If you have any kind of career as a creative, you are of course going to be keen to make the most of it, to make it work for you in whatever way you can. As well as simply enjoying the creative side of things, you might also have to think about the business end, and that will include an attempt to keep the finances in check. It’s also important to keep on being busy throughout the career too. Because of both of these reasons and more, you need to find a decent way to supplement your creative career where necessary and possible.

In this post, we are going to discuss some of the main approaches you should be able to take towards doing just this. If you are doing the following, you should find that you are much more likely to effectively supplement your creative career – so that you can hopefully still have lots of time for your creative output, and can effectively keep yourself moving in the right direction too.

Coaching

This is a popular means of boosting your income as a creative, and one that a lot of people are really going to try and make the most of. With coaching, you are essentially walking alongside other creatives in your field while they try to build their own career, and this is the kind of thing that is always going to really be worth doing. You will find this is very rewarding and exciting, and something that you are probably going to be glad to have done.

It is also the case that you can generally charge quite highly for these kinds of services, especially if you are quite experienced in your field. And you should be able to build up a client list over time and charge more and more that way too. All in all, it’s something that you can find financially and emotionally rewarding, so it’s certainly something you will want to think about.

To begin here, think about looking into putting your own advert out somewhere local, and starting to talk about what you can offer. Before you know it, you should find that you are going to have a good sense of what you can offer people. And you could be coaching a number of people in no time.

Teaching

This is obviously similar to coaching, but in a different kind of way. It is usually much less one-on-one, and where in coaching you are helping to lead someone to a better path or career, teaching is usually more to do with just training someone in the skills involved in their craft. So this is something that you are going to want to think about if you are trying to supplement your creative career, because teaching can be a good use of your skills if you want to effectively make some more money through being helpful to other people.

This can be a kind of giving back for a lot of people, and it can also be something you approach in a lot of different ways. It doesn’t necessarily mean becoming a full-time academic, though that is an option if you want to go down that route. It could mean doing workshops, online courses, guest lecturing, or you might be able to do it in a freelance way with platforms online that can help you to reach an audience and client base. Think about what your speciality is and then make sure that you are reaching out to those who really want this in particular. That might mean you teach graphic design online or that you are going to host a creative writing workshop – it’s up to you and your craft.

However you do it, teaching can be surprisingly rewarding, so it’s certainly something you will want to think about and consider at least.

Freelancing In Related Fields

Often, for a particular creative pursuit, there will be another field – or a few – that are related to it or similar to it in some way, which you can use to supplement your main creative gig. You can do this through a little freelancing, and it can actually turn out to be a hugely effective way of approaching things. A fiction writer might freelance as a content writer, or a musician could score ads or edit audio for podcasts.

These are just examples, but you can probably imagine how your own creative work can be aligned with a particular field, and it’s something that you are going to want to think about if you are trying to supplement your income a little.

Creative Day Jobs

Perhaps you are content with having some kind of a day job that is going to help feed your creative habit, but which also keeps you freed up for your own creative act. This is the kind of thing that is going to be hugely important, because it can mean that you are actually financially much freer to pursue whatever your creative impulse might want. So this is the kind of thing that is going to be really useful to consider, and you should make sure that you are really thinking about that.

This could be just about anything, but it might be worth looking at gallery work, museum work, working at a bookstore or something of the sort. It could even be a kind of creative project management work. Whatever it is, it’s often a very easy and sensible way of keeping your finances in check while you build your art career.

Those are just some of the things that you might want to think about if you are aiming to supplement your creative career. Any of these could help, and you might find that you are really going to be in a much better financial position.