How to Increase Sales on Stock Sites? (continued)

completion of the article on ways to boost sales on stock photo sites from March 22

Allow free image downloads

Newcomers to stock photography might be surprised to see this section’s title. Here’s the reasoning: some stock sites have free sections where you can either directly upload or submit your photos and illustrations for free distribution. Why is this helpful? Posting photos and illustrations in the free download section often helps drive paid sales by sparking interest in your portfolio from buyers who download one of your free images.

Use screensavers

This approach is quite unique and hasn’t been fully explored — it works for some, and not for others. Still, as a way to promote your portfolio, it’s worth trying. Create a screensaver featuring a rotation of your images, and post it for free download on sites that host various screensavers for visitors.
The most important thing! Make sure to subtly include a link to your portfolio hosted on a stock site within the screensaver.

Improve your English skills

Who are the primary buyers on stock sites? Mostly individuals from European countries and the USA — people who are generally proficient in English. This is why steadily improving your English will help you better understand buyer demands, connect with international contributors, and adopt useful practices. Additionally, good English skills will allow you to promote your work on thematic blogs or forums.

Create a blog to announce your work

If your English proficiency is decent, consider starting a blog to showcase new works in your portfolio. Ideally, create a separate website with a .com domain on a free platform like WordPress.
Don’t forget to perform some basic SEO optimization for better indexing by search engines and to fill it with content. Blog content could include short articles in English about stock photography, photography or drawing in general, or simply stories about yourself. This can help attract a circle of regular buyers.
If creating a blog on your own is challenging, start one on a free platform like LiveJournal or Blogspot. Some stock agencies even offer their own 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 the best-selling images? Why is this important? Monitoring stock trends helps you understand what’s currently in demand. Once you know what buyers want, focus on creating photos and illustrations on trending topics, though avoid directly copying popular images. Since the original will still hold a priority in sales, your work would be in its shadow, gaining only a small share of sales.
It’s wiser to simply develop a popular theme — or, better yet, evolve the theme creatively to avoid claims of plagiarism. Keep an eye on top-selling photos and illustrations, gather inspiration, and get to work!

Avoid self-competition

Many microstockers, 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 starts gaining relevance through high sales, and then you legally create a competitor for your own work, what happens? Now, buyers on the stock site have options, and sales of photos and illustrations will start splitting between 2, 3, 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 best-seller without self-competition. Plus, your original work’s relevance in the search results will decline.
What’s the best approach? Instead of making copies, link related photos and illustrations to your hit image. For example, if a photo of a girl with a jump rope is selling well, don’t rush to create similar shots with 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 at play. Then, you could organize a lightbox on the theme of children’s games and list it as usual. The hit image will drive attention to the lightbox and all its content without harming the hit itself.
And when you see that your hit’s sales start noticeably dropping, that’s when you might consider creating copies. The original photo or illustration may still stay in the top ranks for stock sales for a while longer but will gradually pass its audience to similar works, giving them a chance to thrive.

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 own 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 clear that 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 shall find!