Hi, this is Anne for Graphic Design How To, and today we're going to go over Part Two
of How to Make Money with Stock Vectors and Stock Photography.
So last week we covered how they work, the ins and outs of actually putting your image
on there and what happens with that.
And then we also talked about the money side of things, how much you make per image and
those kinds of things.
This week is going to be all about how setting goals can actually help increase your revenue
month over month.
We'll also talk about what makes a good stock image, do's and don'ts and that kind of thing.
So let's get started.
Okay, first, Daily or Weekly Creation goals.
These are really important, and when I first started out, I wasn't really sticking with
any kind of goals at all.
I was just putting images up whenever.
And so things really started to change for me after I decided to have goals.
And the first one is this daily goal.
For me, it was a daily goal.
And it still is.
I create one image every day.
But if that won't work for you, I really recommend doing three images a week, or even like one
a week.
But I wouldn't do any less than that.
Otherwise, you're probably not going to see the kind of revenue returns that you're looking
for.
Okay, the second type of goal is a monthly or a yearly revenue goal.
And when I was first starting out, my monthly goal was $30 a month, which seems incredibly
low.
And it is, but you have to start somewhere, right.
And it took me a few months to actually build up and actually start making $30 a month.
So once I hit that $30 a month, then I started increasing so like $10 extra every month.
So the next month would be $40 a month or $50 a month and you could kind of go at whatever
speed you want to increase.
Just know that at some point, you're probably not going to be able to hit those goals anymore.
And then you can kind of go back and revisit your daily or weekly creation goal, maybe
bump that up a little while, until you're hitting your goals again.
That's what I really recommend.
A yearly goal would be something like, "Oh, this first year, I just want to make $500
a year."
And then really focus on hitting that goal.
The third goal isn't really a goal, actually, it's just a weekly upload day that you can
say, "I will absolutely, no matter what, always upload my images on this day."
So you shouldn't really be uploading every single day.
Whenever you create your images, you can do all those together on one day, every week.
So for me, it's Friday.
So every Friday, I have at least seven images that I put on all of the stock sites that
I'm a member of.
And if you do it more often than that, it gets a little crazy.
So I would just want to do it once a week.
Also it helps your consistency.
You have all these things going on every single day, and then you have your one day.
Alright, now I want to tell you what happened with me when I decided to get really serious
about this.
Like I said before, I wasn't really uploading with any consistency.
And I didn't create images all that often.
So I'm going to show you this graph of my revenues, and it doesn't actually have dollar
amounts on it, as you can see, but this is September 2016, to February of 2017.
These show my revenues across all of the stock sites that I was a member of at the time.
Now during this time, I was uploading whenever, and I was creating new images whenever just
when I felt like it.
But right here in February, I decided to get serious.
That's when I started doing everything that I just talked to you about, having a daily
creation goal, weekly upload day, and that kind of thing.
And now check out what happened with my revenues after that.
Dang, right.
It's just went crazy.
This was so unexpected for me.
I didn't know it was going to happen.
But I really think it happened because of those goals that we talked about.
So I really recommend doing goals.
Okay.
And there's one more thing I want to talk about, and that's forecasting.
So once you've been doing this a while, maybe like three or four months, you'll notice you're
making a similar amount every month.
And if you increase your number of images that you're putting out there, that's going
to be going up.
But over time, you'll be able to forecast how you'll do if you increase your stock portfolio
by a certain number of images.
So let's say you're making $10 a month and you have 10 images.
You can probably say, if that's been consistent for a while, you can probably say, "Well,
if I have 100 images, I'll probably make $100 a month.
And if I have 1000 images, I'll probably make $1,000 a month."
And that, of course, all depends on your sellability and all of that kind of thing.
But you can pretty well forecast what you're going to make with this many images.
At least it's worked pretty well for me.
So that is a huge motivational thing for me, just to see, after, you know, I do increase
my portfolio by this many images it's pretty cool to see that the money has increased by
that much too.
It's pretty accurate, at least in my experience.
So I wanted to touch on that.
Let's switch over to what makes a good stock photo.
We'll talk about photos first, and we'll talk about vectors second.
So with photography, you really want everything absolutely technically perfect.
So that means there are no mistakes.
Nothing that catches your eye in a weird way.
You definitely want to have a perfect composition.
You want all the lighting to be perfect, and of course, have everything in focus and all
of that stuff.
It's definitely good to get people in your images because people sell really well.
So when you're looking through a magazine, the images that really make you stop and do
a double take are probably images of people and never something, you know, that's like
really weird.
But people do help to sell images.
Now if you do decide to get people in your images, you have to get a model release for
every single recognizable person in your image.
So keep that in mind as you're shooting.
Another thing to strive for with photos is market to a specific industry.
So like healthcare, or maybe businesses.
Your target audience is graphic designers, and web designers and people who use these
stock agencies because they don't want to go out and take the time to take pictures
themselves or maybe they don't have that kind of time.
So they want to be able to go through, and if they're designing for a restaurant website,
they just want to be able to pull some people who look like they're having a good time in
a restaurant.
Now once you have what you want to shoot, go ahead and set up several different shots
and angles.
Maybe have your person that you've hired doing several different things, wearing several
different things so that you can get a lot done in just a little time, and you don't
have to set up a different shot every time.
It's totally okay to have the same models doing totally different things.
Anything that sells is fine.
All right, now let's switch over to vectors.
Vectors share a lot with photography.
So with those, you also want technical perfection.
You don't want any stray points out there or open paths.
Make sure everything is really tight from a technical standpoint.
You also want to focus on concepts here because a concept will sell an image better than just
a picture of a random object.
So instead of drawing an image of a pig, maybe you'd want to go towards something like a
piggy bank because that could also say finance or saving money or anything like that.
Putting some lightning bolts in the little slot of the piggy bank could make someone
think oh saving really fast.
Anything that will trigger a graphic designer's creativity is going to be good.
So concepts work really well.
Third thing, you want to market to a specific industry, same as photography and also for
the same reasons.
And then finally, if you're going to create icons, I really like doing icon sets.
And the reason I like to do that is because those seem to sell so much better than single
icon images.
Yes, they're a lot more work.
But as a graphic designer, when I see just one image against a set of nine images, I'm
going to get the most I can for my money, so I'll go ahead and download that nine image
icon set instead of just the one image just because it's a better deal for me.
So icon sets definitely sell better than single icons.
But if you don't have time to make a whole icon set, that's fine, you can still sell
single images.
I just wanted to let you know that the sets will sell a little bit better if you're able
to get some of those in there too.
Alright, there's some good things to know for both photography and vectors.
It's a great idea to be unique.
So you want to do something that no one else has done.
And that can be really hard to do.
The other side of that - you don't want to go too far from what is considered normal
for the industry, because people won't buy it.
They won't understand what you're trying to go for.
So keep that in mind too, when you're creating images.
Being unique is good, but don't go too far.
Try to think like a designer.
Think what a designer is looking for, what they might need for their job, and create
around that.
And then check out trends.
Some stock sites actually publish a list of trends of what they see happening in the next
year.
And you can read through it and see what images they're actually wanting.
Now, keep in mind that every other photographer and vector artist is also looking at these
trends lists.
So I tend to not put too much stock in them because it's probably going to be pretty saturated
pretty quick, but trends are definitely a good thing to check out.
Okay, so we've talked about a bunch of do's with stock photos and vectors.
Well, let's talk about some don'ts.
First off, don't sell someone else's work because
that's stealing.
Don't take someone else's image and change it a tiny
bit and try to call it yours.
You can get into some pretty big copyright problems, and you can get sued.
So just don't do it.
Everything you do should be created by you alone.
Second thing, don't spam with images.
And by that, I mean, take a vector that you made, change the colors 50 times and sell
it as 50 pieces of artwork, because that will just get you rejected in the approval process.
You're only hurting yourself because any rejection you get goes against your record.
At least it does with some stock sites.
I don't claim to know the algorithms of any of the stock sites.
But I know that when you have rejections, it is not good for you.
Don't submit public domain content.
And so public domain content is stuff that's over 70 years old.
It is free for everyone to use it.
And so the stock sites don't want you trying to charge people for that free content.
So just leave that stuff alone.
If they know about it, they're not going to approve it anyway.
It's just a waste of your time.
This next one is not necessarily a don't.
But just be careful when you have brand names or trademarks or like recognizable people
or property in your images because you have to submit those in a certain way.
And that's called editorial use.
And that means that only certain publications can use those.
They're not going to sell as well, because you cannot use those for commercial purposes.
And they're actually very hard to get through the approval process anyway.
I just steer clear of them.
You can do what you want, though, especially if you're like a celebrity photographer or
something like that.
You're going to want to go ahead and go through that process.
But for me, it's more trouble than it's worth.
Alright, so that's a few do's and don'ts of stock images.
Next week, we're going to talk about ways to build a portfolio with stuff you might
already have sitting around.
And we'll also talk about file preparation and some tips for that.
And then we might get into actually uploading, but we'll see.
So I'll see you guys next Thursday.
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See you Thursday!