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.

Previous posts in this series:

1. Microstock Photography Tutorial
2. Types of stock photography
3. STEP #1: Research hot selling markets
4. STEP #2: Leverage on your strength
5. STEP #3: Research for lame and lazy competition
6. STEP #4: Determine A Niche For Your Microstock Photography
7. STEP #5: Shortlist Microstock Photography agencies
8. STEP #6: Select one (1) microstock photography agency
9. STEP #7: Select stock images with good technical quality
10. STEP #8: Select images that are commercially useful
11. STEP #9: Remove images with potentially legal issues
12. STEP #10: How To Keyword Your Images