I am not going to claim to know the secret formula or recipe to creating a file in a hour and making thousands of dollars off of it.  I will not be going into how exactly to come up with ideas or create new items.  All I am going to be talking about today right here is how to get your head around the idea of selling microstock video files online.  First off I’ll introduce myself, I am Matthew Butler, I have been selling files on the envato marketplace videohive since October 16th of 2010 and from that fateful day I have been able to sell over 5000 files and currently number 13 of the top selling authors on videohive.  

Now that I got my little intro is out of the way let me jump into how wrap your head around selling files online with the possibility of getting zero sales for your work or the possibility of your file selling 100’s of times if not into the thousands.  If you work a full time job or freelance for a living creating motion graphics for other people you expect to work and then get paid for your time.  With selling stock files you have to think of it a little differently and with the possibility of getting no sales(or money) out of it at all.  So lets start at the creation step… you may find yourself having to create a project with extremely specific guidelines or possibly no guidance at all and let your creativity guide you.  But of course you also have the dreaded client changes once you have completed version 1.  Ultimately you could find yourself  going through revision after revision and spending the same or even more amount of time with changes, edits, tweaks, etc. than the actual time it took to create the project.  Now if you were to create a project file in the same time you could actually have 2 projects completed…. how? Simple; you have no client to respond to or have to deal with brand standards etc. so you are able to work on more files besides working on just one file and making a ton of small changes over and over.

After putting that into the back of your mind think about how you make money, either on a per project basis, per hour basis, or salary.  You will now have to totally forget about how you actually get paid and realize that if you make a good solid file that looks good and holds up well over time.  You can spend a day(lets say 8 hours) making a file.  Now lets say that file is online until the day you die but in all likelihood either that video style will be out dated or we will be viewing videos at 2160p and your files resolution will no longer get sales.  So lets just say 10 years your file will be getting sales.  Lets say 1 sale a month of that file for 10 years.  So that racks up 120 sales over a 10 year period.  For a video file you spend 8 hours creating long long ago. To put some monitory value behind it to put it into perspective lets assume your file is $10 so in 10 years you would have made somewhere between $600-$840(on microstock you will be making between 50%-70% off total file price so you would get between $5-$7 depending on how much you have made total for the site) for 1 days work.  Not to bad if you ask me.  But lets just say your file is just a little bit better and sells 2 times every moth for 10 years.   Now if you spend a complete year creating files, lets say 250 days(taking weekends off and a few other random holidays).  You could quickly see if just each one of your files sells once each month for an entire year you would get a healthy $15k-21k(250 files x $5-$7 earning per file x 12 months a year) extra money each year for the next 10 years or more.  And just think if just half of those you make 2-3 sales per month(making $26k-$36k per year) and were talking about a possibility of getting paid a solid income for the next 10 years. So you would basically be getting paid between $260,000 - $360,000 for your one year of working on creating files.  Not bad for a yearly salary.

The hardest part of getting your mind around spending a lot of time creating a file that may never sells is to think of different ways this is helping your not just with the possibility of making a few bucks but also increasing your knowledge of the software, getting a better eye for design, 

  I hope this short intro I was able to open you up more to thinking about joining a microstock video website and thinking about creating and selling your own files on there.  If you have any questions you can contact me on twitter @butlerm_com, leave a comment here or go to my contact page on butlerm.com and leave me a message.