Stock Photography is time consuming
Today's message to all of you that are looking for some more information about how to get into stock photography and video is very simple.
Do not believe in any videos or blog posts making 4 and 5 digits in income when it comes to stock photography. They are bluntly lying in your face, and they probably just want your engagement or capture your email. Even worst, try to sell you a "course" with their secret on how they have done it.
I am not saying that is impossible, but if you do a quick research you will see that many of the photographers that are out there sharing their stories and all the information, it is not as easy as the majority make it seems.
And most definitely it won't make you a lot of money quickly.
Now if you are up to put some work, if you have the time, and want to work on maybe get a consistent amount of money getting in every month from your stock portfolio, you better be ready to put on the work and the time.
You might be thinking that you have there thousands of images that can be uploaded and ready to be used, and that is amazing. A great start, you can cut on the editing time. But that is not all you have to do when you are using microstock agencies to get your images licensed.
The process it timely and also can be a little bit tedious. So be ready for that.
With this I am not telling you not to do it. Just want to give you another perspective that is more real to what really happen in the space, so you are not going in with such high expectations that in the end will make you give up and stop because you were not prepared for the work and the possible lack of results in the short term.
I just want you to be aware and prepared for what's to come.
Now you know, stock photography and video it is very time-consuming, it requires a lot of hard work in the behind the scenes and also will probably not bring you any return for a while.
I would say that if you want to start doing it, see it as something you can do as much as you can daily in any spare time, try to schedule that time of the day, and do not stop. If you keep growing your portfolio a little every day, who knows in the future that income will be something nice.
Why is this so much hard work and time-consuming?
1 - You need to have photos (A LOT)
2 - They need to be edited
3 - Uploaded to possibly multiple microstock agencies
4 - All need to be titled and have a description
5 - Photos must be keyworded to be discovered
Five simple steps, but giving a title, description and keywording all the photos takes a lot of time, specially if you want to do it properly, that you would, to keyword them with the best possible words related with the image, so they will have the best chances to get discovered and licensed. That's probably one of the most important things in all this process.
A lot of people might not do their research or put any effort on those, they might look at their photos and think they are so good that for sure they will be licensed.
That is a mistake. When a consumer comes to the microstock agencies, they already know what they are looking for.
So that search bar is your best friend, whatever they write in there is what you want to have in your keywords, tittle and description. Because if none of the words is there. No matter how good and licensable your photo is, won't appear on the search.
For example, the image below. Think what would people be looking for to find this photo? What would they be looking for on the search bar. Obviously you can go with the more casual words, like roof, building, sky and all of those are good. But there are millions of hits for those words, so probably you have to think, maybe who are looking for this specific image might be looking for a specific type of architecture, add the era, if it is editorial the name of the building, the location, go for words that are more specific to what you are sharing with.
In resume, I hope you start your stock photography and video journey with real expectations and are ready to put a lot of time, work and have the patience to see some results maybe only in the long term.
The Microstock sites I am on:
Shutterstock
Pond5
Dreamstime
Depositphotos
500px