How to Make Money with AI art
Introduction
I’m gonna try to sell AI art patterns for 30 days. I’ll be going over the whole process from generating to uploading to advertising. With people reportedly making hundreds of thousands of dollars, let’s see how much money I can make!
The Challenge of Selling AI Art Patterns for 30 Days
The first step is to pick an AI art generator. I’ll be specifically choosing Mid-Journey for its features. Let’s generate a watercolor eggplant straight from the farm.
Generating AI Patterns
Now, the goal is not to generate just any art; it’s to generate patterns, art that can be seamlessly repeated. People use them to create scrapbooks, cards, notebook covers, packaging, and print-on-demand products like phone cases, pillows, and mugs. The list goes on and on, which makes patterns a potentially great product to sell. There seems to be a big need for them.
Creating a Watercolor Eggplant Pattern
This AI eggplant art — does it seamlessly repeat?
So, let’s make one that does. To do so with Mid-Journey, I simply need to add the command “ — tile” to the end of my prompt. This will make the art seamlessly repeat and generate an AI pattern. We got eggplants for days!
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Selling on Etsy
The plan is to sell on Etsy. It is an online marketplace that focuses on arts and crafts and is a popular place to shop patterns or what they also call digital paper. To determine what patterns I should sell, I’m going to use Etsy’s search suggestions and E-Rank, a free Etsy keyword research tool, to find popular niches that don’t have too much competition. Some I’ve stumbled upon include certain types of flowers, materials, and food. I wasn’t playing with those eggplants!
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Why Choose Etsy for Selling Patterns
On Etsy, patterns are typically sold as a 300 DPI image that measures 3600 by 3600 pixels in resolution. There’s a problem: Mid-Journey can’t export AI patterns in those measurements. Its maximum output is 72 DPI and 1024 by 1024 pixels.
That’s not going to cut it, so I’m going to need to upscale.
Preparing Patterns for Sale
There are many free AI image upscalers out there, but I’ll be using a paid one called Gigapixel AI. It can convert images to 300 DPI and upscale them up to six times the original resolution. So, instead of upscaling to the standard 3600, I’m going 6144 pixels to hook my customers up with that premium product.
Upscaling Patterns with Gigapixel AI
Patterns on Etsy are usually sold in packs, so I’m gonna sell mine in packs of eight. With all my AI patterns generated and upscaled, I’m now ready to create a listing on Etsy.
Creating an Etsy Listing
There are five essential elements of a digital product listing that I need to complete before publishing. The first is to upload my AI patterns for my buyers to download. But Etsy only lets you add up to five digital files. Five digital files, eight patterns — the math doesn’t add up. How am I going to do this?
Uploading AI Patterns to Google Drive
What I’m going to do is upload all my AI patterns into a folder on Google Drive. Then, I’m going to grab the link to it and place it in the document. I’ll include some branding, my thanks, and a reminder to leave a 5-star review. I’m going to export the document as a PDF and then upload it to Etsy. And there you have it, problem solved!
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Designing Thumbnails and Previews with Photoshop
Next up, the photos. Using Photoshop, I’ve designed two templates to use: one for the thumbnail, which displays a title and a quick preview of all the listing’s patterns, and one that gives a full preview of four patterns. With eight patterns per pack, I’ll need to prepare two of these per listing.
Pricing Strategies Using E-Rank’s Profit Calculator
Third on the list is pricing. To be real, patterns on Etsy don’t sell for much. They average around one to five dollars per pack. On a positive note, other than the initial time and money it takes to generate patterns and Etsy’s fees, there aren’t really any other costs. The profit margin is 70 to 90 percent. It’s hot!
🥵 I’m gonna use E-Rank’s profit calculator to determine my exact pricing, bearing in mind Etsy’s fees and a 50% discount that I’m gonna apply to all my listings. My final sale price will be $2.49.
Optimizing Etsy Listings
The last two elements are the title and the tags. I’m gonna fill both with popular keywords related to digital paper and my AI patterns niche. A few good ways to come up with keywords are by looking at similar listings, Etsy search suggestions, E-Rank, and AI.
Using Keywords for Titles and Tags
Using ChatGPT, I can easily generate a bunch of different keywords to use. Note that ChatGPT isn’t perfect, so you’re going to need to know how to use it properly. In the description, I’ve put a free ebook that you can download that covers the best practices when using AI for SEO and keyword research. For example, one of them is to be ready to fact-check your SEO findings. Not every keyword ChatGPT gives will be good, so you may want to double-check them with another keyword research tool like E-Rank.
ChatGPT for Keyword Generation
The ebook also includes tips on using AI for marketing in general, a list of the most popular AI tools right now, as well as a great overview of how these AI tools are being used in marketing today. It’s really interesting stuff that I recommend you download and check out. This free resource is provided by HubSpot, which is today’s video sponsor. A big thanks to them for hooking us up!
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Increasing Listings and Sales Efforts
The listing is live!
My eggplants are out and about. Now to create a bunch more listings, and I mean a lot more. Let’s see how many AI patterns I can sell in the next 30 days.
Creating Over 100 New Listings
So, for the past week, I’ve been grinding. I’ve created over 100 new listings and over 800 individual AI patterns in total. All I see now are just patterns everywhere!
To help with creating prompts, I’ve been using the awesome Mid-Journey command “/describe.” Let’s say I came across this pattern of oranges and wanted a prompt that could generate something similar to it. I can write “/describe” to Mid-Journey and then upload a file of that pattern. Mid-Journey will then analyze that pattern and spit out four different prompts that I can use to generate something like it. It’s magical and has saved me a lot of time and guesswork. 🍊✨
Advertising and Marketing
Other than that, no sales so far. Hopefully, all these new listings will bring in some soon. Just recently, it’s a good sign — wait, not a sale. It’s day 15, halfway into the challenge, and I still got nothing. With Etsy, it does take some time for new listings to percolate into the search and algorithm, but I got a challenge to complete. It’s time to crank things up and turn on Etsy ads.
Turning on Etsy Ads
I’m going to spend one dollar a day and hope for the best. The last time I turned on Etsy ads when I tried selling AI art prints for 30 days, it landed me sales real quick. So, I hope I get the same luck this time around. Fingers crossed!
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Challenges with No Sales Despite Ads
Unfortunately, luck wasn’t on my side. By day 23, I still had no sales. Ads weren’t helping, or at least they weren’t helping fast enough. Things weren’t looking good. I’m wondering, do my patterns look bad?
Well, my thumbnail is okay, my titles, tags, prices. I guess I could speculate an infinite number of reasons.
Mid-Challenge Reflections
My best guess is that there’s just a lot of competition out there that’s limiting the exposure and value of my listings. My account has no reviews either, which doesn’t help. If I did have more time, I think this is what I’d do: I’d consider evolving the business model and actually using these AI patterns to make and sell my own print-on-demand products like mugs. It’s a natural step forward that’s pretty easy to do and could not only allow me more sales but more profit per sale.
Considering a Pivot to Print-on-Demand Products
Maybe I’ll see you on day three!
We’ve made it to the end of the challenge. Before I reveal to you if it was an utter failure or if a miracle happened in the last week, here are my honest thoughts.
Final Results and Thoughts
Selling AI patterns is not as easy as it seems.
