Selling stock on your own Company/Portfolio website

Did interesting research selling stock images, design or videos on your own website as a photographer, designer or cinematographer. Especially when you just don't have a large portfolio yet of movie jobs or paid jobs. You can build up a portfolio section called stock. As these you can easily fill up with allot of them and build up a collection also for your own if you ever need these images for a job. But mainly its easy to just go out and film city scape or landscapes or setup some test and film random object which people might able to use. For VFX guys could build up After Effect library of effects and sell these effects.

There is 2 great benefits having your own stock section on your own website, 1 you can build up a much larger portfolio showing much more things to convince people to hire you and when people buy them you can earn extra cash with it, especially with design. For example selling a logo design as a graphic designer you could say that you can personalise this design further for x amount of money or design business card and more as an extra service they could pay for.

Also its much better to just have it direct on your own website instead of linking it out as it is actually bad to link out to another website as people tend to search further for other options and then might not have bought any of yours. Also most stock website also don't allow personal contact between buyers and sellers making it harder to give the additional service nor people would know you could be hired for other things.

And most stock website will sell your things for a certain amount of standard prices making some things that you have spend allot of time on worth even as stuff you use less time on. But also allot of stock website have a large commission of like 20 or 30% and when you calculate when selling each for a fair price like 100 dollar for a logo design,   minus 21% tax for me in the Netherlands and then also minus 30% commission which I had with BrandCrowd, what is left is just 49% which is doesn't sound right at all and then you would basically push up the prices close to 200 buck so you would earn a better amount, but then allot of people would find it quite expensive and not buy the logo. So having your own webshop section selling stock you would have more control over more fair prices that would lead easier sales and more earnings.

So consider adding a stock or a web store to your own website, and mainly if you are a creative person this is not that hard to do especially with Opencart its quite easy to set it up, or just by using Paypal buttons selling them.

You might say how can I drive any traffic to these sales instead of having them on large stock sites where people directly search in their database. To be honest allot of people use google image search also to find stock photos or other stock things and not allot of people know that much stock website then istock and really even I can't list up that much. Just writing the right meta text en text will just help people find your designs on Google search as I have tons of people finding for logo design through this. Also theres are tons of design blogs who just random scout designs and promote you as I have several designs who haves allot of media talks. Or promote them yourself through mediums like logopond, pinterest or any social media to promote your design with that you are selling. Especially in your free time making new designs, photos or videos that are sold as stock means also more things you could promote, as often allot of jobs has some secrecy and often need to wait a certain amount of time before you could publish it. As building stock you could daily promote a new design or picture that you made and drive more traffic  to your own website than just having a website with a portfolio waiting for anybody just to see it. And mostly allot of photographer and videographer only drive traffic when someone received their card and check out what they have done.

So that was my research and upcoming trends for allot of webdesigners who build these website should include a webshop section. Especially with graphic designers will on the sideline draw designs they could sell on spreadshirt to sell awesome designs on a t-shirt.  But they could also sell unsold logo as there could be 3 to 5 unused concepts and only one be chosen by the clients to be the final logo and the rest you could sell them with small adaptions. And actually allot of webdesigners already do this selling stock website templates of previous jobs they have done and just add alterations so its less noticable. As graphic designer would not be that hard to setup a webshop yourself. I also have set one up, but it now still hidden as I am still designing it until its perfect and will add the store button between the menu link on top of this blog.