Many artists and design professionals make a substantial amount of their income from the relatively passive stream of stock art sales. Useful icon sets,
stock photographs, wordpress themes and illustrations. During the course of your art career you'll find you'll start lots of project and never finish them or find that they do not meet your clients needs. The many stock sale channels on the internet are a great way to monetize these poor orphaned works.
Stock art is an excellent passive income stream. Select your art submit it to various channels, tag it and wait for your art to find your clients. There are a number of considerations you'd need to make when submitting to stock markets though. Generally submitting your stock exclusively to one channel will get you higher commissions but will limit your reach as you will not be able to submit it anywhere else. This is the best option for your best quality stock that targets a very particular niche. In cases like these where you have a good quality product you'll find that distributing in one channel will get your best return as you'll be able to command better prices. When recycling work which can be used as stock you'd be better off submitting it as far and wide as possible.
Spend some time on client forums and find out what is in demand, look at trends in web design and on news sites. This is particularly useful for icon sets and illustrations. If you can produce high quality graphics that fill a common need you'll find your monthly income will swell quite quickly.
With stock photography focus on iconic images that are illustrative. Again it's important to think about what who will be trawling stock sites and what they'll be looking for images for.
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