In the beginning.......

I graduated RIT in 1984 with a degree in professional photography and immediately embarked into a full time assistant position in Dallas, Tx. While assisting, I ran across many photographers who shot stock and after many conversations I had a strong desire to shoot stock. After investigating the top agencies and submission requirements, I postponed my interests for 20 years, big mistake!
With the advent of digital cameras and the progressive advances in image quality, combined with the ever falling prices of prosumer cameras, anyone can claim to be a photographer. Gone are the days of paying you dues as an assistant, just add a digital camera and your a photographer. What's funny is many of these instant photographers cannot even tell you what an f/stop is. Now that's scary! If I may be so bold as to offer up advice to people that want to be known as photographers, take the time to learn the technical aspects of your camera, lighting and photography in general.
In 2006, I came across an article on iStockphoto, my interests were renewed. With traditional stock houses accepting submissions only one time a year or having enough contributors at the time, iStockphoto made sense to me. I have always followed upcoming trends and tried to go in that direction, trying to maintain an edge ahead of the curve.
Many photographers claimed that there was no money in it, took up too much time or would not sacrifice their images for pennies on the dollar. Most of those images are still in file cabinets or on hard drives gathering dust. With a little initiative, these dormant images could be making money on a daily basis!
Case in point, top selling microstock photographer Yuri Arcurs has taken his career in stock photography to new heights. If you ever have doubts about making money in microstock, read the many posts about Yuri's success! If that doesn't give you some incentive then you should probably be looking at a different career.
So I started in 2006 and have put a few images up here and there and then started putting images up more often. Let me tell you that when you had to come up with 50 keywords for each image, it was very time consuming. You got a great rush out of your first sale and then realized it was only 33 cents on your end. I put up more images and got a few more sales but nothing consistent. Time passed and I sort of became disenchanted with the whole process. Then with the economy changing and more photographers entering the marketplace, I saw that this could become a great revenue stream if properly attended to.
If you want to be successful (like Yuri) then you have to eat, drink and sleep photography. If you approach it as a casual relationship you will get an equal return.
So in conclusion, you must first research the stock sites for what is now selling, plan each and every shoot, select the very best images, retouch any possible objections, keyword (very important) and submit all the time. If you think the image is just okay and you know you could do better, then don't submit it and create the better version. Stock image reviewers reject tons of images, so when you submit a substandard image, it not only waste your time but theirs as well creating a bottleneck causing longer approval times.
Welcome to the world of stock photography!