WFH + No traffic = More time and earn $$$ as passive income
My personal experience how to use time wisely during WFH (work from home)
November 2021, being my 2nd year working remotely as a product designer. A few months before the pandemic, I started my job with my current company as a remote designer, and unfortunately, after getting my work permit in March, I can’t fly to Malaysia because of lockdown, and until now, I stayed here in Indonesia and working in my own office (my bedroom).
In some ways, this pandemic has made time feel unstable, sometimes I was able to work early also can work overtime, more than what I should be. But one side to be grateful for from WFH is that I’m free from traffic jams. As a worker who works in Jakarta, the trip to the office, especially for me who lives in Bekasi, can take about 2–3 hours per day, a time that feels like a lot of time just for traveling to the office. For this reason, WFH is a special privilege for me, 3 hours of travel can be allocated for other more useful things, for example, exercise and sport, learning new things, playing guitar, playing with pets, and 1 thing that I learn and do during the WFH, create design and sell it to marketplaces.
At first, I didn’t know anything about this freelance or marketplaces idea, but I remember that day my old friend told me that he earned $100 from selling icons on Iconfinder. So I’m interested in learning it and right in the WFH period, I did a lot of exploration, making and also trying to upload it on several sites, and hopefully, I can continue to learn my design skills and also of course get passive income from selling these designs. In addition, currently in Indonesia, I saw many Youtubers who often share their daily lives and also the things they do, especially related to the freelance world. I learned a lot from Yoko Bomb, Rio Purba, and Sangdes design to start as a designer contributor from microstock sites. And here, I will try to share my experience and design that I made and the opportunities that exist from the website that I use, not to show off, but hopefully, it can also be an inspiration for those who read this.
Icon Design
As I said above, after hearing the story from my friend, I tried to learn how to make an icon until finally can prepare it to sell the icon to microstock. Creating designs and visuals is not something new to me, but especially for making icon designs, I need to learn a lot first, fortunately, I can learn it through Iconutopia and download the e-book icon-design-guide as my fundamental guide to learn how to make icons I highly recommend those of you who want to learn to create an icon to download the Iconutopa e-book.
After creating the icons, there are several websites that I use to sell them, each with a different character. The first is Iconfinder and Iconscout, where users can create and sell icons of any shape and color according to the user’s style, the approval time for each website is different, about 1–7 days until your icon can be published. The second is TNP, users can upload icons to TNP but only black icons are received and approved for TNP may take the longest among the others, about 3–6 months, but based on my experience, if your icon is already published, you can get very large earnings. Tips, before uploading, you should read the contributor guideline page from each website to find out the criteria and approval from the website.
Template Design
Social media is growing rapidly nowadays with all kinds of uses and users, this is also an opportunity as a freelance designer. The result of my observations, in several micro stocks such as Etsy, Creative Market, and also Design Bundles sell various types of design templates, from social media templates, cv templates, resume templates, and other templates. Here I also create several design templates, especially for social media templates.
What’s interesting is that the presence of Canva as an online editor tool can be used to support design templates, I’m sure there are many people out there who want to create designs, but don’t have design tools like Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator and Canva can help them! This makes the combination of design templates using Canva can be more powerful, and fyi, the price for the template can reach $5-$20 per template package. Interesting right?
T-shirt Design
From TikTok I learn of this opportunity, often called Print on Demand, whereas a designer, his job is to upload SVG/PNG to Print on Demand websites, and the website will automatically insert our designs into shirts, pants, jackets, hats, glasses and some other stuff. Here I would recommend you to use these sites, Teepublic, Redbubble, and Teespring.
For earnings? I honestly haven’t gotten it yet, because I am still a newbie, but from my research on creators who use it first, it looks very profitable with can earn $10 per shirt.
That’s my sharing what I’m currently trying to do during the pandemic. And in the process, the earnings that I get from selling designs are arguably not too big, but I’ve learned to try to be consistent and patient, and I hope to get opportunities that come to get results. Until now my total income from all the websites that I use is about $300 and hopefully will continue to grow. And this is a promising source of passive income if done consistently.
So, how to start? Bit tips from me.
1. Choose a design that you want to create
2. Learn fundamentals of how to create the design
3. Choose the site that you want to upload, read the instruction and contributor guidelines and start uploading your artwork
4. Do it consistently
Good luck to you that want to try it! Just reach me if you need more tips for it!
Visit my store to see all my artworks
Good luck!
