Web Design Tutorials | Design Inspiration | Create A Website
Being a web designer doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to make money just via web design. There are plenty of ways a Web Designer can make money these days. Myself and Andy have been working hard finding out ways web designers can make money. We have got 14 different ways web designers can make money online. If you can think of any more, then please feel free to drop in a comment. (Icon By Dapino Colada)
Blog About Web Design (such as WebDesignDev)
Many web designers have their own blogs. Having your own web design blog can benefit a designer in many different ways. You can earn money from ads, if you have great content that brings in alot of traffic, you can sell other peoples products, and also you can convert some of your traffic into clients by promoting your web design services.
Design Contests
99 Designs connects clients that need design work, to designers. You can participate in design contests such as logo designs, and earn some serious money. http://99designs.com
Design Stock Images (123RF)(istockphoto) (graphicriver)
As a web designer, you can use your funky design skills to design vectors to sell stock images on 123RF, istockphoto, and also you can design textures, templates, graphics and much more and sell them on graphic river.
Write Tutorials For Photoshop Websites
There are loads of web design tutorial sites online, such as PsdTuts. They pay greatly for brilliant tutorials. PsdTuts pay $150 per tutorial they accept, so what are you waiting for, get writing!
Freelance Switch & Smashing Magazine’s Job Board
People always need design work doing. There are loads of people who post work on job boards such as FreeLance Switch or Smashing Magazine. This can be a great way to pick up work.
Bring Offline Businesses Online
This can be an awesome way to earn alot of cash. Web Designers can get in contact with offline businesses, and offer them a fee to bring their business online. Its a great way for web designers to earn more money, and also it will help the business out and gain exposure within search engines.
Create And Promote Your Online Portfolio
Creating an online portfolio of your work generates buzz and can rank you higher for certain keywords in search engines. Blogs can publish your work, which will send traffic to your portfolio. People who like your work will hire you.
Elance
This is the mother of all online places to find work. Looking at elance.com, it looks as if there are around 1,000 new jobs posted every day for web designers to feast upon. Work ranges from HTML, CSS down to SEO and flash. I would seriously recommend checking out elance.com to make some money.
Offer Training / Write How-To’s
There are many websites such as tutor.com, ehow.com and videojug.com that pay you to make how-to videos / articles, and tutor people about a certain subject, such as web design in our case.
Become An Expert In A Niche
A web design can brand themselves as a general web designer, but if you market yourself to a certain niche then you will receive alot more clients. An example of this would be you could be a general web designer, but you could have a few business cards in the golfing niche that say we specialize in web design for golfing, and you can repeat this for many different niches.
Participate On Web Marketplaces
Web Marketplaces such as sitepoint and digitalpoint forums can earn you alot of money. It can spread your name out there, and get you alot of work. If you participate in discussions and show off your design skills, you will find yourself with lots of design work.
Affiliate Marketing
This can make you alot of money in the long run. An example of affiliate marketing would be, if you have just finished designing a website for a client, you could recommend or even offer to help them setup hosting to host the website. If they agree then you can sign them up to web hosting companies using your affiliate link. Such as DreamHost and CrucialWebHost. Then you would receive a certain % of what the client is paying each month for referring them to that web host.
Design Themes For ThemeForest
With ThemeForest, you can design themes for popular content managment systems such as wordpress and joomla, and ThemeForest will sell your theme and give you a commission. Great huh!
Offer The “All In One” Package
Clients can be lazy, and sometimes they look for web designers that offer the “All In One” package. This means that you do the web design, coding / programming and host their website for them / setup their web hosting. If you cant program, then you can always outsource or hire a programmer to complete the work.
I can concur with all of your suggestions…. I believe the “All in One” package is massively beneficial to new businesses. Hence why I provided this for a while now….
Ayo Adigun’s last blog post..article of the day 10 June
Interesting article that serves as a great reference to all web designers
Thanks!
Johnson Koh’s last blog post..Interview – Elena Savitskaya
I’ve been thinking of creating templates for theme forest but I a google search had a lot of results saying that there was no design guidelines and purely down to the reviewers taste. A lot of time for no reward in some cases
The other tips are great.
Great article! I’m curious, however, about your preference with elance vs. all the other freelance sites. Any particular reason or positive experience?
Rafael J. Hernandez’s last blog post..Why I forgave the Economy
Great article.
I will sign up at some of the websites. Thx for the great list!
hmm. i going to have a look on ThemeForest. looks promising.
Ditto on the great content. The “all-in-one” is a great way to go because you can build in a long-term relationship (and source of income). Probably most beneficial too in WOM advertising.
I tried IStockphoto but the standard is really high. You need something a bit better than photos of your cat
I agree, but there are many other stock networks out there with lower standards.
I like this article, except for the design contest advice. Design contests are a scam to designers. Sure, a chosen person will win a couple hundred dollars, but what about the hundred others that have now wasted all that time and energy on speculative work. The difference between an amateur and a professional is: professionals don’t work for free.
I agree with all of the above, but the design contest part. Don’t get me started on sec work.
aahaha i will join at 99 designs lewls
goog tip man carry on
An informative article. Thanks for sharing this info post.
WOW!! I truly can NOT believe that you would include 99Designs at #2 on your list (or at all, for that matter!!). This company is one of MANY holding illegal lotteries across state lines with no fair (or set) rules, giving preferential treatment to their favored designers, violating labor laws, copyright laws, and taking away artists’/creators’ rights. This growing trend has severely and negatively impacted our nations’ economy, and these places need to be shut down before they put our country into another Great Depression. Again, this company is in clear violation of many state and federal laws, and they need to be shut down immediately, not promoted! FOR SHAME, SIR!!
Just because they have not yet been shut down does NOT mean that what they are doing is legal. WOW – you are SO ignorant!! Without a proper judging panel, proper contest rules, nor proper “alternate means of entry”, which EVERY real contest must have in order to even be LEGAL in this country, these “contests” are not really contests at all, merely underhanded attempts to rip off naive artists.
Although 99Designs is an Australian-based company, they are hosted right here in the US, and they are also conducting business right here in the US, therefore they MUST comply with US laws. Allow me to elaborate on this, and also to educate you in some basics of copyright law in the USA…
What 99Designs is doing is not only illegal in the USA, it is highly unethical as well. First of all, they state that, “After the prize is paid in full, the ownership lies with the contest holder which is royalty-free and irrevocable.”, which is absolutely LUDICROUS!!! There are ONLY nine categories (as enumerated clearly in copyright law) by which works can even be considered eligible to be work-for-hire. These “contests” (and again, I say this loosely, since they do not have a proper judging panel, proper contest rules, nor proper “alternate means of entry”, which EVERY real contest must have in order to even be LEGAL in this country) fall into NONE of these nine categories, so what this company is REALLY doing here is ripping off young designers fresh out of school who are too green to know their rights. They are simply skirting both labor and copyright laws, and attempting to steal intellectual property from others.
Slavery was outlawed in this country long ago. Let me elaborate… even IF these people were on-site employees of 99Designs, 99Designs would not get any rights to their works if they were not at least paying them the federally established minimum hourly wage, right? RIGHT. So why on earth, when these artists are NOT employees of 99Designs, and they are NOT being fairly paid, would 99Designs possibly think for a moment that they could own (or transfer the right to own) these artists’ works?
If someone is not your employee, and they perform work off-site, on their own equipment, on their own software, paying for their own electricity, receiving no benefits of any kind whatsoever from your company, and said work results in the creation of intellectual properties, then for those properties to even be ELIGIBLE to be considered work-for-hire they MUST fall into one of the following NINE (and ONLY nine) categories, as enumerated clearly in copyright law.
1) A contribution to a collective work (such as a magazine, newspaper, encyclopedia, or anthology).
2) A contribution used as part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work.
3) A supplementary work, which includes pictorial illustrations, maps, and charts, done to supplement a work done by another author.
4) A compilation (new arrangement of pre-existing works).
5) A translation.
6) An atlas.
7) A test.
Answer material for a test.
9) An instructional text (defined as a literary, pictorial, or graphic work prepared for publication and with the purpose of use in systematic instructional activities).
Works that fall outside of these nine categories (like LOGO DESIGNS!!) are CLEARLY ineligible to be work for hire, even with a signed contract. Just because 99Designs has tricked some artists into signing away their rights doesn’t mean that it’s legal to do so, or that their contracts are binding. 99Designs needs to realize that you can not bend and interpret the law to suit your needs. Law is law, and any wrongdoing WILL catch up with you eventually. (think Napster, The Pirate Bay, Jack Kevorkian, etc…)
A contract by very definition MUST be inure to the benefit of BOTH parties. Otherwise, by law, it MUST be construed as a waiver.
Also, if you will read through the blog postings for 99Designs, which can be accessed right from their website, many artists who have fallen for their scam never even receive the measly well-under-market-value pittance amounts that they were promised after the close of one of these “contests”. I have read postings from several artists who have already been waiting well over six months to be paid for their works. This is completely unacceptable, not to mention illegal.
ARTISTS!!! DO NOT EVER SIGN WORK FOR HIRE AGREEMENTS!! WE HAVE FOUGHT LONG AND HARD FOR THE RIGHTS THAT WE HAVE!! DO NOT LET THESE TRICKSTERS DECEIVE YOU!! YOUR WORK HAS WORTH!! IF YOU HAVE BEEN RIPPED OFF OR TRICKED, JOIN A UNION THAT WILL FIGHT FOR YOUR LEGAL RIGHTS, THEN FILE A GRIEVANCE!! SEEK BACK DAMAGES FOR THE USAGE OF WORK THAT IS RIGHTFULLY YOURS!!! JOIN THE GRAPHIC ARTISTS GUILD TODAY!! (HTTP://WWW.GAG.ORG)
Absolutely Infuriated with People’s Ignorance in this Field,
Peter McClean | Multi-Media Artist
http://www.petermcclean.com
On Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/PeterMcCleanMMA
On LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/petermcclean
On Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/petermcclean
My Facebook Fan Page: http://www.artist.to/PeterMcClean
On MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/petermcclean
Also, ALL artists and designers should follow:
http://www.twitter.com/nospec
http://www.twitter.com/SpecWatch
(stay informed!) =]
I have to agree, I can’t see why 99 Designs is listed, the other ideas are all great, and while 99 Designs can make you a bit of extra money, most of the time it is just a time and effort waster.
I’m not sure why you would want to be an affiliate marketer for web hosting when you can be a web hosting reseller with far greater control and better financial return.
I am quite skeptical about elance/peopleperhour . I mean how could I compete with people from India/Pakistan offering pretty much the same services as I do for half the price I would quote?
You need to stand out from the crowd when you send private messages to potential customers. You are much better equipped to do this than someone from India or Pakistan : )
I’m doing an article on ” Top Ten Income Opportunities Ranking Factors” and I must admit that this beautiful piece has greatly inspired me. You have a great article full of hot, precious and very important info. Please keep on churning out wonderful stuff!
Designing themes of theme forest is a great additional income source for website designers! Thanks for the other tips and hints, I will definately be checking them out.
Very informative article, i have been advertising my portfolio on social marketing sites including facebook and it has helped me get more business, thanks for writing this.
I honestly found your article very informative and there are several methods you mentioned for making money that I had not looked into.
Niche business cards are a fantastic idea!
Really nice artilce, I also do webdesigning work and I like your article going to try all this stuff soon….
By the way I want to share it on twitter but unable to find any share it button
Thanks Ayush. The tweet button is at the top of the page.
I’m not sure why you would want to be an affiliate marketer for web hosting when you can be a web hosting reseller with far greater control and better financial return.
Hi, I think Odesk is the best solution for money making opportunity if it dose not work then we can make excellent website and earn money by selling product and traffic. We can place Google ads, infolinks ads and etc ads to our website to earn extra income.