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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 #11: Submit your images to microstock agencies

April 26, 2010 By nrjberg 1 Comment

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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Filed Under: Microstock Tutorial Tagged With: Microstock Tutorial, Photo Buyers, Photography Tutorial, Relevant Keywords, Stock Agencies, Stock Photography, Stock Research, Upload Images

STEP #10: How To Keyword Your Images

April 25, 2010 By nrjberg 1 Comment

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:

Where the image was taken (city, national park, country)
What is in the image (Empire state building, Niagara falls)
Emotions expressed in the image (happiness, loneliness)
Concepts involved (cooperation, complexity, security)
Orientation (vertical, horizontal, panoramic)
Race (Asian, Black, Caucasian)
Age (11-12 years, senior)

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.

Type in the keywords after you uploaded the image and got it approved
Embed the keywords inside the image so they automatically are uploaded when
you upload the image.

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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Filed Under: Microstock Tutorial Tagged With: Irrelevant Keywords, keywording images, microstock agencies, microstock photography, Photo Buyers, Search Engine Result

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 #12: Wait for approval

There’s More To Come

STEP #11: Submit your images to microstock agencies

STEP #10: How To Keyword Your Images

STEP #4: Determine A Niche For Your Microstock Photography

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