Top 10 Tips to Make Money Online with Photoshop

Tip #1: Create Photoshop brushes or other goodies and sell them online.

An excellent idea. However, this may require a more advanced knowledge of using Photoshop. You will also need to know where and how to sell these products. One option, of course, is to offer them through download sites. Another option is to have your own website where you can sell your creations.

Tip #2: Create your own gift store with your artwork.

If you’re an artist, designer, or slogan-maker, this is one good option. Knowledge of Photoship may range between novice to expert. Anyway, one of the author’s suggestions is to offer stuff via CafePress, of course. But, it also lists other CafePress alternatives, including some of the ones I noted here.

Tip #3: Participate on contests.

Here, the author comes up with a list of places where you can take part in Art/Design contests using Photoshop. Sometimes, the rewards of these competitions are not just monetary. In any case, they can be great fun, useful for building up a portfolio, and may lead to more lucrative jobs

Tip #4: Write your own tutorials.

The basic idea is to set up a website, write tutorials, post them on your site, and put advertising on your site. Nothing revolutionary, but definitely worth considering. It’ll be especially rewarding if you can sell affiliate products that may compliment your income. The author also points you to various tutorial directories where you can submit your articles to increase traffic to your site. Also see: Article Marketing for Your Online Business.

Tip #5: Sell your photographs or illustrations.

Unless you’re going to retouch your photographs, then you might not even need to use Photoshop. Anyway, you can also check out JMMO’s Make Money Online with 5 Stock Photo Sites.

Tip #6: Create and sell your own Photoshop plugins.

Again, like tip #1, it’s definitely a great idea. Even better, since this is something that not many people can do, as it requires a high level of expertise. And, if you can come up with a stellar idea for a plugin, then you can watch your income add up.

Tip #7: Write something that’s cool or unique.

This tip is mostly an extension of tip #4, but instead of submitting your article to tutorial directories and/or coming up with a website filled with articles on Photoshop, this leads to the possibility of just creating a snippet of content on a blog that may be picked up by bigger blogs or sites and linked to.

Now, for my additional tips/ideas:

Tip #8: Offer your Photoshop expertise and be an online tutor.

You can create learning packages and turn these in to an online course, an ebook, or a web workshop. Check out Online Education for some ideas.

Tip #9: Be an “on call expert” or consultant.

If you want to offer your services as a consultant, you can do so using your own resources or third party resources.

Tip #10: Be a Photoshop content provider.

If you’re not keen on creating a full website with plenty of Photoshop tutorials (tip #4), and you want to do more than just write bits and pieces of cool Photoshop stuff (tip #7), then you might want to consider another option if you like the idea of writing. With the advent of blogs and blogging networks, one idea is to come up with a Photoshop (or related broader subject matter) blog and monetise that either on your own as an independent blogger - or as a network blogger where you can possibly get paid on a regular basis for the content you provide. Check out Blogging Jobs from some of these sources.

However, if keeping a blog regularly is too much of a commitment for you, another alternative is simply to write content whenever you have the time or inclination to do so. Of course, the best way to make money from this is to treat it like a freelance writing gig — approach magazines, web publications, etc that may be interested in publishing Photoshop-related articles.