The Art of Money Getting With A Camera
Maybe I’m confused (I hope I’m OK 
but I decided to release my new special report “Start A Big Profit Microstock Photography Business – 12 Steps To Sell & Resell Your Images” for free.
16 pages of pure content.
No email address required, no jumping through hoops…
… just download the report from this link.
I need to know what you think about the report. Drop me a mail or make a comment below.
Over and out.
You’re now ready to submit your first images! This is a big step and a very important milestone for you.
I hope you realize the magnitude of what you learned in the previous steps and I will summarize the key points to make sure you remember them.
Step 1-4: You identified a market with hungry desperate buyers and limited competition. You hopefully also selected a market you’re passionate about but that’s optional (but it certainly helps to keep the motivation up).
Step 5-6: You shortlisted a number of stock agencies and prioritized them based on some important criteria’s to maximize your success.
Step 7-9: You selected your best images based on technical quality and how useful they are commercially. You also saved your own ass by removing images with potentially legal issues.
Step 10: You tagged all your images with relevant keywords to make sure your images are found by the photo buyers when they search the database.
If you follow these steps you’re miles ahead of your competition and you can literally run circles around them. They will have no clue what hit them when you enter the market, all they will know is that you crushed them.
Now it’s time to submit your images. Most agencies nowadays support digital upload via the Internet but some “anti technology” agencies might still require you to submit CD’s or DVD’s. They are relatively few though so I’ll assume they accept that you upload your images over the Internet.
Make a final check to make sure you upload the right images and use the upload interface the agency provide. It’s usually self explanatory how to do it so I won’t bother you with too many details here.
After you bumbled through the previous steps a number of times you’ll realize you need one extremely important tool to save time and reduce frustrations to a minimum.
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The greatest lesson I ever learned about microstock photography is that key-wording is extremely important. It’s not sexy or fun but this is where you eventually will crush your competition if you do it right. Most of your competition will luckily do it completely wrong so you can get an enormous advantage here.
Listen carefully.
Some microstock agencies have millions of images in their databases and the method the photo buyers use to find the right image is to search for certain keywords they think is relevant for the image they need.
It works much in the same way as when you search for something on Google. You type in a few keywords and Google presents the result the search engine think is relevant.
But Google and all other search engines have a big problem with images.
You can easily see what the image is all about just by taking a quick glance at it but for a search engine it’s not as easy. They are simply clueless if you don’t help them to understand what the image is all about.
No one will find your images if you ignore to include relevant keywords.
Tagging your images with relevant keywords is an absolute must if you want the photo buyers to find your images.
Not just one keyword but many keywords (as long as they are relevant).
In most microstock sites you also can write a short description and a headline to your images. Also use this opportunity to try to get some important keywords.
Here’s a few important types of keywords you should try to include:
Note: Include as many keywords you can as long as they are relevant but do not include irrelevant keywords just to come up on the search engine result page.
You have two options to upload the keyword to the agencies website.
Embedding the keywords in the image is obviously preferred because you only have to do it once and get the keywords automatically uploaded to the site. You can save lot’s time if you submit images to many stock agencies.
The problem with embedding keywords in images is that you need special software to do it and not all stock agencies support it. You also need to decide which keywords to use before you upload your images (but you can always add keywords later).
If you decide to manually type in the keywords you can simply create a simple text file with keywords for each image and simply copy and paste the keywords to the website. This is also fast and easy so don’t panic if you can’t afford software to embed keywords or don’t know how to do it. This is how I started out and often still do.
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It’s potentially dangerous to ignore this step when you make your image submissions to microstock agencies because you might end up as a jailbird or end up in the poorhouse if you’re not careful.
You need to have a basic understanding of the law before you make your first submission. It’s luckily not that complicated and the most important parts can be condensed in a few bullets:
I recommend you always try to get a model release whenever you can. Imagine Coca Cola offered you $20,000 for exclusive use in one of their campaign and you didn’t have a model release. That would suck, right?
Both you, the stock agency and the end user could be sued if you break the law so always be careful with commercial issues.
I’ve created a free video to to help you stay on the right side of the law. Watch the free video by clicking on this link.
Disclaimer: I’m nor a lawyer neither a professional on legal stuff and I recommend you always ask for advice by a trained professional.
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Even if you’re images are technically perfect they might be rejected if they are useless for commercial reasons.
Here’s a simple checklist with common commercial issues that could get your image submission rejected:
Always read the submission guidelines carefully and weed out images with questionable commercial value.
Note: here you should put the highest priority on images that falls within the market you identified in step #1-4.
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