HOW DO YOU MAKE MONEY SELLING STOCK PHOTO?

Getting started as a photographer selling stock photos on Dreamstime.com is simple. Take good quality images, upload them to the site and enter relevant metadata (Title, Description and Keywords) to help buyers find them, and wait for sales to roll in. The more high quality, in demand images you produce, the more you can make through the site.

It doesn't matter that much if you're an amateur or a professional photographer, selling stock photography is an activity open to everyone, and a good opportunity to generate some passive income from images which otherwise wouldn't have an immediate use and would just be buried on some hard drive indefinitely.

There's a span of time between the moment you're thinking of selling your photos on a stock photo agency and your first sales. No one can tell how long will that period will be, but the best time to learn about how the stock photography industry works is before uploading your first images and starting to build your portfolio.

Pro tip: you should learn about model releases, the difference between commercial and editorial licenses, payment structure and possible stock photography earnings to make this activity work.

Then, you should develop some kind of strategy, to increase your selling chances. Most stock photographers are looking at other popular photos and try to copy them or shoot the same images in their own vision. This could work for a short while, but the results won't be spectacular in any way and the passive income they're dreaming of would soon become active income, meaning they would have to produce stock images non-stop so they could compensate the lack of inspiration with quantity.

Instead of this approach, the best way to build a successful portfolio is to research the photography topics already uploaded by fellow contributors and find uncovered niches to fill.

Selling photos online may not be rocket science, but there's still some time needed to figure out the best way to develop a workflow.

Like everything in life, you can get more out of your sales the more you are willing to put into the process. Here are a few tips to help you sell your photos online on Dreamstime.com.

1. Exclusivity

One of the biggest impacts on earning potential is the issue of exclusivity. If you choose to upload your stock images only to this agency, you are rewarded with a larger commission percentage on credit sales – or a larger per image royalty per subscription download – but you will also receive the benefit of enhanced search result placements for your images. Exclusivity can be for the contributor’s entire account – or it can be assigned at the image level – both reward you with larger payouts per download.

Exclusive contributors may also benefit from better copyright protection, as it would be easier for a stock site to chase any license misusage.

2. Load Additional Format

Where appropriate, load additional formats for your images. These can be vector files for illustrations, clipping masks for isolated objects or the camera raw file. When sold via credits, these can be lucrative transactions and may considerably increase the sale price.

3. Extended Licenses

Ensure you have extended license options selected – these are options to buy additional rights for Unlimited Seats (U-EL), Print (P-EL) or Web (W-EL) usage that translate into larger net sales. You can view of modify the rights on all you images at any time by using the Manage Licenses option in the My Files section of you Dashboard.

Two other options that can add significant passive income are the Sell the Right (SR-EL) and Time Limited Exclusivity (SR-EL 1 and SR-EL 3). As the name implies, these options transfer the right to the image to a third person in perpetuity or for a specified time period (one or three years) so the decision to offer these options should be taken only while weighing the consequences.

4. Great metadata

Having great metadata on an image will mean that they will be returned more often in relevant search results. Title, description and keywords you attach to each image are the primary way a potential buyer has to find and download your stock images.

Title should be meaningful and briefly describe the picture. “Serenity” means nothing to a search engine. “Spa Concept with Massage Stones and Flowers” is a much better example, when you're actually into selling photos.

Description should be just that. A clear concise description of what is in the picture and the overarching theme or concept. Repeating key words or phrases in the title and description will help give them better weight in the searches as well – but overloading this area with meaningless or irrelevant words will have the opposite effect on your images.

Keywords are the main resource used by search engines. The goal is to use as many words as are absolutely necessary to convey the what-where-why-how-who of an image, but no more or no less. Relevancy is important, so try to avoid any possibility of falling into the spam area.

Getting your images in front of buyers will help to increase their sales potential, and the Dreamstime.com level system will allow for increased earnings the more an image is sold.

5. Assignments

Having images accepted into the monthly assignments provides several ways to earn additional income. First, all images in the assignment must be exclusive to Dreamstime.com providing the revenue bump described above. Secondly, images accepted in assignments are placed directly into the Level 5 category translating in higher earnings potential. Last but not least, if your images win any of the first three places in any assignment, you will win cash prizes (up to $300).

Keeping some of these ideas in mind when you are uploading content to Dreamstime.com can help you maximize your income on the site.

So, as you can see, it can be easy if you want it to be, but just having a camera and uploading your photos on a website won't make you rich overnight. You have to put some effort into it, learn the process, apply some kind of strategy and be patient. The money will come for sure.