Envato sets out with one mission and one mission only – to help people earn and learn, online!
Envato operates several marketplaces where thousands of people buy and sell digital goods each and every day, they also have a network of tutorials and educational blogs where millions of people visit everyday to enhance their creative skills. Envato believe that there is more to work than simply making money, and they’re totally committed to helping others and selling awesome products. Envato was founded in 2006 by Collis Ta’eed, Cyan Ta’eed and Jun Rung.
As mentioned already, Envato has huge network encompassing themes, graphics, programming scripts, audio and more. Two examples of the most popular are:
Themeforest – A great place to allow anyone to sell digital goods, such as: PSD templates, wordpress themes, flash templates are much more. It’s home to a thriving community of around 500,000 users, authors and buyers.
Graphicriver - Graphicriver is much like Themeforest but is focused more around specific graphics, rather than website templates. It’s a great place to sell textures, vectors, Photoshop work and much more.
As well as this, envato also own many more sites which are great for selling things, such as:
Audiojungle (Music, sound effects etc), ActiveDen (Music players, games etc), VideoHive (Motion graphics, DVD menu’s etc), 3DOcean (3d Models and graphics), CodeCanyon (PHP, javascript etc) and Photodune (Stock photography).
Overall the Envato marketplaces are home to 2,525,279 members and 3,182,081 marketplace items.
The real value to Envato comes from its overall community feel. Each marketplace has its own feel and
Getting started
Of course the more experience you have the more valuable you will be however you don’t have to be a wizard with 15 years experience or more, I would definitely recommend that you invest in quality software to enhance your skills, do what the best do, if it works for them it should work for you too just add a bit of “you” flavour and people will love you.
Look out on forums, blogs and social media sites.
It pays to look out for what people are wanting, keep an eye on business/webmaster forums where people are talking about “Damn I wish this…” Or that…” Same for social media sites, you can even use some clever “lead generation tools” to find people even geographically who are saying “Damn I wish this existed” etc.. then go out and build it!
So, what can I sell on envato?
No matter if your skills are in the graphics industry, the gaming industry or even website development, envato has a place for you to sell your goods online.
As already mentioned briefly, enavto caters for the needs of many and pretty much anything digital can be sold in of it’s marketplaces. The only hard part, is remembering where you should go to sell what you’re wanting to sell. For example, if you’re wanting to sell a website template, you’d visit theme-forest and follow the instructions.
To make things a little more clear, here’s a list of what you can sell where:
Themeforest
- HTML/CSS Templates
- Email templates
- WordPress templates
- Magento templates
- Joomla templates
- Mobile templates
Pretty much any web-related templates, whether it be for a CMS or ecommerce, you’ll be able to sell it at themeforest.
GraphicRiver
- Photoshop work (backgrounds, logos etc)
- Vectors
- Textures
- Fonts
- Icons
- Web elements
And many, many more. The fact is, any graphic related work of yours could be worth some pretty decent dosh so, what’s to loose?
If you wish to find out about what else you can sell at envato, simply visit the sites and see which one suits you best for what you’re selling.
What sells the best at envato?
Obviously, once you’re at envato and you are dying to get selling, you’ll release there’s quite a bit of competition. However, with the knowledge of knowing what sells well, you’re already ahead of many of the other competitors. So, below is a list of what sells best at envato.
Lets start with the obvious factors of standing out: No mistakes will insure your work is verified and will get straight on the market, it’ll also make people believe that you are amazing at what you do. Keeping it original, there’s nothing worse than spending ages to make something that has already been made, it just won’t sell! Keep your work original and to your style – it’s a whole lot easier. Usability - Quite important for anything that you may be selling. For example, in web design you will want your template to be catered for a range of audiences rather one in particular, I’m sure the same goes for most other things. Making it stand out is the most important rule of them all, if your content is dull people are more likely to ignore it and look elsewhere, if your work is standing out, it will draw the potential buyers attention to your work rather than other peoples.
Those are the main rules when selling your work, however for each individual piece of work it will be different, be sure to stick to these and your work is sure to sell!
Branding yourself – it’s extremely important!
Envato sites have an easy to use “branding” section in your settings for you to display the relative social network, freelance and design related websites you are registered to.
Click here to view the video on YouTube.
Another great way to brand yourself on Envato marketplaces is by making the most of your portfolio. Not only does it tell potential buyers a bit more about who they’re buying from and develop a relationship but it’s a great way of gaining some extra work from people who can’t quite get along with your pre-made templates. You can spice up your envato portfolio by:
- Editing your thumbnails to make them correspond with the rest of your page, then edit your preview so that it easily shows the work is by you, it shows what it is instantly. This is not all that hard to do however for the simple sake of taking a few moments to think and do can mean the difference between selling £100′s worth of stock every month and merely £10s.
- Take advantage of the ability to provide links in your description, remember in business and as a freelancer (still business) you want to convert at every possible and relevant opportunity, if you have a website link to that, if you offer bespoke designing for example link to where people can get that.
- Brand your thumbnails – keep them consistent
- keep extremely clean item previews. Use neat and consistent formatting in your selling descriptions.
Doing the above makes your potential buyer think “If they put this much effort into their profile, I can be 100% certain their work is going to be top-notch!” and this vital that they think this, it’ll increase your sales/interests dramatically.
The sheer number of social media sites Envato lets you promote on your profile is ridiculous! However as we know social media (at the moment at least) is king and if you are on as many of these sites as possible you are
It’s also important to use screenr.com to provide a preview off all your sites interactive features as this is a safer way than providing a live preview. However, a live preview is still recommended.
Go Local
Show your killer branding to small businesses in your local area, think how many small businesses there are.
Infact – In the UK in 2012 there were 4.8 million businesses in the UK of which 99% were small-medium in size employing 250 people or less of which 4.5 million had 0-9 employees (96%).
Out of those 4.8 million think how many you could sell services to in your local area.. Perhaps not just your town or city but your county too, this doesn’t just apply to the UK either, the same principals apply in any country.
Of course there are many ways that you can sell services and products to small businesses local to you however for the sake of selling on Envato marketplaces this is simply another channel to market your work.
Get some business cards (could be free from vistaprint or moo.com) print some flyers and give them out to local businesses, or email them look and see if they have a website or if their website is outdated, is their website mobile friendly? Then in a friendly manner kindly say “Im a local designer/programmer, I see you don’t have a website I have a very reasonable theme I think would work well for your business.. You can find it here.
Remember that the core envato sites are for selling products (i.e. templates). However, freelanceswitch is focused on more specific jobs for specific people. They aren’t all local, but this is the internet, everyone is just a message away!
To summarise
- Remember to make your work stand out from the rest, keep it original and neat looking.
- Pay attention to your branding, keep it consistent and keep it simple. Keep previews clean and thumbnails tidy.
- Perhaps identify a sub-market within the marketplace you are selling, for example what type of person would buy your website themes? Are they people with news sites? Are there many people with news websites?
- Envato’s top authors make between $20,000 and $50,000 per month selling stock! If you could start off with just 10% of this I am sure you would be happy, and even just 1% is something to start off with. It can’t be impossible right?
- Remember to keep your profile/portfolio up to date and interactive – it shows you pay attention to detail.
- Don’t always release your work, have a go at freelancing and working for others – you could even try local business’ in your area.
- Show you are a real person, people like to deal with real people online, especially where money is concerned. No one wants to deal with people who hide behind shady personas. Be open and be open to having a bit of a laugh! It shows that you are human.
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