How to Make Money Giving Away Clip Art

Stephen Bucaro -----------------------------------------------------------
Permission is granted for the article below to forward,
reprint, distribute, use for ezine, newsletter, website,
offer as free bonus or part of a product for sale as long
as no changes are made and the byline, copyright, and the
resource box below is included.
-----------------------------------------------------------
How to Make Money Giving Away Clip Art

By Stephen Bucaro

Everybody loves to find free clip art on the Web. Some
people are clip art addicts. They must have every bit of
clip art they can find, purchase, or swipe. Other people
will search for days for the specific piece of clip art
they need. There used to be a lot of good free clip art on
the Web. Now most clip art sites require you to pay.

Free clip art sites have the most valuable asset on the
Web. No - not the clip art itself, but the tremendous
amount of traffic these sites attract. Traffic is often
referred to as "eyeballs" by Web marketers. First you have
to figure out what kinds of products and services those
eyeballs might be interested in. Then you have to join
affiliate programs that will pay you a commission when
someone purchases from an ad on your Web site.

What kinds of products and services are clip art seekers
interested in?

Obviously they are seeking clip art to use on their Web
page or print publication, so they are definitely
interested in graphic design and Web publishing software.
Here are some other things they might be interested in:

- Image and clip art libraries
- Computer and printer products
- Web services such as Web hosting
- Anything that general audiences are interested in

=> You can also sell all the clip art from your own Web
site on a CD. Owning the CD makes it much faster and
easier for your customer to use the clip art.

Where do you get clip art for your free clip art site?

You can't sell or give away copyright protected clip art,
but you can find millions of public domain clip art images
on the Web. You could also find an artist who is willing
to sell you, for a low per-image price, non-exclusive
rights to a collection of images. Offer to do the scanning
and Web preparation yourself. A good cartoonist can bang
out a clip art type drawings in less than one minute
apiece.

I recommend that you draw your own clip art. This is not
as difficult as you might think, because cute, amateurish,
funny-looking clip art is very popular today. The subject
of the clip art is more important than its artistic
quality. Business related cartoon clip art is the most
popular subject, except just before a holiday when holiday
clip art becomes more popular.

How to draw your own clip art.

- Practice the examples in books about how to draw cartoons.

- Redraw clip art you find so that it looks nothing like
the original.

- If you are not artistically inclined, decide that your
first 100 sketches will be "throw aways".

=> Some people can draw with a computer graphics
application. Others can be creative only when drawing on
paper. Scan drawings on paper with a scanner set for
"line image" scanning. After scanning, use a paint program
to touch-up the line drawing and fill in the colors.

How to create a free clip art Web site

- Start promoting your site after you have collected a
minimum of 100 images.

=> If you acquire or create only one new image each day,
your Web site will have 300 new images at the end of each
year.

=> When you have several thousand images, it's time to
think about adding a search facility to your Web site.

The most popular sites on the Web are free clip art sites.
But these are becoming scarce because their owners don't
understand that the most valuable asset on their site is
not the clip art, but the traffic. While they are waiting
for someone who is willing to pay for their clip art, you
can be raking in commissions from products and services
you sell to people who came for free clip art.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Resource Box:
Copyright(C)2002 Bucaro TecHelp. To learn how to maintain
your computer and use it more effectively to design a Web
site and make money on the Web visit
http://bucarotechelp.com
To subscribe to Bucaro TecHelp Newsletter Send a blank
email to bucarotechelp-subscribe@topica.com
-----------------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------------------
Every time I offer PrintMaster Publishing Suite for FREE -
it goes out of stock real quick! Last time I offerd
PrintMaster 7.0, Now I'm offering PrintMaster 10. Don't miss
out on one of the best publishing suites on the market.
Retail Price: $29.95 - Your Price: FREE!
http://bucarotechelp.com/software/printmaster10.asp
-----------------------------------------------------------

About the Author

None