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.
Stephen Bucaro
To learn how to maintain your computer and use it more effectively to design a Web site and make money on the Web visit bucarotechelp.com. To subscribe to Bucaro TecHelp Newsletter visit http://bucarotechelp.com/search/000800.asp.
