Monday, March 9, 2009

I will be RICH........................

First of all, there are very few get rich schemes on the planet. Stock photography is a real job, just like any other. You will get out of it what you put into it and there are no real short cuts other than reading this blog or others like it where people will tell you about their trial and errors.
When I started, there were no keyword tools (or none that I knew of), so I had to come up with as many keywords to describe the image accurately as possible. Now if you think that cutting and pasting takes a long time, try it on your own. This alone would be enough to deter 50% of the people from selling stock.
For those of you who don't know, keywords describe the image accurately, there are generally up to 50 and they are located (after you put them there) under keywords in the metadata.
Metadata is defined as "data about other data" which seems kind of confusing to me but essentially it's data about the image.
Things like shutter speed, f/stop, white balance, creation date and yes, keywords. These keywords are the basis of search engines. If you type in baseball, you get instant results. It's the same way on the stock sites, type in what you are looking for and the results are immediate.
So whether you start with a traditional stock house (very hard) or a microstock agency remember it's a numbers game. It will take some time to get, let's say 1000 images online. In the beginning you might not have a sale for weeks only to find out that you made 25 cents today. Wow! I'm not getting rich very fast at this rate. However, over time you will get to the 1000 image mark and you will see that you are consistently making money. So do your homework, study top selling images on the sites (most downloaded) and try and figure out why. Look at the top selling categories and plan some shoots using that theme to go on.
Business, finance, healthcare, family are all good starting points.
So before you start shooting aimlessly, do your homework!