Ai is coming up with sweeping changes in almost every online business sector. Last year, it widely affected online communities and business entities.
Experts are assuming that many online applications will be converted from tool-based to prompt-based in the upcoming years. Though AI wiped out many ordinary, repetitive jobs, it also created new job opportunities in many sectors.
Such two sectors are prompt engineering and prompt trading. What I actually mean if you are good at prompt engineering, you can earn passive income by creating and selling prompts, just like selling printables and digital assets online.
It is a totally new category of digital product. Experts are also saying that just like printable listings, people would be able to make six figures by selling prompt assets further.
And many people are already making money from it. If you have a little bit or enough idea about prompting and are curious to know the potential of this new digital product, then go through the full article. I hope you will find it helpful.
What is a Prompt?
Please don’t be disappointed. As you reached this article, I believe you have a good idea about Prompt. But for general people, let me share a few words about Prompt.
A Prompt is a set of instructions or word combinations provided to a language model to generate a specific result. In a simple sense, prompts are inputs for the Ai to produce what you are expecting from it.
To get a very specific result, your prompt needs to be well-organized and well-optimized. Like other online applications, Ai has no specific tool. Feeding prompts is the only way to get results from an Ai.
Why will people buy Prompts?
If prompts are just some set of word combinations, then why would people spend money for these when they can write prompts by themselves and get their results? It’s a point, but to know the facts, you need to dive deep with me.
Think for a while: why do people buy digital products like Canva Templates and printables from online marketplaces when they can make these by themselves?
The simplest answer is people usually buy digital products when either they don’t have the technical skill to make it or they don’t have time to make it.
A person who is buying Canva video templates either has less video editing skill, or does have editing skill but needs ready-made video templates to produce more video content within a short period.
Similarly, think of a person who is working in a digital marketing agency planning to make social media ads for 5 different companies within a day. He is planning to use ai generated images for his ads.
Now, if he starts experimenting with prompts, it will take him all day long to make ads for 5 companies because he needs to go through lots of trial and error. Instead, he can save time by buying already experimented prompts from the marketplace and making relevant images for his ads.
Similarly, a person who is planning to make too many t-shirt design templates within a short period by using an Ai tool, can save his time by buying prompts for t-shirt design.
Another important reason for buying prompts is the facility of modification and experimentation. After buying some stock images of female models, you cannot modify the posture or emotion of the characters in the image.
You cannot put a smile on the faces of the characters and cannot change dress color. But with a well-organized prompt, you can do that just by changing a few words.
Who will buy Prompts?
I hope you can answer this question now. In simple words, people who have less prompting skills and people who have prompting skills but have less time to generate outputs will buy prompts from the marketplace.
Irrespective of any profession, wherever Ai has been integrated, prompt engineering will be there. And when it comes to prompt engineering, premade prompts or pre-experimented prompts will be needed to save process time.
So, whoever uses Ai to expedite the business operation is likely to buy prompts.
How to make Prompts.
To be very honest, at first, you need to learn prompt engineering. There are many courses and free video resources online.
First, you should educate yourself about prompting and should go through many prompt experiments to understand what kind of prompt generates what kind of result.
Take time to cope with Ai. It is better to start with the sector you are an expert in. For example, if you are an expert in graphic design, you should learn prompting for text-to-image Ai tools like midjourney & leonardo.
If you are a good video editor, you should learn prompting for text-to-video Ai tools like Stable Diffusion. In online business, only the true skill wins. Just being a me-too-prompt expert, you can not expect passive income.
Where to sell Prompts
Up until now, only a few marketplaces are providing this facility. And the sad truth is, except for Etsy these marketplaces do not have a huge number of consumers or regular viewers.
But it is also true that the number of viewers is rapidly increasing on these sites. I should remind you about the beginning of Etsy. At the very beginning, Etsy didn’t get that much traction when it went public in 2015.
But when people started to make money from Ety, its growth skyrocketed. Today, Etsy is known as the amazon for digital products.
So, as Prompt itself is a new category digital product, it will take time to witness rapid growth in Prompt marketplaces.
However if you want to learn more, you can go through my another article where I covered many useful information about the best marketplaces to sell prompts.
And to have a rough idea you can note down the below market places for prompt trading.
Will it be worth it to sell Prompts online?
Well, people have already started making money from prompt selling. Look at the number of sales in the images below.
This is a screenshot of a best seller account on Promptbase who joined in January 2023 and up until now he generated over 1k sales.
If you want to check personally, then just visit Promptbase.com. Take a look at the number of sales and multiply that number with the average price. You can easily guess how much people are making.
Another thing I should remind you is that internet-based business deals with immense uncertainty. How the prompt industry will grow in the future depends on how the prompt engineers are dealing with it now.
If the Ai users can ensure fair use of Ai, then there is a possibility to grow a giant industry just based on prompts. Please encourage fair business practices if you are planning to sell prompts.
I mean, don’t just copy other’s prompts and sell them at lower prices. Don’t reveal the price-worthy prompts for free in your blog just to get more traffic. This kind of unethical practice may harm this potential market.
Final Words
If you sum up the above, I believe you clearly understand that a fully untapped market is waiting for you if you are seeking a new business opportunity for the upcoming years.
The idea of Prompting became popular this year. Many people are yet to know in detail about Prompting. That means If you start today, you will be playing totally in a blue ocean.
If my analysis seemed worth it to you, then go ahead and start learning prompt engineering today.