AI marketplace, and all of the artwork is less than $50. You’ll earn 95% of the revenue from sales, which is a steal because the platform handles much of the promotion work for you.

You’ll find people selling items on the marketplace for $5 – $50.

Affiliates can also promote your art, expanding your reach and helping you drive even more online sales.

Bundles of clipart sell for a lot more money, but there’s a major upfront time investment to make large collections of clipart.

Start Making Money with AI Art Today

AI art can make you a lot of money. You can find your niche and begin offering your own art like many others have been doing. You’ll find plenty of options that appeal to consumers of all ages.

And once you make your first dollar, you’ll be addicted to finding new, exciting ways to sell your art.

You can use the blueprint I provided above to begin making a name for yourself and land your first AI art sale.

How To Make Money with AI Art