Passive Income and Making a Job The Works For You: Interview Lead Designer Gillian
I had the pleasure of interviewing Gillian, a Lead Designer who does branding and web designing. She came to talk about passive income and making your job work for you. As introverts, we may want more passive income so that we don’t have to deal as much with people and can have more time to ourselves.
Gillian explains how she accidentally started her business. Her partner got her a laptop for Christmas two years ago and she had all these things she imagined doing it. There was a weekend in the February after that where her partner decided to have a guys weekend and she decided she was going to play with her new laptop. She had just discovered Etsy and knew that you could sell digital downloads. She decided to give it a try and created some graphics. Once they were up, she got an amazing response to the graphics and sales exploded overnight. I can relate to that, as all the things I’ve started have either been something I’ve fallen into or I got shoved into.
After that, Gillian started getting messages asking if she could do other things for people too. That’s how she got to where she is, by people asking questions about what she could do and her saying yes when she had no idea how she would do it, along with a lot of trial-and-error. She loves what she does, loves her clients, and is working to make her business more passive so she can work more with people she is most comfortable with. Having more passive income allows her to make her job work for her.
How Gillian got into passive income in the first place was by starting on Etsy and later moving to Creative Market. Her first product on Creative Market was a branding board she had been using with her clients that was only $3. She started making good sales, without much thought. She branched out into WordPress themes a year later. As soon as she added the first one, it skyrocketed her sales. She says she got carried away from there, thinking if one theme brought on that much, how much would two? Then, it increased from there.
Gillian talks about how she isn’t the greatest with affiliate marketing, but she knows about her own products. She is working on creating templates for the themes on more platforms. She wants to make sure that there is a copy for each platform, so that everyone has something that will fit their needs. She feels it is easier to expand on one product, such as selling the theme and adding a sheet that comes with it with helpful links that lead into other services and products. That way she gets to build a value ladder off of a smaller product that helps them even further. She is working on expanding upon that sheet, as well as branching out into producing a podcast about passive income that is on its way to being approved.
Her biggest piece of advice is that whatever you are doing, just keep going. You will create products that nobody buys, but you will have others that do well. You may even have products that you think are ridiculous and everyone loves.