If have basic photography skills and you are looking for a way to make residual income online, you may want to consider selling your photographs on microstock photography websites. These websites are an online marketplace for digital photography. I have been submitting my stock photos to microstock websites for the past two years. I now have over 300 approved photos on some websites and I typically earn between $200 and $300 per month in residual income.
If you are not familiar with microstock, let me tell you how to get started selling your photos online. First off, you’ll need to have an eye for getting a good shot and a camera that takes photos that are at least 4.0 million pixels. For example: a photo which is 2400×1800 adds up to a total of 4.32 million pixels – a photo of this size is valid – however, a photo which is 1000×1600 adds up to a total of 1.6 million pixels which is smaller than most website’s minimum size requirement. A digital SLR with multiple lenses is the best choice for those who are serious about making money selling photographs online.
Now the trick is finding out what type of photos you should take. The best way to do this is to browse through the top 100 images. You will find this link by going to the microstock website and then clicking on the link that says “Most Popular Images”. Take a look at the top images and you’ll notice that the quality of these photos is very high. You don’t need perfect photos to make money selling your photos online, but your photos do need to be good enough to pass a check by website’s reviewers. Typically I get about 60% of my images approved. Although it is frowned upon by many microstock photography websites – I do sometimes wait a month or two and resubmit rejected images. Many times these photos will get accepted on their second time around.
If you want to take photos at home indoors, you can set up your own mini-photography studio and create images at your convenience. Set up a small table and some lights and you can shoot food related shots, which are very good sellers. This is called table top photography and believe it or not there are photographers who make their living doing table top photography alone. From what I have seen however, the best sellers are photos of people and vectors. Getting high quality photos of people can be tough and when you do submit these photos, you’ll need to get your models to sign a model release. This release tells the microstock agency that these models are giving up the rights for their image to be purchased or sold royalty free.
People also sell illustrations in vector format on these websites and in many cases these illustrators make even more money that the photographers. There are some folks earning thousands of dollars per month in residual income through micro stock websites. One example of a photographer making a ton of profit is Yuri Arcurs. He is known as the top micro stock photographer in the world. Yuri makes over $10,000 per month in residual income from his photos.
If you decide to pursue micro stock photography, you will probably face a few hurdles getting started. But those people who are committed to creating high quality photos with great concepts can be rewarded very handsomely. Make a commitment to submit a certain number of photos each day and you will see the financial rewards in no time! Before you know it, you’ll have created a stream of residual income that has limitless growth potential. Happy shooting!
