money

f you are not making money with microstock photography, you’re missing out on something that can really be a good additional income stream. It could be your answer to how to make easy money for beginners. Granted unless you go into it full time and at full throttle, the amount earned will probably not be enough to get you that condo, selling photos and images at microstock agencies is one of the few ways of earning you passive income.

Whenever I’m asked what’s the best way to make money online, I always say writing and selling photos at microstock agencies. If you have the talent to write, you can make lots of money without even having a blog or website.

Just go into top making money online forums where there will be a offers thread and list your writing services there. You will get more work than you can handle especially if you are competitively priced. You don’t even have to be an excellent writer since many people need blog posts just to fill up their made for Adsense blogs. As long as you are able to write on a topic or specified niche, you will be swamped. Your earnings are limited only by your ability to churn out articles.

And here’s why I prefer selling microstock photography and images to writing. With writing, you earn with each article or post you write. The earning potential is restricted and limited to one price per unique article written.

With microstock photography, you just have to create the image once and you can put it up for sale – literally forever – without you having to do anything more. In fact, you can put the same image up for sale at multiple microstock agencies. If you are prolific and can produce many images, your income could be quite substantial.

True, the amount paid per image can seem very little. Shutterstock for example, pays $0.30 per sale while for others, it’s $0.50 per sale. But that’s just one image for one sale. You put many images into 5 different microstock agencies and you have a potentially credible source of income. For me, I probably fall into the average microstock earner with several hundred dollars earned a year.

Not terribly impressive but bear in mind that my portfolio is a relatively modest 80-130 images and I didn’t have to do anything more after creating the images, so when it’s several hundred dollars a year for doing nothing, I think that’s not too shabby – it’s one of the easy ways to make money for beginners. In fact, I have been trying to make time to create more images while juggling my other projects. I may have to give up the more time consuming ones like this blog that requires constant new content.

Another thing that’s good about microstock photography is that there’s no promotion to be done on your part since the site is used by targeted traffic. People go to microstock photo agencies because they are looking for images to buy. Your job is to create images that are commercially in demand. Beginners trying to make money selling images often make the mistake of creating images that are not in commercial demand which is the main reason why they have problems making money.

The trick here is to browse through the best selling images and see what subjects sell. You can mostly forget about photos of your pets. Remember, they must be commercial images that are used in articles, blogs, magazines and other commercial media. Put aside your artistic aspirations and concentrate on making images that perhaps a financial magazine might need for its article on the economic downturn or rising oil prices.

If you do decide to go into selling images at microstock agencies, stick with the main ones instead of signing up with each and every microstock agency. Less established microstock agencies have a risk of not being able to sustain its business as was the case with Lucky Oliver which has closed down.

The stable microstock photo agencies to join are Shutterstock, Fotolia, Dreamstime, BigStockPhoto and StockXpert and iStockphoto. There are a couple more that you can also try if you are feeling adventurous such as MostPhotos, 123RF and SnapVillage amongst others. It may be a good idea to try them out by uploading just a handful of images to see if the images sell over a period of time. Remember that a big part of getting sales from making money selling images at microstock agencies is creating images that are in demand.