Go hard or go home...

If you want to earn more then a few dollars a month from your microstock photos, you need to treat this hobby as a business, and as most people know, starting a new business takes a lot of time and effort in the beginning for little or no return until you get established.  Once your business is established, there is a certain amount of work that needs to be done to retain your market position, and even more work to keep growing your market.

For most people (except for professional photographers), microstock photography is something they do in there spare time outside of their normal day-to-day job and spare time is valuable.  The time you spend on microstock, whether it is for photo shoots, processing and submitting to agencies or marketing your work is time that you don't get to spend with your family and friends (unless they join you in the hobby).  So you need to get the best ROI - Return On Investment (your time) as you can achieve.

To be successful, a business needs to provide a better product or a service then their competitors.  Your products are you photos and you need to produce the best products that you can.  In simplicity terms, the Microstock Contributors are the Manufactures, the Microstock agencies are the Wholesalers and the Microstock Agency Customers are the Retailers. 

In a normal business model, the number of Manufacturers would be small, and they would have the power to dictate the price of their product.  The Wholesalers would be greater in number and select the best Manufacturer for they products and add some additional value to the product before offering it for sale to the Retailers.

In the Microstock model, the number of Manufacturers (Contributors) is large while the number Wholesalers (Microstock Agencies) is small.  This model gives the power to the Wholesaler (Microstock Agencies) to dictate the product prices and selection of products to sell.

How does this affect you as a Microstock Contributor??  It means that you need to produce a large portfolio of work and submit it to a large number of agencies to reach to largest number of customers.

It might make it easier to think of your efforts in the form an formula which I'm going tweak slightly to apply to Microstock- the Drake Equation.  You might not know the name of this formula, but most people will be aware of it.  The Drake equation is an equation used to estimate the number of detectable  extraterrestrial civilisations in the Milky Way galaxy.  It goes something like this:

Take the number of stars that form in our galaxy in a year and divide it by the average number of stars that have planets.  Divide the result by the average number of planets that might support life.  Then take that result and divide it by the faction of planets that might develop life forms.  Divide the result again by the fraction of planets that might develop intelligent life.......etc, etc, etc.

I think you get the idea.  We can apply a cut down and simpliefied formula to our Microstock efforts to calculate the odds of selling a photo.  Some thing like this...

Take the average number of photos that you take during a photo shoot.  Divide this number by the average number of photos that are of an acceptable quality for Microstock.  Take the result and divide it by the average number of photos that are accepted by a Microstock agency and finally divide this last number by the number of photos sold.

((( No. Photos Taken / No. Acceptable Quality) / No. Photos Accepted) / No. Photos Sold)

Example:  If I average 300 photos in a session, but only 10% of these are of an acceptable quality, I would only be able to submit 30 photos to the Microstock Agency.  Of the 30 submitted, the Agency only excepts 10% of these photos for their library, that means that I have 3 photos for sale on their site.  Of the 3 photos, I average 1 sale a month.  It means for every 300 photos I take, I average 1 photo sale a month.

That is a lot of work for a very small return.

There are things that you can do to increase your odds of selling a photo...such as:

• Increase the number of photo shoots - this should be a no brainer
• Increase your skill level - the more photos that you have that are of acceptable quality the better
• Submit to multiple agencies - the more agencies that you are signed up with the greater number of potential customers to buy your photos
• Market you work - advertise your work on social media and get more potential buyers looking at your work on the Microstock sites.

Here is another example but with increased numbers based on the above suggestions:

If I still average 300 photos in a session but do 5 sessions in the month, I would have 1,500 to start with.  I've now increased by photography skill level and 30% of these are of an acceptable quality, I would be able to submit 450 photos to the Microstock Agency. I'm now signed up with 10 agencies and each agency accepts about 20% of the photos submitted.  This means that each agency has accepted 90 photos for the month, which takes my accepted photos for the month across the agencies to 900.  If I still only average a 33% chance of a selling a photo, this works out to 30 photo sales per month per agency - or a total of 300 sales for the month.

What it all boils down to is that you need to be doing a lot of work and continually increasing your photography skills to make money in this field.  There is no easy or fast way to make a quick million in Microstock.

Cheers
Fiona