How to make money selling AI prompts.

I received an Email from a reader who was interested in launching her AI prompting side hustle and needed my help with ideas.
Photo by Mark Fletcher-Brown on Unsplash
Instead of just emailing her the answers, I thought it’d be cool to share a whole story so everyone on Medium can learn from her question.
Now the topic of AI for passive income always comes with Mixed emotions.

• Some people think it’s the 7th wonder of the world
• Others think it’s impossible and too good to be true

Well, I happen to fall in the middle.
From my experience, AI for passive income is only as viable as the idea in question.
For example, If you’ve ever tried dropshipping, you know how saturated it is.
With that kind of competition, there’s nothing AI can do to magically make you a millionaire.
But when you find the killer passive income idea, AI can be a real money maker.

So What Makes For a Killer Idea?

• It should have an obvious pool of buyers (High Demand)
• There should be endless ideas to try
• And the competition should be relatively mild

Now, today’s side hustle idea, selling AI prompts, meets all these criteria.
According to Google Trends, the demand for AI prompts has remained relatively consistent.
Google Trends Chart
For the possibilities with this side hustle, they’re endless.
Because come to think of it, there are so many types of prompts we could be creating.
Talk about

• AI Art
• Text prompts
• Chatbot prompts etc

Finally, it’s a relatively new market, so the competition isn’t so fierce.
With that out of the way, let’s take a look at how today’s challenge should go

Step 1: Choosing Your AI Tool

AI is advancing at a pace so rapid and new tools emerge almost every fraction of a second.
So to build a business around AI prompts, you need to first choose your tool.
There’s

• ChatGPT
• Midjourney
• Dalle
• Notion
• And so on

In my opinion, Midjourney is the best option, and I’ve got reasons to back it up.
First Midjourney is Paid while most of these other tools are free.
So Midjourney prompts attract business-savvy people who want to implement AI art into their businesses.
ChatGPT is free at the very least and to reach a broad audience, you will need to keep the pricing of your bundle very affordable.

Step 2: Choose your marketplace

So let’s say you choose Midjourney as your prompting tool, there are so many places you could be selling your Prompts on.

1. Etsy

Etsy is a Marketplace for all things creative and that includes prompts.
Many sellers have caught on and there are now dozens of Etsy shops entirely dedicated to selling AI Prompts.
I even found this AI prompt shop on Etsy with over 2715 sales.
And at an average price of $3.43 per prompt, this shop has made well over $9,312 passively.
Screenshot of Purrfect on Etsy
The best part is even with the millions of digital products on Etsy, Prompts are still a fresh concept.
With not so much competition, but very high demand.

2. Creative Fabrica

As my readers know, I sell Canva templates and other creative elements on Creative Fabrica.
But frankly speaking, I didn’t even know there was a market for Midjourney prompts on Creative Fabrica until today.
I found this bundle of Midjourney prompts with over 419 favorites. (And that’s a lot of favorites!)
Screenshot of product by Artistic Revolution on Creative Fabrica
That’s obvious demand.
Creative Fabrica is a big deal so don’t overlook this Marketplace.
They get over 10.7 million visitors every single month.
Creative Fabrica traffic insights by SimilarWeb
And I’ve made over $1486.46 with over 369 followers and 2265 favorites.

3. KDP

Amazon is the largest ecommerce marketplace in the world, so demand on Amazon is basically demand everywhere else.
As expected, Lots of people head to Amazon for books on these AI tools and yours could be the one they choose!
Now to sell your prompt book on Amazon, you need an account on KDP.
KDP stands for kindle direct publishing and it’s Amazon’s platform for authors looking to sell their books through Amazon.
Also, Amazon allows short reads especially with their Ebooks.
So you can basically create an ebook with just about 8 pages for your Prompts and sell the book on Amazon.
Some of the viable keywords I found for a Midjourney book are:

• Midjourney Prompts
• Midjourney art
• Midjourney prompt guide
• Midjourney book
• Midjourney for dummies
• Midjourney Prompts book

4. Social Media + Gumroad

Once you get really good at making Midjourney prompts, you should consider turning your skill into a brand.

• You could create YouTube videos around each prompt project you complete
• Or TikTok videos showing the prompts vs the image output
• You could also create an entire portfolio of your AI images on Pinterest, Dribble, Behance and Pixabay
• Or Maybe even Medium to share your prompts and the output

Once you grow your followers, you can send them over to your AI prompt store on Gumroad.
There, they can grab the prompts to make the cool images you’ve been sharing.
This is probably the most profitable way to sell your AI prompts or any digital product at all.
I currently use the audience strategy for my Gumroad store and so far I’ve made $1816.01
So there you have it, 4 ways you could be selling your AI prompts.

Step 3: Find Viable Prompt Ideas

This is probably the most important step for this challenge.
Because the more ideas you can brainstorm, the more products you’ll be able to list in your shops.
And for these ideas, we don’t need to break a sweat because we have ChatGPT.
Over on ChatGPT, ask for 10 Midjourney Niche ideas you could be creating for your shop
ChatGPT Dashboard
Now, in our community, we’re all about working smart and not harder.
So instead of creating random products that may or may not sell, we stick with the most viable ideas with the highest chances of making us money.
These ideas are the ones with

• Low competition
• Yet high demand

You can find these keywords using the search bar on the marketplace of your choice.
Type in your idea and if it drops down, it’s in high demand.
Screenshot of Etsy's Search Bar
Then go further to check the competition for your idea.
For best results, stick with keywords with less than 1000 search results on any of the marketplaces we’ve listed.
On Etsy, we can also try keywords with less than 1500 search results.
But with Gumroad, you don’t have to worry about the competition because once you build your own audience, you can create your own demand.

Step 4: Create your prompt.

Now this step is easier said than done because we’ll obviously need hard skills here.
I mean think about it.
If everyone could come up with perfect prompts, why would they need to buy them?
Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash
That answers every question you might have.
Midjourney Prompts are really technical to create.

• You need the right words
• Dimensions
• And characters to create the perfect image

The skill required is the only reason why people would rather buy than create their own prompts from scratch.
So to make this side hustle work, you need to learn how Midjourney Prompting works.
It’s a real skill and a high value one at that.
But don’t be scared, it’s not far fetched.
In fact, there are two ways you can go about learning this skill.

1. You can take the long road.

Watch hundreds of YouTube videos from random channels until you can single handedly create a quality prompt from scratch.
Photo by Szabo Viktor on Unsplash

2. Make the upfront investment and pay to learn this skill.

And while I know paying for knowledge sucks, it’s usually the best option

• It’s more effective
• Faster
• And easier for learning since you have all the knowledge you need in one place

So if you’re willing to invest a few dollars, I highly recommend you check out Ken Bluttman.
He sells an AI Art prompt class specifically for Midjourney.
Art Prompt Class by Ken Bluttman

Remember, you don’t have to buy the class.
But if you value your time and want to launch these passive side hustles a lot faster, then you should check out his Midjourney’s prompting class here.

Conclusion

AI prompts are a great way to make passive income online.
And I really hope many of you start this side hustle on any of the marketplaces I listed.
Especially if you

• Currently have no skills to exchange for money
• Or any idea of what you should be doing to make money online

Besides, it’s really fun coming up with cool prompts and seeing what output you get.
So if you’re interested in this side hustle, you should start improving your Midjourney prompting skills on YouTube or with Ken Bluttman’s AI art Prompting Class.

You can check out his Midjourney Prompting class here.