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STEP #12: Wait for approval

April 27, 2010 By nrjberg Leave a Comment

After you uploaded your images you usually have to wait a few days before you know if they are accepted or not. If you followed the advice in the previous steps you have a good chance to get them accepted in your first attempt but don’t give up if you failed the first time.

If they are rejected you need to find out why. It’s not always easy because many agencies just say “rejected” and leave some vague reasons why. Analyze all information you have and redo step #7-12 again and do NOT give up. It sometimes takes a few attempts but eventually you get the hang of it.

If you’re images are approved then congratulations!

After your images are approved you still have some work to do. First you have to give the images a title and don’t forget to include the most important keyword in the title if possible.

You also should write a short description of the image and here you should also include keywords whenever you can.

If you didn’t embed the keywords in the image you now need to copy and paste your keyword from the text file to the web interface.

REMEMBER: Keywords are extremely important to make your images visible when the photo buyers search for keywords. Without relevant keywords your images exist in vacuum and will not be noticed.

OK, so you have now passed the 12 steps to a big profit microstock photography business is ready to try your wings but guess what…

There’s More To Come

I have added two more steps that will transform it from being a “big profit” microstock photography business to a “kick-ass mega profit” photography business.

The last two steps is what separates the leaders from the followers in this business so read, underline and memorize the last two steps.

But before you continue – you need to promise me to take action. It will make you no good if this information ends up slumbering on your hard drive or as a nagging thought in your brain making you feel as a procrastinator.

Next step is due tomorrow so stay tuned!

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Filed Under: Microstock Tutorial Tagged With: Image Submission, Images, Keywords, microstock agency, Microstock Tutorial, Photo Buyers, Photo Search, Photography Business

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 #1: Research Hot Selling Markets

April 12, 2010 By nrjberg Leave a Comment

The biggest mistake most microstock photographers do is to first take lot’s of images and then hope and pray someone will buy them.

BIG mistake.

It’s like carpet bombing the stock agencies with images and hope some of them will hit the target. I call this the B52 tactic for obvious reasons.

Imagine instead a F15 Hornet take aim on the target, then release the laser guided missile and a few seconds later the competition is annihilated.

That’s what I want you to do, first identify a well defined target with laser precision, take images for that target and sell the crap out of your competitors.

A secret weapon I use to find such a market with hungry buyers is to simply spy on the photo editors. It’s a sneaky but brilliant and perfectly legal.

But more about that in a future post (coming in the next couple of days).

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Filed Under: Microstock Tutorial Tagged With: hot selling markets, Images, microstock photography, Photo Editors, Photographers, Photography Tutorial, Stock Agencies, Stock Photography

STEP #12: Wait for approval

There’s More To Come

STEP #5: Shortlist Microstock Photography agencies

STEP #4: Determine A Niche For Your Microstock Photography

STEP #1: Research Hot Selling Markets

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