Wanna Make Money Online With Your AI Art? Try Doing This.
Imagine making money with art without actually having to be an artist!

Imagine making money with art without actually having to be an artist! Introducing the quirky and surprisingly profitable world of AI art! This is something I have been nerding out over recently and the reason for this is because I met people in real life. I saw it with my own eyes that they were making really good money and they didn’t have good artistic skills and they were making things like stickers, canvases, and prints that you put up on your wall. So I decided to dive into the world of print-on-demand and AI art.
So, how do you make money online with AI art? First of all, what exactly is AI art? Without getting too nerdy, you’re basically going to be using artificial intelligence, machine learning, and neural networks to generate or assist in generating visual artwork. Whether you’re an artist right now or you’re someone who’s not good at art, but want to make extra money by doing print-on-demand, this might be a great opportunity for you.
I’ve got a feeling that in the next few years this is going to turn into one of those massive things like Amazon FBA or Shopify, so it’s probably smart to get in on the ground floor because there’s going to be some technology that’s popping up in the next few years that’s going to make this even better, and I’m going to get into that here in a few minutes, but there was recently a piece of AI artwork that sold for $430,000 and although that is not going to be the most common way to make money, this was at a big art exhibit in New York. It does show the potential and the possibility of AI artwork, so let’s talk about how to make money online with AI art. This is going to be a quick crash course or step-by-step guide.

Acquire AI Art Creation Tools
The most common, most popular, and arguably best one right now is going to be Mid Journey and if you didn’t know already, MidJourney basically transforms your prompts into unique artwork. There’s other AI art platforms out there, most of them you can try for free, sometimes completely free, or sometimes there’s a free trial, but Mid Journey is the most established one.
Create Unique Artwork
I’m just going to assume that you’re using MidJourney and the best way to do this is to heavily experiment with different prompts. Prompting is something you could make an entire video or probably even entire channel about and there’s lots of content out there when it comes to prompting, but that is going to be the key and the more specific your prompts are the more awesome the images that it creates. Some really good niches to get into right now would be canvases, stickers, posters to put up on your wall, and then of course, you could also do the classic clothes designs, such as making something for a t-shirt.

Set Up An Online Storefront
This is probably the most important step when it comes to actually making money. A great place to sell this, especially if you’re a beginner, is going to be an online platform like Etsy and this will allow you to showcase and sell your prints to a wide audience. You can also use Shopify, but in that case, you’re going to have to do a lot more of your own marketing.
Use a Print- On-Demand Service
A great one that I’ve been experimenting with and I’ve been using is Printful. What this is going to do for you is whenever somebody orders your piece of AI artwork, let’s say you’re making a t-shirt for instance, they will actually print it and ship it to the person automatically. So by doing this they basically just took care of like 80% of the work for you.

Promote Your Art
What I recommend you do next is to utilize social media in order to promote it, things like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or Tik Tok are going to be great for this. For instance, you could record a video of how you made this piece of artwork with a step-by-step guide of the prompts that you used then under that video there might be a small percentage of people who want to buy that piece of artwork as a shirt design, or as a print, or as a sticker.
Now one thing I want to mention here is make sure you understand how branding works because you want to have a recognizable brand across all social media platforms and this is one of the most important steps. There’s literally entire channels dedicated to showing you how this works, but just know that marketing and branding are very important when it comes to getting your stuff out there and there are many creative ways of doing this.
For instance, one man made a single digital NFT every single day for over 5,000 days and then he made a compilation of all those NFTs and sold it for $69 million. By the way, like I said earlier there’s going to be a ton of opportunities coming down the line that don’t exist right now but they are inevitable and I’m going to give a few examples.
First of all, AI is going to be used not only to create just simple pictures, but it’s going to be used to create video games, movies, animes, etc. The video game part of me is particularly interested, and the reason for that is because I happen to know that video games are getting integrated with the blockchain as well as web 3 and in the near future, I predict in the next 2 to 3 years, people are going to start getting paid big money to make either weapons within video games or even entire levels.

So there might be kind of like a master video game that you play and then within that video game which would likely be within the Metaverse, there are going to be other mini games that you can purchase and these are going to be user-generated content. These are going to be created by people who play the game and AI is going to make this easier than ever.
Now anyone who’s played video games a lot is probably familiar with modded games so you might be playing Call of Duty or Halo but you’re playing a modded version of it where you can jump really high or everyone can only use knives, but they have infinite throwing knives, or something along those lines and in my opinion, this is going to be more and more common within video games that are going to be played in the Metaverse and even just normal ones as well, because a lot of the time, these modded games are more fun than the normal game itself and these companies are going to start incentivizing people to create the funnest games. Very similar to what Amazon did to incentivize people to create really good products and meet the demand of the market, that same thing is going to happen to the video game industry.

Another massive use case for AI generated artwork is going to be 3D printing. For instance, let’s say that you’re into cosplay, you like dressing up as your favorite Final Fantasy character, like maybe Cloud from Final Fantasy 7 or Yauna from Final Fantasy 10. What if you could design one of Cloud or Yauna’s weapons and one of their outfits in something very similar to Mid journey and then order it online so you didn’t have to go through that entire process of making the entire outfit yourself. You could basically just have mid Journey create a 3D sword or a 3D outfit and then you order that online.
They make it, they 3D print it, and they ship it to you. I can almost guarantee that this is going to happen in the near future and if you’re on top of this AI artwork trend, you are going to be able to capitalize on this when it inevitably happens. And it’s not just cosplay stuff, people are probably going to want to make their own custom clothes, as well. Imagine if you could just take your own measurements, input them into a system, and then design your own shirts, your own shorts, and your own shoes. That is very likely going to be happening in the near future and this is going to be the intersection of AI artwork print-on-demand and 3D printing.

Attend Online Marketplaces and Art Fairs (optional)
This is just a good way to kind of get your name out there, meet other people that are doing the same thing, and just keep your finger on the pulse of what is working right now. Chances are, you will meet other successful artists who are doing something that’s working for them and you can kind of integrate whatever your style is into whatever strategy they’re using.
There’s a few websites like Artsy, Saatchi art, or Super Rare that offer opportunities to showcase and sell your AI art. You could also use websites like Fiverr and offer specific services like taking someone’s portrait picture, turning it into a really good piece of AI art, and then you can upsell them to put it on a t-shirt or a coffee mug, or something along those lines, and if you don’t want to do this for yourself, you could do it for a friend of yours as a gag gift or a birthday present.
Collaborate and License (optional)
Collaborate and license so you can explore partnerships with brands, designers, or businesses that are interested in using your AI art. So this could be many things, like I mentioned before, I think the video game industry is going to be huge for this, I mean just think about how much money people spend on Minecraft servers.
For instance, someone creates a really cool Minecraft server and people will spend a ton of money just to have access to it. There are people making hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars a month with their Minecraft servers, so this is inevitably going to happen with just about every major video game out there or you can go more of the classical direction and simply just license your art, sell it for $250 to $1,000 a pop, for instance.
Let’s say somebody wants to use your artwork in a commercial, you’d probably sell it to them for maybe $1,000. Another example of this is let’s say you specialize in making artwork for EDM Artists and they basically just put it in their album artwork and you could develop a brand for being someone who’s really good at making that kind of art.
Pros:
- Endless creativity
- Global reach
- Cost effective
- Convenient
- Have great exposure
Cons:
- Authenticity concerns
- Market saturation
- Technical barriers
- Intellectual property issues
- Limited emotional connection
I honestly feel like AI art is going to be very similar to EDM music. So I’m personally a pretty big fan of EDM music and the reason for that is because I think it really lowered the barrier to making music. You no longer have to spend 10 years becoming good at playing the guitar. To make a song, you just have to learn how to use a soundboard and you can add guitar, piano, flute, harmonica, saxophone, or whatever you want.
So one person can make the same type of song that in the past would require an entire band. This has decreased the barrier to entry for making music and the result of that is there’s a lot of terrible music out there. There’s a lot of absolutely terrible EDM music and I think that’s one of the main reasons why it gets such a bad rap, but some of the best EDM Artists are incredibly good and EDM has influenced almost every industry out there, just about everyone, even country music artists, are using soundboards now, so I do think it’s smart to just embrace AI artwork, because it’s not going to stop and you can use it to make your art even better.
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