Relying totally on freelance jobs can create some stress if you don’t have jobs flowing in on a steady basis, or if you don’t have some money set aside as a buffer for those dry periods. I can assure you that while working freelance by itself creates enough stress by living off routine you don’t want to think about ‘what if I can’t provide for the next month’. Freelance working should be supported by other means of income, income that could let of the steam in those periods when money runs short and there seem to be no new jobs in the near future. Don’t rely on one source of income, especially if you are a freelancer. So my advice for you would be to create alternative sources of income.

Multiply your income sources

There are various ways of creating other income sources such as blogging for adsense income, or setting up an e-commerce site. The type of income I am going to explain in this section is passive income earned from selling stock material. The beauty in this type of income is that you do it once and the income flows steadily once your system is up and running. Also, since you have all the resources, creating the material can be a piece of cake. What to do with the designs customers don’t like? Or your personal designs that you haven’t found an outlet for? Polish them up a bit and submit those work for others to appreciate and buy. This kind of work creates income which can be slow at first, but when on track can become your primary source. You have to be patient at first though. It’s just the job to do when there is nothing to do but to wait for a new job.

Assuming that you mainly do creative work such as in photography, videography, flash designs, illustrations, audio my advice will be about the sites relevant to these fields. Of course there are other sites for other media but because of my experience I’ll be talking about the creative fields I mentioned above.

About 2 years ago to this date (March, 2006) after learning about Royalty free images and videos I decided to give my talents a go and I made an initial effort to compile a few video and image files. I applied to Istockphoto at first and that was the start of my earning of passive income. Later on I searched for other sites and came up with quite a list. After reading about which are the best on various articles I decided to upload my media to the sites listed in this article.

Go Microstock

Now before I give detailed info about these websites I’d like to shortly explain what Stock Photography means. Stock photography is a term for a collection of photographs, not necessarily about a specific subject but of a certain quality that publishers, advertising agencies, artists and etc. use in their creative assignments.

You can also check it out on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_photography

The contract by which they use these images or videos or etc. can be either Royalty Free or Rights Managed. Well as in our case I’ll be explaining the methods of selling your media via Microstcok photography companies. Microstock photography is a derivation of Royalty Free photography, where as a photographer or creative entity of other kind you sell your media through internet based companies to a wider audience for much lower prices down to 1$ a piece, since there is also a wide range of competitors to your production. But still, the good thing is you don’t have to be a pro to go microstock. You can read more about this on my article about stock photography coming up soon.***

Talking about microstock companies, there are a lot of alternatives but the best are still the best. Here is a list of the most popular ones on the net.

Istockphoto: Stock photography; search royalty free images, photos, illustrations, flash, video and audio. A lot more than just photos all in one site.

Revostock: Affordable stock video footage, music and sound effects. This site firstly started with only footage and then in turn added music, sound effects and after effects projects.

Pond5: The world’s stock footage marketplace. This site is focused only on footage for now.

Shutterstock: Royalty- free subscription stock photography & vector art; Royalty – free stock video and footage clips.

Fotolia: Royalty- free stock photos, vector art and footage.

Dreamstime: Lowest prices for Royalty-Free stock photography.

123rf: Stock image and photo subscription

Bigstockphoto: Royalty free photos, download stock photos and images stock photos royalty free downloads.

Canstockphoto: Stock photography images.

Cutcaster: Buy and sell royalty free images, stock photos and vector illustrations.

All of these companies have their pros and cons but before I go into site specifics I’d like to explain another term you’ll come up with once you try to register any one of these sites. This new term is exclusivity. Each one of these sites will ask you when you sign up whether you would like to be an exclusive producer to the microstock website, or if you wish to sell any of your material exclusively when you upload. saying yes to becoming an exclusive producer means that you agree to selling your media only on that site. Whether you would like to go exclusive on a specific site is totally up to you. You may be a fan of one site only and hate the rest, or you may try selling stock at all the sites you find. The most important thing you should bare in mind is that going exclusive is limiting your audience. Selling microstock to more than one site multiplies your audience. On the other hand sticking to one site only can let you get more money per purchase and frees you from all the uploading work to all the sites. Believe me uploading files, managing their keywording and keeping track of their acceptance can be time consuming. Well its up to you to decide.

Going exclusive? Which site to choose? Or if you want to work with more than one firm, what should you expect?

For more in depth info on these microstock sites you can read my next post in Short Guides for Freelancers.

Methods of Making Money for Freelancers 1 About promoting your public profile.

Methods of Making Money for Freelancers 3 A Review of Microstock sites.