When working for a client, there are the confines of deadline, budget, scope.  When you are your own client it becomes harder to draw the line. By the time I finished it I was already thinking about starting something new. At least I’ve got something up in the meantime. Take a look.

• Full-Time work
• Freelance work - Finished projects soon to be added in portfolio section
• My own independent projects - Previews coming sometime
• KrugWorks - I am planning a redesign and a refocusing of the content.
• Girlfriend / Family
• My sexy new Macbook Pro - Pictures soon, this baby is a month old and I am in love with it
• Songwriting and recording
• Leisurely activities - All Points West on Saturday! Batman and Step Brothers, 2 thumbs up!
• Sleep - at the bare minumum

It is a one stop analysis shop, and its free. You plug in your URL, it scans your site, and it gives you an overall grade out of 100, based on their own unique algorithm. The really useful part is that it breaks your site down by category and shows you what you are doing right or what you are doing wrong. A quick count shows they use 23 different elements to compute your grade. Do you know of 23 important strategies than can significantly effect your web site’s search ranking and traffic potential?

Krugworks has a current score of 57, and this site is very new, whats you’re score? WebsiteGrader

*Edit - WebsiteGrader will tell you the last date the Google indexed your site. I’ve come to realized it’s often not accurate. The best way to check this is on your own. Type in Google: site:http://www.krugworks.com and click the cache link on your page result. At the top you will see the date it was last cached.

Not so fast.

Things they can do: “Index the textual content in Flash files, discover URLs that appear in Flash files.”

Things they can’t do: “Search images, videos, java applets, xml files, swfs within a swf.”

That’s a lot of stuff it can’t index. And what about broken up text? I assume it sees that as an image, hence no search on that. I am all for this progress. I love using flash, I just want to point it that this is just a small step in the right direction, and  hopefully a sign of even better indexing to come.

Selling Stock

A stock file is a ready made asset usually hosted in a library full of other assets of the same type.  The customer buying the stock gets to purchase a high end asset without having to commission a custom project or spend the time or resources to do it him/herself. The person selling the stock gets the benefit of reselling the stock creation as many times as they like. Photos are a popular asset. As a designer it is much cheaper for me to simply buy a few high quality photos for dollars a piece than it is to hire an expensive photographer for a custom photo shoot.

What about the Rights?

One type is Royalty Free, which means the customer buys the stock once and can use it as much as they like. The other type is Rights Managed which means they have to pay for each usage. In either case the customer is paying for the usage of the asset, but not the rights to claim ownership or resell it. You do also have the option of selling Exclusive Ownership Rights, which means you’re basically handing over the goods for a one time fee.

What control do I have?

Very little control. By selling stock you usually are consenting for it to be used in any variety of situations. If you are concerned about how or where your stock might be used, you probably shouldn’t sell any. If you sell stock photos of your kids you should be okay with the idea of coming across that picture in a magazine or web ad.

How much can I make?

Stock income can be a great tool for many types of industries. It’s great for designers, developers, photographers, writers and even musicians. The amount you can make depends on what you’re selling, how much the item is selling for, how good it is, and how many times it sells. That last note is probably the most important factor.

Okay so what can I sell, and where?

As a creative you should often be in a state of creating or producing something. Selling stock is great for you because you will often be able to strip out the more generic components of a project and sell them. Be sure to read the submission criteria on the stock sites though. You don’t want to waste time creating stock only to find out you can’t sell it.

There’s a whole lot of stuff that you can sell; Photos, Vector Art, Sound Fx, Music, Illustration, Flash Components, After Effects video, and even more! Here are a few of the sites I use for buying or selling stock. A quick search will show you that theres tons more out there.

• iStockPhoto - Photos, Video, Vector Art, Illustration
• FlashDen - Flash, Fonts, Video
  
• VectorStock - Vector Art, Illustration
• Audio Jungle - Audio FX, Music
• RevoStock - Video, Audio FX, Music

So that brings us the the conclusion of Part 1 of Creating Passive Income. I hope you found this guide useful. Stay tuned for Part 2 where i’ll get into easily making and selling products online.

The guys at PSDTUTS have a growing community of skilled designers and are committed to posting a new tutorial every single day. I like their blog format of postings, making it easy to check out the newest posts every day. Fueled by paid submissions, they offer $150 each, this seems to be working quite well for them.

They also have a growing network of other tutorial sites. Vectortuts.com and Nettuts.com are worth checking out too, they’ve definitely made it into my daily reading.

Check out some of their latest tuts:

I am currently a Creative Developer employed at MediaWhiz . Those of you who’ve been around the blog world for a while are probably very familiar with some of MediaWhiz’s products such as Text Link Ads, Review Me and Shopping Ads. These products are quite popular in the Blog and Marketing world and I’ve learned a lot about this market in the year that I’ve been at MediaWhiz.

I’ve come to realize that just as a designer must keep up with the latest in design trends, semantics, browser differences, software and so on, we must also become knowledgeable in web marketing and how to design for optimization. What good are our beautiful websites if in the end they don’t sell very well?

This blog is still in it’s very early stages, obviously, but I hope to build a useful resource for like minded designers and webmasters. A site full of great inspiration, useful tips, recommendations, and a good deal of fun on the side. So come back in a little while and see what I’ve got for you.