Photography Business Tips: 7 Tips for Stock Photo Selling
If you wish to make money, photography consumers are easy to find and there are millions of them. What they don’t want to pay in high prices, they make up for in volume. This means that aquantity mindset (in terms of exposure) is key. The best success formula is exposing your work to more people, but selling it for less. Choose a market niche and multiplythe ways that people can discover your work.
Here are 7 Tips for Stock Photo Selling:
1.What works best is uploading lots of photos.
Creating a huge inventory of quality stock on a vast range of subjects. In fact, there are so many popular stock photo sites online that it’s best to try selling your work through several different services. This exponentially increases the likelihood that many people will discover your images and pay to download them for their projects.
2.Choose the right photo agencies to associate your work with.
Click around and explore. Note the types of images stocked, and determine whether yours are on par with their style and quality. Check the amount of traffic images like yours get; pay attention to the number of times those images have been downloaded.
3.Categorizing images properly is crucial.
Photo buyers shop by category, so sellers need to showcase their images in as many as make sense. So getting your photos listed in all the right categories ensures they appear in front of the right audiences. 4Similarly, assigning keywords to your photos provides them an even stronger chance of being found by searchers. Keep your keywords simple and accurate. The people in charge of stock photo sites don’t take well to sellers using improper keywords to tag their images. Doing so will slow you down in their approval process – or worse.
5.Look through your stored photos and ask yourself why someone would buy each.
Can you envision it on someone’s brochure cover or on a company’s website? If so, do any minor editing via software such as Photoshop or the free Paint.net program to boost quality and marketability. Now upload it to as many stock photo sites as you can!
6.Once you wet your feet, start shooting specifically to sell.
Have a potential buyers’ markets in mind. To realize sales, photos must be commercially viable. Embrace the area in which you excel and go for marketable compositions.
7. Save your earnings and upgrade your lenses.
Take a digital photography course and read all you can. Work to continuously improve your technique for cropping, color balance, composition and other key elements that make or break someone’s interest in downloading your work on stock photo sites. Find your formula and push it to the limit.