Many don’t know how much money there really is to make in micro stock photography. These sites allow for the average photographer to compete with the big professional photographers by selling their pictures online to designers and businesses. These images usually sell for an average of about $1 per image and many photographers on Istock, Shutterstock and Dreamstime have hundreds of donwloads per day. That is well over $200 a day with just the pictures that are sitting on those websites.
There was a recent study done with some of the top sellers on Istock and it was found that some of photogs on there were making in excess of $10,000 per month. That’s not a bad living, especially considering that many of them had other sources of income as well.
And that’s one of the great things about micro stock. You can make money while shooting weddings, events, or whatever and still be making money while you sleep with your images sitting on Dreamstime and Istockphoto.
There are many designers who just got sick and tired of trying to find the perfect image and decided to take them themselves. Some have even quit their full time jobs to shoot micro stock photography and are seeing huge success. But with more people entering the market you need to be better than ever to stand out from among all of the talent that is already there.
There are still others making thousands of dollars just by selling their photos one download at a time. It is exciting work as you can travel anywhere to find just the right image that you know will sell and it can take a fair amount of patience as well. Once you figure out which pictures will be accepted you need to know what pictures will also sell like crazy. If you can find that hot picture that all of the designers want than you can do very well. Get ten of these top sellers and you will be well on your way to quitting your own day job to work with micro stock photography.
