Have you tried selling stock photos to micro stock agencies? Have you successfully sold many photos? Or are you struggling to earn any money from these sites?
Selling your pictures online to stock agencies can earn you some serious money but that’s only if your photos are actually selling. When the stock photos you take don’t sell most likely you think “wrong category…better find a more profitable subject to photograph”. Even worse is not getting your photos accepted to the stock agencies. Well…here’s the big secret to stock photos:
The problem is NOT in what you photograph, it’s in two different and extremely important things:
If you are having a difficult time selling your photos online or getting your photos accepted most likely it’s because you are not taking “stock photos”. Just because you uploaded your photos to the stock agencies and they were accepted DOES NOT mean that they are “stock photos”.
What are stock photos? And how can you take stock photos that are hot and very profitable? As you read every word in this article you will discover both the questions and much more…
There are many reasons why your stock photos aren’t selling. Let me ask you a question…when you see an image that looks really breathtaking which of the two do you think? Check which one as your answer.
Well, if you thought that it won’t make money then for the most part…you’re right. Why? What’s the big deal?
Assuming that a good looking image is going to sell is the biggest mistake in stock photography. A great image is essential for stock photography but a stock photo is much different than a regular photo. It has its own language and way of operating. If you can learn this language and become very “fluent” you will be amazingly successful.
Competition is the second reason people don’t make money in stock photography. Go to any stock agency and type any of the following keywords:
I can guarantee you that there will be pages and pages of results for these keywords. What makes you think you can compete against these pictures? Why would you want to?
Sure this photos have lots of traffic and many people want these photos BUT if you’re a beginner your photos most likely will be a blur in the search results….unless you learned how to beat the competition.
Let’s go back to the two problems….they are “taking stock photos that are stock photos” and “competition”.
If you fail to solve these two problems you will not make much money at all. You will be like all the other desperate photographers that flock to the idea of earning money taking pictures. If you are one of these people then you have two options.
You can either remain where you are and take photos that are worth the .25 cents they’re being sold for or you can solve these two problems and become a Stock Photo Expert!
I will show you how to become a stock photo expert but before I do let me tell you a little about myself…
I got into stock photography probably a lot like you. I heard that there was a quick and easy way for photographers to earn money and I jumped onto the band wagon.
I had heard that if you have a thousand photos on these sites you could be making some serious money. So the first thing I did was go out and take as many pictures.
I would go for hikes through the Box Springs Mountains near my house and take pictures of everything I saw…birds, flowers, the sky, everything!
Well…I submitted my photos to these micro stock agencies. I stayed up all night and checked my account every second to see if my photos were accepted. Finally I got the news…over 75% of my photos were rejected.
I was still positive and knew that the other quarter that were accepted would earn me some good money. Weeks passed and I only sold one photo for .25 cents.
I quickly got the hint that micro stock photography was NOT a way to earn money and I rushed to taking stock photos for large stock agencies. Knowing that I would need much better quality images for these stock photos I decided I would learn how to take better stock photos.
Through massive amounts of trial and error I finally found out how to take stock photos that sell. My stock photos were selling so good that I decided to come back to micro stock photography and implement what I learned from professional stock photography into this micro stock photography.
Amazingly I started getting lots of my photos downloaded! I honestly didn’t even have half as many photos as when I first submitted.
Stock photos must be very high quality in order to make money. They must look really good and basically “flawless”. The common belief that “more photos means more money” is true but quality beats quantity any day of the week. A thousand average stock pictures will be not nearly as profitable as a hundred high quality stock images.
When I talk about quality photos I don’t mean beautiful and breathtaking images. I mean quality stock photos. Stock photography is an entirely different language than normal photography.
When learning any new language you must first follow the rules of it in order to get better. One rule of stock photography is to keep the picture as simple as possible. I know you’ve heard of the photo compositional rules that say “keep it simple” and “get closer” or “isolate”. Well…stock photography follows this rule but much different.
The message of your stock photo must be absolutely obvious and easy for the mass majority of society to understand. Subtle meanings in stock photos just won’t be taken in by… Read more…