I came across this tip on the Microstock Group site as a way to increase revenue from 123RF. The link is a post from one of the 123RF staff, and explains how you can highlight up to 5% of your images as favorites (or “Faves”) and that those images are displayed earlier in the search results. The site show you how many you can Fave – it was 81 in my case, and so I went through my images and...
What a month! After a couple of barren months, July roared back to give me both a best month ever and also I finally broke the magical $1000 earning level. As an earlier post detailed, I had a number of great sales – $118 on Alamy and $100 on Dreamstime, a couple of video sales for $25 each, and a few Shutterstock enhanced licenses for $28 each. A surprising entry in the list was iSignStock – a UK based stock...
After a couple of poor months, July has been unusual, to say the least. The month started well with the purchase of the full rights to an image on Dreamstime, followed by a couple of enhanced sales on the following two days on Shutterstock – one of our bengal cat with a mournful expression and one of the city of Abu Dhabi. In the meantime, Pond5 came in with two sales from Kauai – one of the pier at Hanalei...
I was very pleasantly surprised to be asked to give an interview with Matt Antonino, the photographer and blogger at NiltoMil.com. Matt is famous for a very aggressive target for his stock photography – to go from zero to a million dollars from the sale of his images. How is he getting on – not bad! I think he is regularly achieving $1000 months now. Anyway, Matt has a weekly “focus” section on his blog and he chose me to...
In the early days (well at least a couple of years ago!), one of the default settings on Dreamstime was that you would offer to sell the rights for your image at a predefined price of $250, of which you would get $125. As this was the default, I left it like that for many of my early images. The site has changed now, and you need to specifically select this option – which I don’t. I was advised yesterday...
I recently sold the rights to an image, and one of the conditions is that I need to remove the picture from all other stock sites, personal sites and exhibitions. Removing it from all the stock sites I submit to was not an easy process, as I had to find out, for each site, exactly how to do it! Rather than forget and have to learn it all again, here is a summary of how to delete individual images from...
Well, time to dust off the camera and get shooting again! June was not a good month for sales with the total not even hitting the $600 mark, ending at $595. The reasons were pretty clear as I looked at the various sites. Although the number of downloads was pretty similar from month to month, there was a distinct lack of any enhanced or higher value sales. In previous months, I was seeing several $28 sales on Shutterstock and occasional...
I spent Saturday at the Maryland Barn Storming event near Frederick where you get to visit eight historic barns in the area, including a fantastic home created out of an old barn. This event happens every year, and is well worth supporting if you are in the area. For me, this was also a great opportunity to try out my new Promote remote control for real. I took my tripod, used the 18-40mm lens for wide angle shots in small...
I have always known that Dreamstime have the unique approach of boosting the cost of an image as it become more popular, and so after 50 downloads, an image moves into the highest price category (Level 5.) I have one of those: This one sells well on a number of sites, and as there appears to be no end to the foreclosures in the US, I hope it will continue to sell. The photo is OK, but not great, technically,...
Don’t get too excited – I haven’t suddenly come across the alchemist’s dream of a way to turn a boring snapshot into a million dollar stock image. But I did come across a very interesting site aimed at explaining the ins and outs of the stock business. The site is professionally put together and focuses more on stock buyers than contributing photographers, but it does give us all a chance to get into the mind set of the buyer –...
