Digital Image Downloads Business

There are many aspiring online writers who want to generate an online presence as early as possible because Google for example takes time to find and index their articles which could take months. Many try to write articles daily because their strategy is to find out which particular subjects will become popular so they can write more of it and get more popular.

A Product in High Demand

I for example know that many beginner writers expect to write at least 100 to 200 articles before they probably become suitable for monetisation. Writing these number of articles can take several months if you are working alone writing your own articles and not spending money on writers so you can generate a high volume of articles in a relatively short time.

Most online content creators usually have another job while waiting for their online content business to become profitable enough to do it full time. I for example do online writing full-time by myself and finish two articles a day to build up my content volume. I do not have much time to create my own images and illustrations to add to my articles to make them better looking.

I turn to free online image and illustration database sites instead. While the images and illustrations I download are not totally relatable to my articles they are close enough and effectively complements my articles. I am one of the many people who depend on sites like these to provide me with the images and illustrations I do not have the time or skill to do.

Other people who need the services of these sites are those in the publication business. I have seen both online and paper news publications using the images from these sites. I use these sites everyday and do a lot of online surfing that I already remember the images of these sites. I even use the same images. I see e-books, YouTube images for example using these.

You can make money by creating these kinds of images and illustrations and selling them online. You can upload these to these online image and illustration database sites and make money. You can Google "downloadable images" and the top list of these kind of sites will appear.

Making Livable Income Could be a Problem

The compensation you get varies per site. There are sites where you can only earn when a user of your image or illustration makes a voluntary donation to you. There are sites that offer your images and illustrations for a fixed price to a user and they give you a commission. The important thing however is that the more you upload the more chance of you earning more.

However there are many online comments from those who upload to these sites that they do not make enough earnings to compensate for their efforts. Add to the fact that there are many sites already offering several thousands of images and illustrations to the point of saturation and many are still being uploaded to these sites everyday.

But just like all businesses there are many losers and few winners. There are many online sources about people who are making good money creating these kinds of products (downloadable images and illustrations). My conclusion after researching a few of them is that it would be helpful if you have your own website to sell these kinds of products...

How To Increase Your Earnings

With a website you can specialise on a particular niche so you do not exhaust yourself chasing all sorts of customers and end up getting none. You can seamlessly integrate your products into the articles of your website for a better chance of selling them. You can for example write articles about improving efficiency if you are selling downloadable planners and calendars.

You can also rehash and improve your existing products to produce more for less time and cost. You can combine images and/or illustrations together to create a new image or illustration. For example you can add an illustration of a boat on an image of a lake. This technique is already being done by many and you will find many examples online.

Another thing you can do is to try analyse which ones of your products are selling well. If for example a certain picture of a cat is selling a lot try to present it in a different hue or background or make similar cat products. You can also add short poems, jokes, inspirational and other words. Sometimes the words sell better than the images and illustrations.

Give what others are not giving. Try to see if you can offer products that no one else is selling or in short supply. For example I see many images of all kinds of cars but very few images of people in cars. Another example would be images of happy people which are many already but people who are crying with tears in their eyes hardly exist.

There are also some subjects which are hard to capture in images or illustrations alone and need words to complete them. For example I cannot sell an image of an expressionless face. If I however add the word solemn, lonely, or serious to the image then I can sell this same image to 3 different buyers who need an image for each of the words I just mentioned.

One of the best thing that you can do is to get a feedback from people regarding what image they need. You can create a Suggestions feature in your website for people to inform you what images they want. You will know then the most demanded images and you can create them to sell to these same people.

You can also start your own online image and illustration sharing site and invite people to upload their images and illustrations. You can share the profits with them. You can also accept custom orders such as those done by graphic artists. You can also offer other products in your websites such as e-books and courses that people can upload or download.

Conclusion

In summary you can earn money from uploading to online image and illustration database sites but it would be limited. If you setup your own website offering the same products plus other related digital products you stand to earn much more money and you have better control of how you manage your products and business.