How to Boost Stock Photo Sales?

This article is a continuation from March 22 on methods to enhance image sales on stock photo sites.

Boost Exposure with Free Image Downloads

If you’re new to stock photography, this section’s title might surprise you. Here’s the reasoning: some stock sites have free sections where you can either directly upload your photos and illustrations for free distribution. Why is this helpful?

Posting photos and illustrations in the free download section often helps to increase stock photo sales by sparking interest in your portfolio among buyers who download your free images.

Use screensavers

This unique approach hasn’t been fully explored; it works for some but not for others. Nevertheless, it’s worth trying as a method to promote your portfolio.

Create a screensaver showcasing a rotation of your images and offer it as a free download on screensaver hosting sites.

Importantly, ensure you subtly include a link to your stock site portfolio within the screensaver.

Improve your English skills

The primary buyers on stock sites are mostly individuals from European countries and the USA, who are generally proficient in English. Therefore, steadily improving your English can help you better understand buyer demands, connect with international contributors, and adopt useful practices.

Moreover, strong English skills will enable you to promote your work on relevant blogs and forums.

Create a blog to announce your work

If you have a good command of English, consider starting a blog to showcase new images to your portfolio. Ideally, create a separate website with a .com domain using a free platform like WordPress.

Remember to implement basic SEO practices for better search engine indexing and populate it with content.

Your blog content could feature short articles in English about stock photography, general photography or drawing topics, or personal stories. This can help attract a loyal audience of regular buyers.
If creating a blog independently is challenging, consider using a free platform like LiveJournal or Blogspot. Some stock agencies even offer their services for such purposes. For example, Shutterstock provides a Shuttertweet service for this.

Track and analyze trends on stock sites

Do you regularly review trending search terms on stock sites and track best-selling images? Why is this important?

Monitoring stock trends helps you understand current demands. To do this effectively:

• Understand current market demands.
• Create photos and illustrations on trending topics.
• Refrain from directly copying popular images.

Since the original will still hold priority in sales, your work would remain in its shadow, gaining only a small share of sales.

It’s better to develop a popular theme or, even better, to evolve it creatively to avoid plagiarism claims. Keep an eye on top-selling photos and illustrations, gather inspiration, and get to work!

Avoid self-competition

Many microstock contributors, noticing that an image in their portfolio is selling well, immediately rush to create similar copies. Where does this lead? Simple: self-competition.

If your top-selling photo or illustration gains relevance through high sales, and you then create a legal competitor for your work, what happens?

Now, buyers on the stock site have options, and selling of photos and illustrations will start splitting between two, three, or more works, depending on the number of copies.

It’s naive to think that total earnings from all copies would exceed the income from a single bestseller without self-competition. Additionally, your original work’s relevance in the search results will decline.

What’s the best approach? For instance, if a photo of a girl with a jump rope is selling well, avoid creating similar shots of her in different lighting or angles. You already have a hit image showcasing her ideally.

Instead, consider photographing the girl with a ball or hoop, or capturing other children playing. Then, you could organize a lightbox themed around children’s games and list it as usual. The popular image will attract attention to the lightbox and all its content without diminishing its own success.

When you notice that your popular image’s sales start to decline significantly, you might then consider creating similar versions. The original photo or illustration may remain among the top-selling stock images for a while longer but will gradually lose its position, giving other images a chance to succeed.

Automate the process

Try to achieve maximum automation in processing, attributing, and uploading your photos and illustrations to stock sites. To process images, use actions; for attributing, apply templates by theme (while remembering the importance of specific attribution for potentially top images).

For uploading, it makes sense to use programs that support uploading to most stock sites.

Believe in Yourself

At certain points in life, we all experience creative slumps, loss of interest in work, and perhaps even loss of confidence in ourselves and our abilities. This can happen for many reasons.

It may stem from reaching an income level on stock sites that seems impossible to exceed, which is what we’re addressing in this article.

What can we say about it? Don’t stop believing in yourself — things will work out, and you certainly won’t make things worse. The worst you could do is delete your portfolio from the stock sites.

Otherwise, illustration and photo sales on stock sites will continue regardless of whether you manage to overcome your creative slump.

Perhaps all you need is a short break from work to let everything fall back into place.

Don’t Forget About Inspiration

The muse isn’t always by our side; sometimes, she drifts so far away that you need to work to find her again. I previously mentioned the inspiration that can come from browsing top sales on stock sites, and now let’s look at other ways to get inspired.

Who are our clients on stock sites? They are designers, advertising agencies, newspapers and magazines, webmasters, and regular internet users.

Try observing how stock images are used; search for your own, browse stores, and look at various ads.

Try analyzing which theme is currently most popular in the media and what is most used in advertising for that theme — demand for this topic is likely high with limited supply.

And look, inspiration is back, isn’t it?

Work with Quality

I already mentioned improving the quality of your equipment and software. But you should also focus on improving the quality of your work.

Very often, there are photos that you spend days editing in Photoshop, removing noise here, fixing artifacts there, erasing some writing on a tree, or an out-of-place bird in the sky. And in illustrations, sometimes you just forget to close the curves.

In short, strive to work with quality — it will save you a lot of time, allowing you to create more new work in the same period.

It’s not always possible to strictly follow these quite sensible recommendations for boosting stock sales, but at least try to address the weaknesses pointed out in your stock work. The effect of increased earnings on stock sites won’t be long in coming.

I’ve only shared what I’ve personally tried or learned from other professional microstockers. Surely, there are many other equally effective ways to boost stock sales.

Seek and you will find!

This article is available in the following categories: About Microstocks