By skyforbes 
These days, however, those projects seem to be fewer and fewer to come by. More people want to do the design themselves. With more options to buy products online, many homeowners only might want some advice from a designer.
Many interior designers are looking to diversify their income with options like affiliate marketing, designing a product line, becoming a brand ambassador or doing sponsored content on their websites, or developing an educational product to sell.
These are all great options and are worth investigating. The problem with most of these is that they really require you, as a designer, to have a significant audience or following from either a blog or social media profile or prolific and published work.
You gotta be “someone” in the biz in order to really have these options work for you.
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No furniture manufacturer is going to want a designer who has no following or who hasn’t been published, to design a furniture line for them.
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You can’t make affiliate dollars via your blog if you have a really small readership.
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You won’t get many sponsored content opportunities if you don’t have a social media following of some significance somewhere.
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You can’t sell an educational product from your website if hardly anyone is visiting.
You have to build a career, a following, a readership, an audience…something, in order to make these options work.
What you CAN do though, to make money fast in interior design, without almost any of that noted above is this….
A one-time design consultation.
It’s the lowest threshold of entry into design services for an end user. It’s the most appealing and most popular for the majority of homeowners out there, therefore the easiest money for you to get.
If you have a website, you can dedicate a page to this service. Describe your process, create parameters and state them, assign a price. Add a few pretty pics and maybe a pic of you, so people will see who might be coming to their door.
Publish.
Take that link and put it on Facebook with some inviting copywriting, a pretty pic, and a promise to solve someone’s design dilemma. Then put some money behind it.
Okay, so I know I said this could be for lean times and maybe you don’t have any money but Facebook ads aren’t that expensive.
Targeted Facebook ads can get your “offering” seen by locals who live in your area, fast. You might have to do this repeatedly and with some strategy (there are hundreds and hundreds of tutorials out there), because you need to be seen more than once before people will actually act.
Don’t ask me how to do targeted Facebook ads, I don’t do them. I’ve boosted posts before, but I, personally, haven’t done one. I did have a marketing person I worked with before develop some targeting for me on Facebook, but we really didn’t use it. I wasn’t really focused in on my goals at that time and didn’t really know who I wanted to target.
However, I do think they work. I’ve talked to other individuals who have seen success with Facebook ads. And I think that is the fastest way to get the word out about this service.
Here’s the advantage of getting this all set up and ready to go……
It’s there when you need to turn it on.
Let’s say, you don’t need this filler type of work right now. That doesn’t mean you might not want to have the option six months from now, or next year.
However, if you set it up now, build your offering, get the Facebook ads thing figured out, etc., then it can be sitting there ready to turn on when you need it.
I get a steady stream of these, because of my visibility online, etc., and have priced them to where I get not more than 3-4 a month of my in-person, local consults. I’ve gotten as many as 8 in one month before, but then I raised my price. 😉
You can raise your price when you start getting more than you want.