The Problem with the Sale of Clip Art

Almost every new clip art maker seems to think that the whole process has to do with being creative and innovative and nothing else.  This is exactly why the majority of people who try to sell digital art fail miserably.  While an individual who makes digital art may be an artist at heart, he needs to be a businessman and a sales representative so as to be able to be successful in selling the art that he creates.  In fact, the clip art created for sale should not be based around artistic freedom but instead the marketing dynamics.

What this means is that if you want to sell clip art, you need to create individual items with regard to what the market wants as against what your artistic soul wants.  Resultantly, you are supposed to spend a lot of time developing your business sense and sniffing out holes in the demand and supply balance if you want to sell clip art and make money from this profession.

Evaluating the Competition in Detail

The first step for any business is to evaluate the competition, and this is especially true if you want to sell clip art.  This means that you should go to the major image stocking websites and digital product marketplaces like PayLoadz and evaluate what is already on sale there.  The patterns of the majority of people trying to sell clip art in these kinds of websites should reveal to you what they are capable of, how they attract clients and even, in some cases, what the clients like to purchase.

For example, you may see ‘x’ and ‘y’ as your main competitors in your efforts to sell digital art.  You can evaluate what they are selling in terms of similarities, sales figures, styles of creation, individual effects and virtually everything else that you think is relevant.  Knowing your competition would allow you to spot holes and chinks in their armors, which you can then use to push your images through.

Researching Your Clientele and the Demand Supply Gaps

While evaluating and analyzing your competition would allow you to do better than them and give you a nice launch pad, you would, sooner or later, have to go deeper into the market dynamics to figure out all the prevalent trends with regard to digital art for sale.  The reason for this is that, after the initial period, you would want to go beyond your competitors and create something that is completely different from them.

In different words, once you understand the basics, you would want to get into the more advanced aspects if you want to sell clip art at a professional and dominant level.  This would require you to understand the market as much as possible.  Your market research should involve an analysis of the usual market based variables such as views to sale success ratios, time to sale success ratios, keywords to sale success ratio and even mode of selling to sale success ratio.

Be Original and Be Safe With Regard To Similarities

Because analyzing the market is something that you cannot avoid, you have to be careful about the sole flaw of this technique.  People who sell clip art and analyze the market make the mistake of thinking that they can copy what is selling well and eat into some of the purchases of the image that is selling well.  Even if the person gets away five times through this strategy, the sixth time would be enough to put him out of business for good because the plagiarism would not only result in financial fines but also a major hit on the artist’s reputation.

However, this does not mean that you cannot use what you have learnt from your market research to compete with your competitors and sell clip art.  Instead, it just means that you have to use it smartly to sell digital art.  There is nothing wrong with using the current prevalent trends. You only have to ensure that you retain your originality and the image remains unique.

Choosing the Right Mode to Sell Clip Art

In terms of physically real products, the place where the products are being sold is considered to be very important.  In different words, where you sell clip art can make a world of difference in how successful you are because where you decide to place your shop will decide the quality and quantity of customers you get.  In order to sell clip art successfully, you should use a mix of three techniques.

The first is, as is obvious, the use of your very own website to sell clip art.  However, this might not be that ideal for you if you are new because you may not have enough of a stock to sell clip art by yourself.  Therefore, you would have to resort to third party websites such as image stocking websites and digital products marketplaces.  Image stocking websites would result in you getting access to an already targeted audience base.  What this means is that the people who come to such websites explicitly come to buy images and nothing else.  Alternatively, digital products marketplaces such as PayLoadz would give you access to a more diffused audience which means that you may sell clip art to people looking for software.

The image stocking websites can be seen as the local farm market where people come to buy produce, and the digital products marketplaces can be viewed as the city departmental store where people come to buy whatever they see and think they need.  Your own website should be seen as your own shop.  As is obvious, you should try to sell clip art through a mixture of all the three techniques because this would allow you to reap the benefits of them all.