Selling microstock photography has become huge business in recent years digital SLRs keep getting cheaper and the images they produce keep getting better. It appears everyone on the planet must own a camera by this point. Given the recurring financial crises of the last couple of years, it is not surprising that more camera owners are interested in selling photography online for some additional cash.
For pro photographers attempting to make a living selling photography online all this extra competition from the hobbyists has made life pretty difficult. Masses of sites have appeared offering photographers the facility to give their work away for nothing more than small change and the excitement of making a sale. The market has been deluged by cheap pictures and many photography buyers have come to view microstock photography as just another commodity to be sourced at the lowest possible cost.
It’s not all bad news though. In a lot of ways we’ve now come the full circle, and an increasing number of photo buyers are showing a renewed interest in features apart from price alone. For the savvy photographer, this offers a means to stick out from the crowd and define a niche of their own.
Specialized Content:
There’s such a thing as too much choice, and professional photography buyers have had enough of the massive stock libraries with millions of images. Plenty of the photography buyers we speak to are continually looking for new collections that target their interests, and will cheerfully search 4-5 specialist libraries rather than one mega collection.
Most microstock photography articles will tell you to start by applying to the 4-5 largest stock libraries for the maximum exposure but that is only half of the story. Those sites might get the most exposure, but that doesn’t always mean you will get a share of it.
Instead of joining millions of other photographers at the ‘big-four ‘ stock libraries, you’ll do miles better to find 3-4 boutique stock libraries that you can submit to. Pick one photography stock agency as your principal net presence and use the others to re-post your content (photographic and written) and add substance to your net footprint.
Original Content:
If you look around, you will find a heap of ‘experts ‘ who’ll tell you the fastest way to make money with microstock is to look at the pictures that sell best on the major libraries, and copy them. It’s fairly likely this could work for a while, but you only need to see the mass of poor photos of popular subjects to understand why photography buyers are tired of it.
Much better that you adopt a Client-centric approach and think about your end user, who they are and what they need the stock images for so that you can then set about creating photographs they can use.
The best thing about this approach is, you can still check the major libraries to see what’s selling, but then, instead of simply duplicating what you see, you can identify the themes and concepts that the buyers need associated with the subjects, and from there create something fresh and new that you know your buyers will need..
Personal Service:
In an industry where the buyers were always racing to meet impossible deadlines, immediate downloads must have looked a God-send for some time.
As one of the few stock photography libraries that did not offer instant downloads, we definitely felt the pressure when we started. We soon realized though the photo buyer’s top priority was to ‘find the image ‘ and as long as a reliable delivery followed, ‘instant ‘ was not really a problem.
In reality, photography buyers are creative people who enjoy interacting with other creative people. These days we are still finding plenty of top-end photography buyers who are happy to take a little more time and experience the ‘photo research ‘ journey, dealing directly with the photographers, so long as it’s pro and efficient.
So however and wherever you choose to sell stock photographs, ensure you make yourself available to photography buyers. They’ll appreciate it and once the link is created, they will come back to you time and time again.
Value Your Work & Your Time
When you approach stock photography on this principle, you’re actually positioning yourself as a high-end photographer, which helps you stand out from the crowd even further.
Without going into the whole rights-managed vs royalty-free discussion, there are many millions of photographers on the web these days queuing up to give their work away for peanuts, so it you follow the group you’ll be facing enormous competition for the smallest of returns.
By comparison, the rights-managed market is a lot less competitive and pays considerably more, so if you’ve got the prime quality , original content, then it makes complete sense to cut out your own niche there instead. Specialist photographers have always prospered and in the existing market place it’s more crucial than ever that you focus on doing a couple of things remarkably well to sell photography online.
When you specialize your work interests, you narrow your market and you are able to really get to know your buyers. This in turn lets you understand their desires and create the top quality original images that may make you stick out from the crowd. And if you then back each sales lead with outstanding personal service, you will soon build a Customer list that may come to depend on you as a creative partner they’d like to conduct business with.
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