Hi, this is Anne for Graphic Design How To, and today is passive income, graphic design
stock vectors and photos, part three.
So today we're going to talk about building a portfolio.
And also tips for file prep and ways to make it easier to upload...just tips overall for
stock vectors and stock photos.
OK, so let's talk about building a portfolio.
Now to me, this is one of the most intimidating things about actually starting out as a stock
vector artist or stock photographer.
It's just getting started and knowing what to put out there.
I totally felt this way when I got started.
So what I did and what I really recommend you do is just go through stuff you already
have.
Maybe you're a photographer, and you have tons of photographs you can use.
Maybe you're a graphic designer, and you have vectors you've already made in other projects,
school projects, and that kind of thing.
So I'm going to give you a list of some things that I used and might work for you, if you
have some of those things in your portfolio or your past projects.
So first off is websites.
Now if you ever had to make a website for school, or just maybe for yourself, you probably
used photos that you took yourself, and also vector graphics like little icons and stuff
that you created yourself.
So you can always look back through your websites and grab those images out, maybe clean them
up a little bit and sell them as an icon set or
photos.
Another thing that you might have made in the past is a mock up.
Mock ups are great for graphic designers.
We use them all the time to showcase our work.
And for me, personally, I've had trouble finding the exact shape I need, and sometimes I'll
just create that in Illustrator.
And that's what this image is.
I created this in Illustrator, and
I'm selling this online.
Now, granted, it's not making me very much money.
I don't know if it's ever sold, but it's a start, at least.
At least it's a way to get images out there when you're just getting started, and you're
kind of overwhelmed by the process.
Images from past projects: My friend Andrea Thomas from Kansas City, is a really great
Illustrator, and she made these little guys for a project for school.
So she could actually get anywhere from four images to 12 images out of this.
If she wanted to separate the books and sell those
as a set, she could do that.
She could separate the anteaters and sell those as a set, or she could make the ones
you see here, as a set.
She could also make them all separate images, although I wouldn't really recommend that
in this case, because I don't know if there's a whole lot of demand for anteaters reading
books.
In the stock image world, you might be just wasting your time.
But it's totally okay to do that.
Just make sure that whatever you're selling is not client work.
I mean, that's kind of a given, right?
If you're the client, you probably wouldn't like someone selling your logo, for example,
which brings us to logos.
Logos are fine to sell.
I wouldn't put any words with them.
Like this one was Quantum Diagnostics.
That's a fake company.
I'm not actually selling a client's work or anything like that, but I would just sell
the cube by itself.
You don't need to have text with it.
In fact, it probably might not get past a review if you have text with it.
And then the other one is just my old branding image, and I could sell this as A-S logo or
something like that.
So raid your old images for logos.
You will probably find a lot there that you can use.
And then, if you're a photographer, you probably have tons of old images that you can look
back through, clean up,and put out there for sale.
Personally, I'm not a very good photographer, so I don't have a whole lot of images like
these that are really sellable.
But if your images look like this, you've got it going on.
You can definitely make money out there on the stock sites.
That is all of my advice for you on building a portfolio with stuff that you already have.
Now, if you don't have any images already, just go ahead and start creating from scratch.
And the best way to do that is just to think about what a graphic designer could use, and
just start creating from there.
Now let's switch over to tips for file prep.
These are a bunch of little things that you can do to kind of speed up that upload process
because when you're first starting out, it is a very time-consuming process.
OK, so first let's talk about keywords.
Keywords are so very important, and you really want to go for anywhere from 20 to 25 keywords.
You have up to 50 with most of the stock sites.
Twenty to 25 is kind of the sweet spot, and you want to make those very relevant to your
image.
So if you have a picture of macaroni and cheese, you don't want to say financial freedom in
your keywords.
Having misleading keywords in your text can actually hurt you in the rankings.
You want to be ranked higher in search.
Make sure your keywords are very, very relevant.
Another thing about keywords... you want to put them in order of most important to least
important.
Not all the stock sites care about that, but I know that some do, so go ahead and make
sure your most important are first and your least relevant are last.
Now there are a couple sites that I use to put all my keywords in to just clean them
up a little bit.
First is a word counter.
And this tells me exactly how many words I have.
So, the one that I use is wordcounter.net, and I'm not affiliated with them, but they
kind of, you know, they do the job.
Duplicate removers: When I'm doing this, I find that I put the same words in there a
few different times, and this duplicate remover will remove all the duplicates.
It's very easy, and that is tracemyip.org, and I'm also not affiliated with that one.
So after you been doing this awhile, I really recommend making a library.
And this is just a little piece of my personal vector library.
These are things that I can use over and over.
Maybe I'm making a new image, and I need a picture of a head with some gears in it.
And so if I have this library, I can see a head.
I'll just grab that, and then I'll grab a gear from a different part of the library
and combine them to make a new image.
So it's really helpful to have this library so you don't have to redraw things or spend
time searching all of your old files for something you know is there, you don't know exactly
where it is.
For me, this is just an Illustrator file, and I copy and paste stuff into it.
So it's all one big file.
Another thing I really recommend doing is putting all of your titles, your descriptions,
and your keywords all in one document.
That way, you can just do a file find or a search, so you can find the original easily,
and you can just use whatever keywords out of there that you need.
Another thing I use a Word or Google Doc or Evernote for is, storing my upload locations.
All of these websites for stock are very different.
And I'm a member of about 11 or 12 of them.
So instead of trying to find the place in these sites where you upload your images,
I've just found it once, and then I bookmark it, or you can also put it in a Word doc.
So those are just a few tips to get you started.
Please come back next week because I am going to show you how to actually upload your images
to one of the stock sites, and I'm going to start out as a new user, so you can see exactly
how to sign up.
Some of them have a test you have to pass.
So I want to show you how all of that works.
So if you decide on any images that you want to use for your first upload, please let me
know in the comment section below.
I'd love to know what everyone's doing out there.
Thanks, guys, and I'll see you next week!!!