Diversify your freelance income with micro stock

Do you have an over sized folder for all your stock photography on your desktop? Have you created a couple of Wordpress themes that are now just sitting dormant? Are there are a handful of flash pre-loaders you have designed but aren’t being used? Start putting those small little files for work for you with some micro stock!

We as designers need to protect ourselves sometimes. We all know that cash flow coming in is hardly stable when freelancing. We can do this with micro stock. You’ve heard of it before. iStockPhoto, Flashden, Graphicriver, these are all micro stock sites; places for you to upload your work to be sold on their marketplaces and you will get a small commission from each sale.

Do work once, have it pay forever.

The beauty of these micro stock sites is that you do the work once and get paid a multitude of times. For example here is a link to my background maker on GraphicRiver.

At this time I have 228 sales over the past year. I get a 40% rip from every $4 sale which is roughly $400 over the course of the year. Now this was only 1 item. Imagine if you add 1 item every month. Before you know it you have a dozen items each bringing you in money, and you only did the work once!

Build your Micro Stock Portfolio Right

A secret I found is to try and mix your micro stock work into your design work together. For instance, a company wanted a nice web 2.0 look, so I created a background that had a web 2.0 feel in photoshop. I then used that background photoshop file and built a background maker out of it, something any designer can use and just change some colors and can bang out designs nice and quick. This way I am getting paid on a design gig PLUS I get the benefit of building another micro stock portfolio piece.

So, if you design websites, build some themes and throw them on The Theme Forrest or if you compose music throw them on Audio Jungle.

For more information on micro stock websites and using them to build a passive income check out The Residual Bacon.

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