Making Money When Things Get Slow

Unless you’re design rockstar, the freelance lifestyle tends to be feast or famine. One minute your taking your girl to steak houses and clubs, the next your stuck at home with takeout and a movie rental. That’s just the way it goes. So how can one make money when things get slow? The key word here is passive income.

There are a billion of those crappy e-book, get rich quick, sales pages out there offering to help us do just that. But as anyone can see, many are bogus. Until recently there wasn’t a reputable list of passive income money makers. Freelance Switch has a sister site that has create a nice passive income list.

This list will include many of the same resources as well as some additional ones geared toward designers and photographers. Many of these services also offer affliate programs to help you earn even more income. Some of these links are my personal affiliate, if so I will mark them as affiliate links. Please help support the site by using my affiliate links.

Be sure to check the website by Freelance Switch about making passive income.

For Designers:

CafePress.com – You obviously have some design skill, put it to use. Find a niche and start creating some shirts and jackets. I use this site and make about $75 - $100 a month in the slow months and double during the holidays.

RedBubble – Buys shirt design, photography, and art. This one is gear more toward artsy style t-shirts. I haven’t made any money with this site yet, but I don’t network on it much.

Smashing Magazine – Im sure you know about this website, but did you ever think about writing some content for them? Can be a great way to earn some money and help build up your reputation.

Associated Content – Mainly a website for freelance writers, this site can still be helpful for web and graphic designers. They pay for articles on just about anything. Initial payment is between $3 and $20. You also get performance incentives for traffic to your content. When I used this site full time I was making $30 - $50 a day.

Vector Stock – Buys vector artwork. Low payout when starting with them, 35% - 30% based on rights. The more popular your images become and the more
downloads you get, the more payout increases. The highest amount to be made is $0.45 per download.

Zazzle.com – Another t-shirt site. Doesn’t pay as well as CafePress and doesn’t get as much traffic. I wouldn’t recommend.

For Photographers/Videographers

iStock Photo (aff) – Buys video, photo, and vector art. They have very high standards. Im a professional photographer and got rejected 3 times. Seems like a good place to make money once you have enough content or some quality work. Vector art does really well here. I can say much for the video as I don’t do it.

Dreamstime – These guys seem to have one of the highest payouts for photographers and pay extra for exclusive content. You can earn up to $30 for print usage of one of your photos.

Shutter Stock (aff) – Buys photos and vectors. Easy to get into, but doesn’t pay as much as others. I use this site and make about $15 - $30 a month.

Revostock – Buys video footage, backgrounds, transitions, sound effects, and music. Prices paid very on a number of factors. Here are some examples; HD 1080 $35.00, Music Tracks $10.00. As always, exclusive content gets more money.

Deviant Art - An awesome online community. They have a store to sell online prints. The great thing about the store is it’s a print on demand service. Meaning once you upload your designs, you don’t have to worry about anything. You can set your own price based off of the cost of printing from Deviant Art.

For Web Designers

Flash Den (aff) – As the name suggests, they buy flash. They also buy audio and fonts. The basic pay here is 25% of any product. Exclusive authors can earn up to %05 of every sale.

BlueHost – If you aren’t making money off hosting services yet you are doing something wrong. Being a web designer is the perfect opportunity for passive income. Bluehost pays $65 per referral.

Moo Mini Cards Review

The traditional business card seems to hold little value these days. It seems as though its two main functions are; using it to pick up members of the opposite sex and getting a free lunch at a sub-par restaurant. I willa dmit there are some very creative and unique business card design out there. The problem is, to create a unique business card takes money. Unless of course you know about Moo Cards.

Moo Cards are miniature business cards, about the size of a stick of gum, that you can have printed online for a very reasonable fee. You may recognize the Moo Cards from Flickr. It was there that I first came across them.

Why they’re cool…

It’s all about the size, or lack there of. The fact that the Moo Cards are mini, get peoples attention right away. Hand someone your Moo Card and they usually follow up with a, “oh thats cool.”

The Moo Cards are printed on both sides of a heavy card stock. You of course have the ability to upload multiple files of your own designs to have printed on the back of the card. If you aren’t a designer, no problem. There are tons of artists on the Moo website that you can choose from to decorate your card with.

What they cost…

The Moo Mini Cards come in at $19.99 plus shipping for 100 cards. A little pricy by comparison, but thats the price you pay for being unique. I personally love the Moo Cards and will be coming back time and time again for my business card needs.

Graphic Design Portfolio Builder - Review

Graphic Design Portfolio-Builder - Review

Amazon.com $35.00
By From the instructors of sessions.edu

Level Introductory/student

If you are a self taught designer
(and most of us are) you probably
never had the luxury developing a

portfolio while in school.

The Graphic Design Portfolio
Builder is a great buy because it
helps you build up your portfolio
with projects that will showcase
a variety of your skills. Each
chapter in the book cover a
different area of graphic design
such as outdoor marketing, Illustrator, clothing, magazines, and more.

Each chapter in the Graphic Design Portfolio Builder contains a mock project. The mock project has things like the clients needs/wants, copy to apear on the project, and other realted material. While these mock pojects are nice, it’s the professional critiques that come with the book that really make it worth buying.

When you purchase the Graphic Design Portfolio Builder, you get access to a
Sessions.edu forum. In this forum, especially made for the book, you can
post your project and have a reall design teacher go over it with you and
critique it. This feature alone is worth the price of the book.

Thoughts Aside:

There are many books and soft-wares present both online and offline; people use them for different purpose. As Graphic design portfolio builder is used to make different graphic design for your website or for your project. Similarly data recovery books and soft-wares tell people how to recover data after disaster or how to take data back ups with the help of data recovery program. Internet is a medium through which people download files, songs, games etc and in some organizations file sharing is also done. While doing so many viruses are attached with these files or folders which can harm the data or drive. So, backup software plays an important role in such organizations where data and sharing of file is very important. These kinds of soft-wares help to take backups in back up server and when main hard drive crashes then one can easily recover their data from these remote data servers.