The Secrets to Automating Your Passive Income with AI in 2024

Automating Your Passive Income with AI

Automating Your Passive Income, in less than one year of being open for business, this shop has made over six figures selling AI digital download art, not revenue profit. A similar side hustle was discussed at the beginning of last year, and since then, a lot has changed.

Now, a year later, brand new versions of Mid Journey have come out, one just a couple of days ago, and the fact that still hardly anyone has tapped into this business model makes the new year the perfect time to go over exactly how to use these AI tools to make some beautiful digital art and sell it online for some passive income, which is the essence of Automating Your Passive Income.

The best part is you can start this business from anywhere in the world with just $10, allowing you to begin Automating Your Passive Income with ease.

It works by taking a text prompt, basically just a sentence describing what the image should look like, and it’ll take that and convert it into a usable, sellable piece of artwork completely from scratch.

We’ll modify our prompts to get the highest quality images possible.

Once our image is ready, we can package it up into a nice-looking listing and post it for sale online and wait for the sales to come in.

Since AI does all the heavy lifting, this is one of the most efficient side hustles you could start for automating your passive income.

We strongly recommend that you check out our guide on how to take advantage of AI in today’s passive income economy.

Researching Profitable AI-Generated Artwork

Before we go just making a bunch of artwork that doesn’t sell, let’s quickly look at what artwork does sell and how much money we can make with this business model.

This first shop called Antique White Art is selling these aesthetically pleasing painting-style digital downloads.

Most of them are a rustic, moody, vintage style with some sort of monotone colors, and honestly, nothing too crazy.

Someone could easily justify hanging these on the wall, and it would look just fine.

They have a consistent, professional look, and considering the seller is quite familiar with AI generators, it’s no wonder why they’ve been able to make over 600 artwork listings.

The interesting thing is they opened just 22 days after the release of the old guide showing the first method for using AI to make downloadable art.

Now, Aura shows that over the last 11 months, this seller has been able to bring in over 31,000 sales and over six figures in their first year in business.

If it’s possible for them, it’s possible for you.

This next shop that we’re looking at has a similar vibe to the last one.

They’re again selling these moody, antique, vintage-style painting prints.

They’re basically just using the exact same high-converting mockup on all of their listings, and they sell their artwork for a little over $3 a piece.

Now, since they’ve done over 377,000 sales, that would mean that they’ve made well over $1.3 million over the last four years or an average of over $33,000 a month since they opened their shop in August of 2020, again almost entirely profit since their only cost is the Etsy fees.

This shop was mentioned last year, and since then, they’ve made over 100,000 sales and $300,000 in profit.

If we look at their about section, we can see that they’re selling vintage design derivative works, meaning that these are remastered versions of original artworks.

They’re not doing anything special themselves, meaning that this is completely possible to do with AI.

Now there are more shops that have popped up recently, like this one, Lexington Prints, that’s selling AI-generated art.

They opened only 4 months ago but have already made over 14,000 sales.

That means that they’re making close to $10,000 a month in revenue within their first 4 months.

Again, you don’t have to just trust these numbers; you can go look at them for yourself and see if it’s legit and something that’s worth your time.

It’s a super easy business model where you’re just selling artwork as a downloadable file.

Finding Bestselling Art Styles and Concepts

While we’re here looking at shops with success that we would want to replicate, instead of making whatever images we feel like, we have to figure out what types of images sell.

Researching is very important so that we don’t waste our time.

When we find a shop that’s selling digital download artwork, we can scroll down to the bottom of the page and see their reviews section.

Here we can click on “filter,” and we can filter by the most recent to see what customers are buying and liking enough to leave reviews on.

If we click through to look at some of these listings, we can see whether it’s a bestseller or not, how many reviews this specific item has gotten, and we can see what the artwork looks like.

This one just happens to be a wildflower landscape in an oil painting style.

I’ll go through and save a bunch of successful listings for later so that we know what style and vibe to go for with our own art.

Now, we don’t want to copy anyone’s listing because that will lead to legal issues, but we can use the same ideas for our own art.

A second option for doing research is to use a shop analyzer tool like Aura to analyze a shop that’s selling digital download art.

Then we can just come down and filter out their top listings to see what kind of art they’re successfully selling.

Again, just coming down here to collect concepts for the art that we can sell in our own shop.

Creating AI-Generated Artwork with Mid Journey

Accessing Mid Journey is super easy.

To gain access, you’ll want to just come to their website and click on “Join the beta.”

This will prompt you to join their Discord server, where you’ll be able to make the images.

You’ll obviously need a Discord account, so make sure to sign up if you haven’t already.

Discord is completely free.

You can use Mid Journey for free in the beginning just to get started and see how things work before you fully commit, but if you’re going to be selling the images, you’ll want to pay for one of the plans where you’ll have commercial rights to your images.

The cheapest plan is only $10 a month.

To stay super organized and make things super easy on yourself in Discord, just click this plus button and hit “Create my own for me and my friends,” and then just give it a name.

Then, back in the Mid Journey server, find one of these general chat rooms where you’ll be able to find the Mid Journey bot, and you can click on it and hit “Add to server,” and then just choose that server that you just created from the dropdown.

We can access the server we just made on the left-hand side, and this will let us generate images without seeing everyone else’s images.

With all of that setup out of the way, let’s finally start making some artwork.

We’ll come down to the chat box section and type out a forward slash followed by the word “imagine.”

Now here’s where we can enter a prompt, so I could just make an image of a hillside filled with wheat and flowers.

I can also add a command to the end of this prompt, like “–ar” followed by an aspect ratio, maybe 4×3, to change the aspect ratio of the image that’s being generated.

After hitting enter and just waiting a few seconds, I’ll have an image that doesn’t look half bad.

This will give us four different options with controls below it.

The button on the very right will reroll the prompt and give you four new images based on the same exact prompt.

The bottom buttons will create more variations of the corresponding image, and the top row of buttons will enlarge or upscale the corresponding image if you like it.

That’s the basics, but there are things we can do to get even better art.

Since we know what style of art already sells, we can tune our Mid Journey to produce those types of images.

Let’s type out a forward slash and this time type out “settings.”

This will open the settings page where we have several options to work with.

First is the model that we’re going to use to generate images.

Even though version 6 is out and it does make high-quality images, version 5.2 is what we’re going to be using since it has better features at the moment of recording.

Then we have the settings for stylization.

These options control how much flair or chaos the AI will be adding to your image.

If we generated the same prompt four different times, you can see that the higher the stylization, the more wild the image looks, and the lower stylization, the more realistic it looks.

Since we know that the crazy AI-style images don’t sell that well, we’ll just want to select medium or low for now.

We can also set our generator to raw mode, and this will give us a more realistic image as well.

The rest of the settings don’t matter that much, so we can just hit “dismiss.”

Advanced Prompt Engineering Strategies

Instead of just trying to craft the perfect prompt out of our imagination, the second strategy we can use is to go over to Mid Journey’s website and just hit “Sign in” at the bottom.

This will take us to the explore page.

From here, we can search for the concept of the image that we want to make, so an oil painting of a field with tall wildflowers and wheat.

Here’s a list of images matching our search that we can look through.

When we find one with a style that we like, we can click on it and then come up to the top and hit “Copy prompt.”

Once it’s done generating the image, it’s much closer to that same style of image that we already know works so well.

Since we’re using a prompt that’s proven to work, you can obviously use this method and then go in and modify the prompt to dial in your images so that you get the right vibe.

The third strategy is the most advanced, but it will get you the best results.

It starts by finding a public domain image that fits the same vibe or idea similar to what we’re trying to create.

I use this website called Raw Pixel, which has a huge library of free public domain images.

When a good one comes up, like this one, just an image of a lady picking apples off of a tree, I just want to take a screenshot of it or download the image.

Back in Mid Journey, I can type out forward slash “describe,” and this will allow me to upload that image that I just found.

This command basically reverse engineers that image back into prompts that we can use to make more similar images.

But here’s where it gets really powerful.

Instead of just clicking “generate” on one of these prompts, what I want to do is right-click the image that we uploaded and click on “Copy link.”

Now, when I go to generate one of these prompts, I’m going to paste that link in at the beginning of the prompt.

This uses that original image that we uploaded as almost a starting canvas for generating the new image.

The generated result is almost always much closer and much more realistic.

We might still have to generate many different images to get the right one, but this method makes it so much easier to get great images.

Once we finally find an image that looks good, we can upscale that image, and then we’ll have new controls below to finalize it.

We have the zoom controls, which will simply zoom out the image, which is good if it’s kind of too up close.

But for now, I’ll just use the upscale control that are right inside of Mid Journey to upscale the image and make it as high quality as possible.

This gets our image almost completely ready to use, and we’ve still only scratched the surface.

I’ve been able to use AI to make a snowy winter tree, a snowy treeline landscape, rustic Rocky Mountains, and even some sailboats, all of which are proven to work and get sales.

By automating your passive income with AI-generated art, you can create a wide variety of sellable designs quickly and efficiently.

Preparing and Selling Your AI-Generated Artwork

At this point, before we can actually start selling the artwork for money, we need two things: to resize it into popular aspect ratios so people can use it however they want to and to get great mockups so that our images look really professional and high quality.

To resize the artwork, there are several free ways to do this.

This really is easy to do.

I can just open up the image in something like Preview on a Mac.

I can click this edit button and then I can select the crop tool.

Here, I can just enter in an aspect ratio, and also, I just want to make sure that the resolution is on 300 DPI.

From here, I can just save this file and repeat with any other aspect ratios that I want to offer.

So now that we can make the artwork, all that’s left is to post it for sale somewhere online.

There are a lot of options for this, but I think the no-brainer is to just post it for sale on Etsy since they drive hundreds of millions of monthly visitors to their website.

There’s more than enough demand to meet the current supply of listings.

This will also ensure that we’re able to sell our artwork for the highest price and keep the business as passive as possible.

If selling on Etsy sounds like the right move for you, since we already know that it works, you can follow a free quick guide which will get your shop opened and ready to start selling in under 10 minutes.

This also has a link which will allow you to open your Etsy shop and get the first 40 listings that you post for free.

Every listing after that just costs you 20 cents.

Before we go posting our artwork for sale, though, there’s one thing that’s super important to understand.

The shops that we’ve looked at that have been successful have always followed the same rule of posting their artwork in these professional mockups that are once again proven to get sales.

With this business model, we don’t even have to buy mockups; we can just use Mid Journey to make them.

All I have to do is repeat the same exact process for making the art, except this time, we’re making mockups.

I can just describe what type of mockup I’m looking to make, and then after running through several generations and giving it some time to make the images, I was able to come up with some great mockups in just a few seconds.

Again, you can follow these same three strategies of testing prompts, looking at Mid Journey’s website, and using the “describe image” prompts to create some great mockups.

Editing Mockups and Uploading to Etsy

To use the mockups, we have to edit them slightly.

This is also easy to do.

We use this website called Photopea, which is a free Photoshop alternative, but you can obviously use Photoshop if you have it.

All we have to do is drag in our AI mockup image and the artwork design that we’re going to apply.

I can scale up the artwork so that it looks like it’s going to fit on the mockup, and then I just want to hide this layer.

Now I’m going to choose the rectangle selection tool and just make a simple selection of the frame area.

Now I can unhide the artwork and click on the mask button at the bottom.

If I change the blending mode from normal to multiply, the artwork blends in perfectly, looking amazing.

You can also watch a Photoshop mockup script guide which will show you how to make hundreds of mockups in a few minutes by using an automated script if you’re interested.

Of course, at this point, we should be almost ready to upload our images to Etsy.

There’s just one final step.

These files will be too large to upload directly to Etsy, so what we’ll have to do instead is upload each set of images to a website like Google Drive or Dropbox.

This way, I can create a thank you letter or just have ChatGPT do it for me, and then inside this letter, I can put a download link to that Dropbox or Google Drive file.

This is what I’ll be uploading as my digital download file instead of the actual artwork since it’s a much smaller file size.

They’ll download the PDF and follow the download link so that they can download all of the aspect ratios that they might need for that image.

By automating your passive income through AI-generated art, you can create a streamlined process for generating, editing, and uploading your designs.

Scaling Your AI-Generated Art Business

If you’ve made it this far, you’re at least considering this business as a possibility.

So here’s what I would do to scale this business to six and seven figures.

First, while selling digital downloads is nice, some people want to be able to just buy the physical print without having to download the image and get it printed for themselves.

We can do this by using print on demand.

I’ve used a platform called Printify in my own businesses over the last several years since it’s an Etsy-approved integration.

Setting it up for your shop is super easy.

Then I can come in and select the poster or canvas that I want to sell my designs on.

I can just drag in the design directly onto the poster that I’m selling.

I can choose all of the sizes that I want to offer for sale, and once I’m done designing it, I can publish it directly to my Etsy shop.

When a customer buys this physical print, Printify will have a warehouse print out the design and ship it off directly to the customer without you having to do anything.

You’ll just keep the difference as your profit.

You’re basically just drop shipping art.

I use the premium plan since it makes all of the products a bit cheaper, which means I get to keep more profit, but you can still sign up completely for free to try things out.

And when you use the link provided and sign up using the code, you’ll get 2 months of free premium.

I personally keep separate shops for my digital and physical products, so that’s another thing to keep in mind.

By automating your passive income with print-on-demand services, you can expand your product offerings and reach a wider audience without any additional effort on your part.

I really do want you to succeed with this like the businesses that we looked at earlier.

Last year, only a few people actually took action on the guide that was posted, so this year, maybe you’ll make some changes.

There are links with a bunch of free resources, coupons, and discounts available, so don’t be afraid to get started.

Remember, automating your passive income with AI-generated art is a game-changer, and it’s never been easier to get started.

With the right tools, strategies, and mindset, you can build a thriving business that generates passive income for years to come.

So what are you waiting for?

Start exploring the world of AI-generated art today and take the first step towards financial freedom.

Conclusion

In conclusion, automating your passive income with AI-generated art is a powerful way to build a profitable online business in 2024 and beyond.

By leveraging the latest AI tools like Mid Journey, you can create stunning artwork that sells without any artistic skills or experience.

Through careful research, prompt engineering, and mockup creation, you can optimize your designs for maximum sales and profit.

And by using print-on-demand services like Printify, you can scale your business to six and seven figures without any additional work on your part.

So if you’re ready to take control of your financial future and start automating your passive income, there’s no better time than now.

Follow the strategies outlined in this guide, stay consistent, and never stop learning and growing.

With the right approach and mindset, you can achieve the financial freedom and lifestyle you’ve always dreamed of.

So go out there, start creating, and let AI help you build the passive income business of your dreams!

FAQs:

Q: How can I make $1000 a month in passive income?

A: There are several ways to generate $1000 a month in passive income using AI-generated art:

Create a large portfolio of diverse, high-quality designs that cater to various niches and trends.
Optimize your listings on platforms like Etsy with compelling titles, descriptions, and tags to attract more buyers.
Offer your designs on multiple products, such as digital downloads, posters, canvases, and more, to maximize your earnings potential.
Continuously research and adapt to market demands, creating new designs that meet the evolving needs of your target audience.
Invest in marketing and promotion to drive more traffic to your listings and increase your visibility on the platform.

By consistently applying these strategies and automating your passive income with AI-generated art, you can work towards achieving your goal of $1000 a month in passive earnings.

Q: How to make passive income in Nigeria?

A: Making passive income in Nigeria with AI-generated art follows the same principles as in other countries:

Identify popular art styles, themes, and trends that resonate with Nigerian audiences.
Use AI tools like Mid Journey to create unique, high-quality designs that cater to these preferences.
Set up an online store on platforms like Etsy or create your own website to showcase and sell your AI-generated artwork.
Offer your designs on various products, such as digital downloads, posters, and printed merchandise, to cater to different customer needs and budgets.
Promote your artwork through social media, influencer collaborations, and other marketing channels to reach a wider Nigerian audience.
Consider partnering with local print-on-demand services or suppliers to streamline your production and shipping processes within Nigeria.

By tailoring your approach to the Nigerian market and consistently working on growing your AI-generated art business, you can successfully automate your passive income in Nigeria.

Q: How to automate money making?

A: Automating your money-making process with AI-generated art involves several key steps:

Streamline your design creation process by leveraging AI tools like Mid Journey, which can generate high-quality artwork based on your prompts and preferences.
Create a standardized system for preparing and uploading your designs, including resizing, creating mockups, and optimizing your listings for maximum visibility and sales.
Use print-on-demand services like Printify to automatically fulfill orders for physical products featuring your designs, eliminating the need for inventory management and shipping.
Implement marketing automation tools, such as email marketing campaigns and social media schedulers, to consistently promote your artwork and drive traffic to your listings.
Continuously monitor your sales data and customer feedback to identify opportunities for improvement and optimization, ensuring that your passive income stream remains strong and steady.

By automating these critical aspects of your AI-generated art business, you can create a hands-off, self-sustaining money-making machine that generates passive income on autopilot.

Q: What is automated passive income?

A: Automated passive income refers to the process of generating earnings without active, ongoing effort by leveraging technology, systems, and processes that work on your behalf. In the context of AI-generated art, this means:

Using AI tools to create high-quality artwork quickly and efficiently, without the need for manual design skills or effort.
Automating the process of preparing and uploading your designs to online marketplaces, such as Etsy, to streamline your workflow and save time.
Leveraging print-on-demand services to automatically fulfill orders for physical products featuring your designs, eliminating the need for inventory management and shipping.
Implementing marketing automation strategies to continuously promote your artwork and drive traffic to your listings, even while you sleep.

By automating these key aspects of your art business, you can create a self-sustaining passive income stream that generates money on autopilot, freeing up your time and energy to focus on other important tasks or pursuits.