How To Download From Creative Market For Free
Reggie Lamborn
Before you get too excited thinking you have complete freedom to sell whatever you want, let me be clear: you will not make money unless you cater to the trends. For example, vintage logos, hand-drawn fonts, and all the other typical front-page Dribbble shots are likely to sell best right now. As time goes on, trends change and so should your Creative Market files.
Another bubble-bursting truth is you will not generate a decent amount of sales until 1) you get featured or 2) your files are included in a Creative Market bundle sale. Without exposure from either of these, your files quickly get buried and forgotten.
Perhaps the best approach to selling files on a marketplace is to create resources rather than finished products. If a designer is the carpenter, be the lumber mill that provides tools and materials. A few examples are Photoshop brushes and actions, product mockups, and fonts, all of which are very useful assets.
When the Photo category first launched, I was invited to be an early contributor and added a handful of images. I think had a couple sales but it never picked up and I finally removed all of my photos. Since then, I gave the category a second chance by creating a separate Creative Market shop and uploaded my best photos. This generated a total of 11 sales in the last year. To give you an idea of how poor that is, my main graphics related shop has 1100+ sales.
The other reason I believe the acquisition is positive is because Creative Market has, in my opinion, been struggling to roll out new features. As a shop owner, it was disheartening to see Creative Market Pro and the Certified by Creative Market come and go so quickly. More recently, shop owner commissions were decreased as well.
I always circle back to this question for anyone considering selling digital goods: should you make a Creative Market shop? Despite the recent drop, I still have to say yes, though I would recommend checking out Envato Elements first. Each have been great experiences overall and since neither requires exclusivity, you could easily upload to both marketplace. Doing so effectively doubled my passive income as soon as I joined Elements.
Below is the current state of my Creative Market shop income. See that tiny dot in June, 2022? Yep, one sale (as of June 18th). After having years of relatively steady passive income, this drop felt unnatural.
The main draw to selling on Creative Market, in my opinion, is the no-approval upload process. That is incredibly useful for experimenting rapidly as you carve out your niche in a crowded landscape. Just keep your revenue expectations reined in.
This had everyone shaken up a couple of years back. Creative Market raised their commission rate that they take from each sale. At the time a lot of big sellers left the platform and went elsewhere. Unfortunately for the smaller businesses, where the big names go buyers tend to follow.
In 2020, Creative Market was acquired by Dribbble, and while Dribbble assured us that nothing would change for long-standing CM users, inevitably there were changes. A few of those changes were considerable, too, in my opinion:
Creative Fabrica: Creative Fabrica has been based in the heart of Amsterdam since June 2016. Having a design background, the founders realized how difficult it was to find the perfect assets for a design. Creative Fabrica was created to improve and change the way people consume digital assets.
Design / Font Bundles: Launched in 2015 and formed from a combined experience of 40+ years in design, programming and online innovation, the FontBundles.net team identified a huge gap in the market for premium design products at affordable consumer friendly prices.
Envato Market: Envato Market offers a wide range of digital assets, including graphics, themes, templates, audio and video. It consists of different platforms like ThemeForest, GraphicRiver, and AudioJungle, catering to various design and creative needs.
Thank you for this article. I am already a seller on etsy and I just found out about Clevermarket. I think I will start selling there too. But you should mention that Etsy has other fees too. Except from the 3,5% comm. and the 0.20 for listings, they charge the transaction fees $0.25 (from each order you sell, not for a total amount) plus the tax.
As I red in CM support, they do not have transaction fees. Please correct me if I m wrong.
Creative Market is an online marketplace for user-generated design assets. The company sells fonts, graphics, illustrations, mockups, icons, templates, web themes, stock photography, and other digital goods for use by web creatives. Creative Market has over 10 million users and more than 10 million purchasable items, available both as single purchases and as part of a monthly subscription offering.[citation needed] It was founded in 2012 by Aaron Epstein, Chris Williams, and Darius A. Monsef IV in San Francisco, California.[2]
Initially, Creative Market went through three investment rounds, raising funds from notable Silicon Valley investors including 500 Startups, Y Combinator, CrunchFund, SV Angel, and Alexis Ohanian.[3] In February 2014, the company was acquired by American multinational software corporation Autodesk for an undisclosed amount.[4]
In 2017, Creative Market raised $7 million in a Series A financing round to spin out from Autodesk.[5] In 2020, Creative Market was acquired by Dribbble Holdings, directly owned by Tiny.[6] As of 2023, Creative Market Labs Inc. runs an independent operation that includes creativemarket.com, fontspring.com, and associated properties.[citation needed]
Creative Market first began in 2011 as a venture between Aaron Epstein, Chris Williams, and Darius A. Monsef IV.[2] Epstein, Williams, and Monsef were the co-founders of COLOURlovers, a Y Combinator-backed social network service that provides color inspiration for both personal and professional creative projects.[3] The co-founders recognized that COLOURlovers was in need of a marketplace to help its community members exchange the digital goods they were creating, and hence created Creative Market.[3]
In April 2014, the team launched a Photoshop extension that allowed designers to preview and purchase Creative Market's digital assets directly within Photoshop itself. This made it easier for designers to find and integrate third-party digital assets within the workflow of their existing graphic design environments.[7][8][9]
In February 2014, Creative Market was acquired by Autodesk. The amount of the acquisition was not publicly announced.[4] The entirety of the Creative Market team stayed with the company through the acquisition.[10]
In May 2020, it was acquired by the online design community Dribbble.[12] Shortly after, the team released Creative Market's Membership, a subscription offering that includes sitewide discounts and exclusive free assets.[citation needed]
Creative Market has continued to expand its catalogue consistently since launch, rolling out new categories like photos and 3D assets as well as emerging subcategories like Procreate brushes and Canva templates. In 2022, the site partnered with Shutterstock to expand its photo supply.[citation needed]
Creative Market's community members buy and sell creative assets for use in design and marketing projects. Assets include fonts, templates, illustrations, mockups, vector graphics, website templates, stock photography, and a wide range of ready-to-license creative goods. As of 2023, over 10 million products were available for purchase on Creative Market.[citation needed]
Creative Market's content is submitted by their users through "shops." On behalf of their shop owners, Creative Market handles the distribution, payment processing, support, and assisted marketing for its products. Sellers retain a cut of the sale price on their goods, are not bound to exclusivity agreements with Creative Market, and set their own prices on goods they sell through the platform. The platform also provides sales statistics[13] and a customer-seller messaging system.[14]
Get creative with a clever guerilla marketing campaign or use video to quintuple Facebook engagement in an instant. Take your pick of the bunch or use them all. Just remember to give us a nod in your Most Creative Marketer Award acceptance speech.
Social media marketing is an easy way to get the best bang for your marketing budget buck. But with more content floating around the interwebs than we know what to do with, you have to get creative to stop the scroll. Try one of these ideas on for your marketing strategy:
At the end of the day, the opinion that matters most comes from people who already buy your product or use your service. Distill your customer feedback to find loyal advocates for your product, and give their voice a platform with a customer testimonial video or graphic. Bonus points if you can manifest first-person footage of the customers themselves.
When the internet hands you lemons, make lemonade. Keep an eye on current memes and trends, and jump on the ones that work for your brand. Do the same for holidays and events. As a starting point, the Biteable Marketing Calendar offers timely content for every day of the year.
The 21st century might not have flying cars, but we do have Messenger chatbots. And these helpful little bots do more than just answer common questions; they are also a powerful tool for creative marketing.
Consider the Messenger bot your new marketing assistant. Turn your chatbot into a personal shopper with customized product suggestions, or use it to give your Facebook followers helpful information related to your service.
Character limits and Twitter threads make industry round tables thrive on Twitter. The bite-sized bits of content and open discussion forum results in a round table that invites anyone to participate.
The people of TikTok love nothing more than a good life hack. Does your product do something that makes life just a little easier? Do you have industry insider scoops people are dying to know? Share them in a TikTok.
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