Selling Stock Artwork : First Impressions

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.

Lessons from the field

As of writing this post, I’ve made 50 successful sales after 15 days of selling. A meager pinch of the entire market of online stock art sales, but still, over the course of those sales I’ve begun to learn what makes successful stock.

Here are the files I’ve posted as of writing this post:

Here are the lessons that I’ve gathered:

1. Take it seriously.

It turns out that universities actually give out a degree for this kind of stuff – it’s called marketing, and you can get one for a mere $50k and 4 years of your time at the local university. All kidding aside though, the simple fact behind selling stock is that if you aren’t going to devote some serious time and brain-power to it, you’re probably not going to strike gold. Before you start, do a quick gut check: can you honestly devote an hour or two a day to pushing your stock efforts without compromising your other work?

2. Get a cheerleader.

This isn’t a mandate or anything, but the first thing I did after I decided that I was actually interested in selling stock art is get buy-off from my girlfriend (my soon to be fiancee’). The value of this is that I have someone to bounce ideas off and share the excitement of every big sale that I make. She’s not a designer or anything – she’s not even my target market – but she allows me to talk through my ideas and that just happens to be one of the best ways that I’ve found to clarify my thoughts & strategy.

3. Do your research.

It’s the single greatest thing that you can do to prevent yourself from doing a massive belly flop. Identify the top stock marketplaces in your field and spend at least a couple days examining what sells and what bombs. Most of these sites post how many sales any given product has made. They also list the top authors and a variety of other data pieces and metrics that allow you to get the pulse of their customer base. Study them.

I happen to be a designer, so my research is focused in on what’s selling on ThemeForest and GraphicRiver. If I were a photographer, I’d be scouring every stock photo site from iStockPhoto to Corbis to figure out what’s selling the best.

4. Identify your angle.

It turns out that you can’t just copy exactly what the top authors are doing. Shucks. Once you’ve learned what sells and what doesn’t, now it’s time to figure out how you can capitalize on that information with your own style and input. So ask yourself, what kinds of stock can you provide that isn’t already in the market?

In one specific product that I uploaded, a set of hand-inked illustrations that I had drawn up 3 years ago, I noticed that sales were cold. I felt (and still feel) that the product is fun & useful, but I ignored an important rule: you can’t compete with an over-saturated part of the market. It just happens that there are a variety of online stores where you can buy similar elements. Sure, they cost 10x as much and they might not carry the same character that my set had, but the simple fact is that anyone who needed that type of element already had it. This will probably change over time, but the lesson is that it’s incredibly hard to break into a crowded market.

5. Put your research to work.

In my case, I identified that two things: A) Products that only work for one specific type of project sell a few times, then begin to collect dust. B) Products that can be used in a wide variety of projects sell like hotcakes. I used this information to basically filter out 90% of the files that I already had. It also meant that of the artwork that passed the test, I was going to have to make some significant changes to make them more desirable. Still, I had picked my core product category: professionally made web UI elements, layouts, and components.

6. Create your files with the customer in mind.

It’s simple. If you were buying this product, what would you be expecting? In the case of PSD files (and any other technical product), they should be carefully organized, labeled, and as ‘editable’ as you can make it. Don’t flatten layers that don’t need to be. Don’t add unnecessary elements and bloat that people will just remove anyways. Keep it clean. Keep it simple. Keep it useful.

7. Promote your work!

Whether it be through a blog, community site, the marketplace forum, or any other means, give people a chance to click on your products and check them out. In my case, this means designing a consistently branded set of product thumbnails, a user avatar, profile page, etc. I also started making blog posts about my work – these aren’t vacant-promotional pieces though – I do my best to write content that both a) promote my work and b) is useful to people with similar interests.  The point here is one that I actually made on the GraphicRiver forum:

In regards to how quickly stuff sells. Good question – a few of my products began selling only minutes after uploading them, some took a few days before anyone made a purchase. Each of my products has sold within a week though, and my guess is if you pass that week with no sales, it’ll be hard to gather any steam after that. Short of direct promotions of the products from other sites, it’s just plain hard to compete with hundreds of other products on this site – even if you have a winner.

I only have a few weeks of experience on here, so I can’t set this in stone, but I have noticed a noticeable drop in sales after they fall off the ‘recent uploads’ page – which backs up my claim that if you don’t make a few sales in the first day, it’s hard to recover unless you can drive traffic from other places. The simple fact is that on any given day that you upload you’ll have a few hours in the spotlight “above the fold” on the main page, after that you’re gonna have to work for it.

So, while I only have a few weeks of experience, I hope that my reflections on these first two intense weeks help out prospective stock artists. It truly is an experience in the marketing business – and even if you’re a top notch artist, without the right strategy, you’ll never break the top authors list. For me, I can certainly have aspirations for high sales, but the experience of being active in the stock-art market is just as valuable as the income that might come from it.

Anyone else have similar experiences? Insights? Drop a comment below!

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