For better or worse, the stock art marketplace has become a permanent fixture of the design & web development world. Ignore it at your own peril. In a previous post, I introduced my new plan to begin investigating the value of affiliate networks and selling stock artwork. This post will dig into the latter.
Rich Designer, Poor Designer
The lesson behind the renowned book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, is that in order to become rich and stay rich, you have to find a way to get ownership over a product or service that allows you to make income passively. As an ultra-hard-working designer (I generally work 12-14 hour days… and I love it), I’ve always been interested in business ventures that might allow me to use my skills to generate a passive income, but I’ve always been so nose-to-the-grindstone on client gigs that I never really had much time to work on my own side projects.
Sure, I had setup an iStockPhoto account, I considered Threadless, ThemeForest, & FlashDen, I activated my DeviantArt prints account, I’d even looked into collaborating with local clothing labels to produce my own private line of t-shirts. The fact is that all of them required more time and effort than I had to give. More specifically, they required me to do types of work that took me out of my established workflow, a dangerous distraction for any successful freelancer.
After GraphicRiver opened, I decided it was time to try my hand at selling stock art. For those of you who don’t know yet, GraphicRiver is one of the first major marketplaces where the main product is PSD files, not flat images or themes or code files. Perfect for me since it required very little ‘extra’ work to prep and upload files. Two weeks later, I’ve learned a ton.
The lessons I’ve learned, after the jump.
(more…)
Sun, May 31, 2009
Comments