Thursday, July 10, 2008

5 easy ways to make money online with Photoshop



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UPDATED: Added an extra tip!
This is the scenario: You are a skilled Photoshop artist, or perhaps you are a great photographer. If that’s not true, then you may be a cool designer or at least have some nice Photoshop tips or tricks that nobody knows. And you need money.
No matter what your skills are, if you are capable of creating something with a certain appeal with Photoshop or even other graphics application, there are many ways that you can turn that into money with certain ease.
In this article you won’t find any get-rich-quick tips. In fact, to quit your day job and make a living with this information may take you a long while. But, as with most in life, it depends on you. I will only show you what’s out there and make your startup a little easier.
Take into consideration that most of these tips do not require that you have a web site of your own, but with all the free services available, I believe that there is no excuse for not creating your own web site. Two interesting services are: Wordpress.com (free blog hosting) and Google pages (free web pages hosting).

Tip #1: Create Photoshop brushes or other goodies and sell them online.
Photoshop brushes are hot, hot, hot. Hotter than anything. Designers and artists are hungry for brushes. Photoshop brushes are total winners. Sadly there are a lot available on the web for free. The good news is that only your imagination is the limit. Take a look at what’s out there and create your own collection. Perhaps, instead of creating a collection of a million low quality brushes, you can create a good high resolution, high quality, brushes set or collection and sell them at your web site. Although textures, patterns, actions, and other Photoshop goodies are not that popular, you can always build a nice collection with those. Don’t worry if there is a lot of competition out there (and believe me there is), you simply have to offer a higher quality product than the rest and, most important of all, sell it better than the competition.
Once you have your product, you have to sell it. There are a lot of shareware and downloadable software payment processing services that will take care of all the payment process and also of the file hosting and delivery. Some of them even offer some exposure for your product and affiliate program solutions.
.: Payment processing services
» ShareIt and RegNow
Formerly independent companies, now both belong to Digital River’s network. These are among the most popular payment processing and software distribution providers. They host your application and provide marketing solutions too.
» PayPal
The most popular electronic payment processor. Since it is so popular, it increases the chances of an impulse purchase. Many people don’t consider their PayPal balance as money. They are more willing to spend money from their PayPal account than paying with a credit card.
» Payloadz and E-junkie
Both services offer a great load of options and features, some of them for free. I can’t talk much about E-junkie because I didn’t try them. But opening an account and submitting a file to PayLoadz is amazingly fast. They even have an ebay store.
Tip #2: Create your own gift store with your artwork
There are a lot of services where you can sell gifts (mugs, ebooks, t-shirts, calendars, you name it) with your own artwork or content on a print-on-demand basis. That’s the beauty of it. You don’t need to spend a lot of money building a stock base of products. In fact with these services you don’t need to spend ANY money. Just select the product you want, upload your content, select a few options, set your pricing and you are ready to go!
It is advisable to purchase some of your own items to check the quality of the output. Check following links to read more about these services: CafePress alternatives (talks about the alternatives to CafePress and the quality of these services). T-Shirt Forums (users share their experience in this T-Shirt design and marketing forum).
.: Print on demand services with e-store capabilities
» CafePress
» Zazzle
» Lulu
» 99 Dogs
» Print Mojo
» Printfection
» Spread Shirt
» Brandi Jasmine Art Links
This site hosts a large amount of CafePress help links and alternatives along with other art related links.
Tip #3: Participate on contests.
I call this an easy way to earn money only because it is easy to submit your artwork to contests. The problem is that in this case your artwork has to be the best. In some cases, it is not the best artwork the one that wins, but the best idea. Anyway, here’s a little list of contests sites that can give you some earnings or at list some cool prizes.
.: Art and design contests sites
» Worth1000
The mother of all Photoshop Contest sites. Worth1000 (a picture is WORTH a THOUSAND words, got it?) hosts some corporate contests with cash prizes.
» Photoshop Talent
Photoshop Talent members award you with points that are exchangeable for money. Not much money here, but if you are a regular submitter (and winner) you can make some. Prizes go for the winner and 2nd and 3rd place runner ups.
» Photoshop Contest
There are no money prizes here, but the prizes are cool. Graphics tablets, training Dvds, iPods, etc..
» Photoshoped up
No prizes here. You earn points but it is not clear if they will turn into prizes in the future. But if you are a car tuning freak, this is the place to go.
» Graphic Competitions
This site is a directory of worldwide graphics competitions.
» Site Point Design Contests
Site Point’s forum of design contests. Great prizes.
» Elance, Get a Freelancer and Freelancer Network
Not exactly contests sites. A project is posted and freelancers post their quotation and skills to win that project.

Make Money Online (Without Spending a Dime)

Making money online used to pretty much require you to have your own Web site, products to sell and some marketing savvy. But a new generation of dot-coms have arisen that will pay you for what you know and who you know without you having to be a web designer or a marketing genius.But it's hard to tell hype from the real deal. I did a search on "make money online" and "making money online", and much of the information out there is just promoting various infoproducts, mostly about Internet marketing. I see why people sometimes ask, "Is anyone making money online besides Internet marketing experts?"
So I put together a list of business opportunities with legitimate companies that:
Pay cash, not just points towards rewards or a chance to win moneyDon't require you to have your own Web domain or your own productsDon't involve any hard-sellingAren't just promoting more Internet marketingGive a good return on your time investmentIn the interest of objectivity, none of the links below are affiliate links, and none of them have paid or provided any other consideration for their presence here. These are legitimate companies with business models that allow you to get paid for a wide range of activities.Help friends find better jobs.
Sites like H3.com and JobThread connect employers with prospective employees, many of whom are already employed and not actively job-hunting, via networking - the people who know these qualified candidates. Rewards for referring a candidate who gets hired range from a few hundred dollars to as much as $5,000 - not chump change. This is a great way to break into the recruiting business with no overhead. JobThread is intriguing in that they can set up a job board for your site or your organization (you don't even have to have a web site) at no cost to you -- no merchant account required. You determine the posting fees and split the revenue with them.
Connect suppliers with buyers.
Referral fees are a common practice in business, but they haven't been used much in online networking sites because there was no way to track them. InnerSell provides that. Vendors set the referral fees they're willing to pay, then when a deal happens, you get 70% of the referral fee.
Provide business contact information.
One of the greatest challenges in sales is getting accurate contact information about prospective customers. A growing number of services have launched in the past couple of years to help address this, but most rely on members to maintain their own contact information. Jigsaw, on the other hand, pays members to help keep information up-to-date on the people they know, not just themselves, and pays them to do so ($1 for each unique new qualifying contact you put into the system). According to Jigsaw, in their first payout after launch, the top ten point-earns each received more than $750.
Become a semi-pro reporter.
Creative Reporter is a new program from Creative Weblogging that lets just about anyone become a paid reporter/blogger. They're looking for people to create original, but non-exclusive, blog posts / articles of 250-500 words on topics including parenting, celebrities, travel, mobile technology, and more. Pay is $10 per 1,000 page views on your posts (that's excellent pay for Web writing, although there's no telling how much traffic/money you'll actually get).

Easy way to earn money

In the early 0s Frenchmen Pierre Michaux and Pierre Lallement took bicycle design in a new direction by adding a mechanical crank drive with pedals on an enlarged front wheel. Several why-not-the-rear-wheel inventions followed the best known being the rod-driven velocipede by Scotsman Thomas McCall in . The French creation wrought of iron and wood developed into the penny-farthing more formally an ordinary bicycle featuring a tubular steel frame on which were mounted wire spoked wheels with solid rubber tires. These bicycles were not however for the faint hearted due to the very high seat and poor weight distribution.The subsequent dwarf ordinary addressed some of these faults by reducing the front wheel diameter and setting the seat further back necessitating the addition of gearing effected in a variety of ways to attain sufficient speed. However having to both pedal and steer via the front wheel remained a problem. Starleys nephew J. K. Starley J. H. Lawson and Shergold solved this problem by introducing the chain drive connecting the pedals held with the frame to the back wheel. These models were known as dwarf safeties or safety bicycles for their lower seat height and better weight distribution. StarleysRover is usually described as the first recognizably modern bicycle. Soon the seat tube was added creating the double-triangle diamond frame of the modern bike.New innovations increased comfort and ushered in a second bicycle craze the 0s Golden Age of Bicycles. InScotsman John Boyd Dunlop introduced the pneumatic tire which soon became universal. Soon after the rear freewheel was developed enabling the rider to coast. This refinement led to theinvention of coaster brakes. Derailleur gears and hand-operated cable-pull brakes were also developed during these years but were only slowly adopted by casual riders. By the turn of the century cycling clubs flourished on both sides of the Atlantic and touring and racing were soon extremely popular.Bicycles and horse buggies were the two mainstays of private transportation just prior to the automobile and the grading of smooth roads in the late th century was stimulated by the wide use of these devices.