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STEP #7: Select stock images with good technical quality

April 19, 2010 By nrjberg Leave a Comment

OK, so now it’s time to select images with good technical quality.

Here’s a simple checklist with common technical issues that could get your image submission rejected:

Image noise
Blurry or unsharp images
Chromatic aberration
Interpolation artifacts
Color cast
Dust
Leaning horizon or leaning buildings
Contrast issues
Badly exposed
Wrong file formats
Wrong resolution
Excessive sharpening

Always select ONLY your VERY BEST images for the first image submission because the QC controllers will be extra thorough in your first submission.

Even worse, if you fail to get only one image accepted they might reject your whole batch, especially if it’s you’re first submission.

Read the submission guidelines and make sure you don’t violate any technical requirement.

Next in line is to make sure you don’t end up as a jailbird but more about that in the next post.

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Filed Under: Microstock Tutorial Tagged With: Chromatic Aberration, Image Noise, Image Submission, Interpolation, microstock photography, Photography Agencies, Photography Agency, Photography Tutorial, Stock Images, Stock Photography, Submission Guidelines

STEP #6: Select one (1) agency

April 18, 2010 By nrjberg Leave a Comment

OK, so next episode in this Microstock Photography Tutorial.

You need to keep things simple so start with only one agency in the beginning to avoid being overwhelmed by different requirements and submission guidelines.

You can and absolutely should scale to many more agencies after a while but more about that later.

Based on the notes you took in step #5 you now need to make your second strategic decision.

High commission is obviously good
High #visitors per months is good
Requirements on exclusive rights is NOT good unless they pay a huge commission
It’s good if the agencies style and markets they target is a good match with your style

You must now decide which stock agency to “attack” and soon we come to the fun part

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Filed Under: Microstock Tutorial Tagged With: microstock photography, Photography Agencies, Photography Tutorial, Stock Agency, Stock Photography, Submission Guidelines

STEP #5: Shortlist Microstock Photography agencies

April 17, 2010 By nrjberg 1 Comment

Now you need to find a microstock agency to sell your images so now it’s time for some fun and shortlist all microstock agencies you’re interested to work with.

Take some notes about each agency you shortlist:

Commission they pay per sale
Requirements of camera equipment and images
#Visitors per month
Style and niches they specialize in
Do they require exclusive rights
Who retains the copyright
Licensing (Royalty free / Rights Managed)

Here are two great resources to find the traffic (# visitors to the site):

Please remember that the information you find at these sites aren’t exact but they give a good indication. You should not compare the numbers between alexa and quantcast so use only one of the sites to compare the traffic between the microstock sites.

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Filed Under: Microstock Tutorial Tagged With: Camera Equipment, Images, microstock photography, Photography Tutorial, Royalty Free, Stock Photography

STEP #4: Determine A Niche For Your Microstock Photography

April 16, 2010 By nrjberg 1 Comment

Time for next step in the microstock photography startup checklist:

The perfect market is a market with:

Lot’s of hungry buyers
Limited competition
Something you’re passionate about

You should know what you’re passionate about but how do you find markets with hungry buyers and limited competition?

Easy, you spy on your competitors and photo buyers. It’s a bit sneaky but it’s perfectly legal and it’s a brilliant method.

Just go to iStockphoto.com or any other microstock agency and they will disclose this information for you if you know where to look at it.

Think about it for a while. The number of downloads is the same as demand. Many downloads of an image means lot’s of hungry buyers right?

And the number of images in a certain market is the same as competition, right? Many images means lot’s of fierce competition.

Here’s a screenshot from the worlds largest microstock agency where I’ve marked how you can easily find markets with lazy competition and lot’s of thirsty (even hungry and desperate) buyers by using readily available information.

See how incredibly easy it is to spy on your competition and photo buyers?

Let’s take this screenshot from iStockphoto below as a practical example on how to calculate a good market.

All you have to do to find a market with hungry buyers and limited competition is to divide the number of downloads with the number of images for a certain market. The higher ratio you get the better market.

In this example we have 400 downloads / 980 images for the market trout fishing which gives us a ratio of 0.408. To make sure trout fishing have enough depth you can take the average downloads of the first 10 images and divide with the number of images.

Just make sure you use the same method for all markets/keywords when you compare them

Your first strategic decision is now to decide which market/niche to enter.

Later you’ll expand to more markets to enter to really explode your sales but I’ll come back to that at a later post.

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Filed Under: Microstock Tutorial Tagged With: Images, Istockphoto, limited competition, microstock agency, microstock photography, Perfect Market, Photo Buyers, Trout Fishing

STEP #3: Research for lame and lazy competition

April 14, 2010 By nrjberg Leave a Comment

You might have found a market in step #1 with lot’s of buyers but what if the competition is grueling?

Your next task is to identify a market with limited competition and the best tactic I know to identify lame and lazy competition is simply to spy on your competition.

It’s easy, it’s ingenious and it’s a remarkably easy way to do it as you’ll see below.

Keep on reading next post (coming tomorrow)

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Filed Under: Microstock Tutorial Tagged With: microstock photography, Photography Tutorial

STEP #7: Select stock images with good technical quality

STEP #6: Select one (1) agency

STEP #5: Shortlist Microstock Photography agencies

STEP #4: Determine A Niche For Your Microstock Photography

STEP #3: Research for lame and lazy competition

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