21 Reliable Marketplaces to Sell Your Designs

by Rafiq Elmansy
in Resources
— 11 Aug, 2010

Create once; sell repeatedly is one of the trends that allow designers and photographers to generate the most revenue from their artwork by selling a single piece numerous times as royalty free stock resources.

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The question is what is the benefit of selling designs and photos through royalty free stock sites? Unlike the old method of selling designs to one direct client, selling royalty free stock resources creates higher revenues, even if the selling rate is low because the stock resources are sold many times. The sum of these sales is far higher than selling the design or photo once.

In addition to higher sales, the time and effort to create stock resources is spent once and the designer or the photographer can still receive revenues or sales profits on his or her work for a long time after ensuring that time is better compensated.

Royalty free resources do not replace the old method of hiring a designer to do the work because most of these resources are also used by other designers in their work to save time and effort in creating such stock resources from scratch. Designers still do both, they create stock resources whilst also working with a client directly.

Selling royalty free designs and photographs is a good way to spend free time or the time between projects to create resources that can be sold later on stock resources sites. There are many sites that provide royalty free resources for designs, vectors, photographs, WordPress templates, Flash and videos. These sites provide the opportunity to sell your artwork and gain a percentage of the sales based on many factors that are different from one site to another.

Popular sites that have a large volume of visitors ensure better sales for your artwork and higher revenues consequently. I’ve tried to collect the popular royalty free, stock sites that sell different types of resources.

Sell stock vector and photography

Photographs and vector resources are the most frequently used resources in different designs such as websites, printing designs and other graphic tasks. The first sites that provide royalty free resources were focusing on photographs and stock vector.

iStockphoto

The oldest and biggest site to provide stock photos, vector, Flash and video resources. This is why you will find it listed on the other stock sites categories. You can apply to become a contributor on the site and you need to pass an exam to make sure you understand the site guidelines.

Dreamstime

Dreamstime is another popular site that welcomes selling your photographs based on a good rate.

Fotolia

In addition to photographs, Fotolia allows you to sell both photos and vector content to a very large number of the site visitors.

Shutterstock

Similar to Fotolia, Shutterstock lets you sell your photos and vectors to large number of site visitors.

Depositphotos

Depositphotos include a large number of resolutions options to download; this affects your sales positively as it gives a wide range of options to the site users.

Sell graphic resources

After the success of stock photo sites, other sites applied the same concept to sell a wider range of graphic resources such as PSD files, icons, textures…etc.

The following sites provide the opportunity to sell graphic resources and files as royalty free files:

Graphic River

Graphic Leftover

Freelance marketplace

Sell logo designs

There are sites that focus on solely selling logo templates and other sites that sell logos as well as other graphic resources and photos such as istockphotos and Freelance marketplace. Below are some selected sites that you can use to sell logo templates.

Stocklogos