Artists Need Multiple Income Streams

Congratulations! You’ve had a great year, artistically speaking. Your work is well received, the grants are coming your way and presenters are responsive. You’ve worked long & hard for your success, but how confident are you that your momentum can continue. Artists need multiple income streams for lots of reasons. Three favorites of mine include: stabilizing your income between exhibitions or performances, freeing up time to make more art or seek inspiration, and partaking of the magic of passive income streams. These income streams can be from any combination of time for money arrangements (i.e. day jobs), getting paid for your art work, and investment (i.e. passive) income.

While you’ve had a great run so far; funders and presenters are pulling back and your confidence in your momentum is waning a bit. Having multiple streams of income from the sources listed above will help tide you over the lulls between your successes.

You might already be doing some type of day job or freelance work that contributes to your success. Exchanging time for money, even doing something benignly interesting, can cut into your creative output. If you’re in between batches of work, taking a class, indulging in a bit of wandering, or simply sitting watching people go by is what is needed to launch you into your next batch of work. But the benign demands of your moderately interesting (though mentally intrusive) day job interfere with your need to take the class, the hike, or the sit-and-look to launch your next batch of work to the next level.

After you’ve taken the time to set them up, passive income streams are truly amazing. Consider the possibility of generating passive income streams by creating an online business. You’re already skilled at creating things and have the entrepreneurial zeal to market & sell your work. Consider creating passive income streams to tide you over the slack times and to perhaps fund even more art. More sophisticated use of the internet can help you do just that.

Possible passive income (or residual income) streams might include creating and publishing detailed content about your work. Get involved in a effective, well supported network marketing or multi level marketing systems. The more successful network marketing organizations will be candid with you that a fair amount of hard work is required in the beginning to set up your business. But once you get your business up and running using the marketing skills you already, augmented by the powerful online marketing skills you can learn, your business can continue to be profitable. This can be done spending as much time and headspace available to you in any given week to build your business and lead your team. This work can also be done from anywhere in the world with a laptop, high speed access, and a cell phone.

All you artists and fellow creatives out there, consider how your art and creative process would benefit if you had multiple income streams to tide you over between gigs. So the time between gigs can be your most creatively productive.