Sell Your Photos & Videos Online

By Daniele Carrer

By selling my photos and videos online I have earned more than 100 thousand euros, thanks to microstocks: agencies that provide webmasters, marketers, documentary directors and anyone who wants to buy content created by others to use on their projects.

As a photography enthusiast, I traveled the world with my reflex camera paying for flights and hotels with the sales of my images and videos. This was incredibly satisfying, but not easy at all, as I had to learn which subjects sold the best, how to describe my pictures and footage to be found by customers, and how to organize the production to be more efficient.

Over the years I became so professional that in the end I was able to give up my job and start living the life I wanted.

For those who want to start today, no big investment is needed: uploading to microstock sites is free, and the only necessary equipment is the camera you already have, or even your smartphone.

The real challenge is understanding what photos and videos the buyers want. If you don't get the help of someone who has studied this business, you will have no chances for making good money.

The earnings I got prove that I am the right person for you, and the explanations that I give in "Sell your Photos and Videos Online" will make the difference between making small change and creating an income that can improve the way you live.

Daniele Carrer

• Language: English
• Publisher: Daniele Carrer
• Release date: Aug 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393166870

Book preview

What is microstock?

Since the early 2000s, photography and video enthusiasts have been making money by uploading their work online. Despite what the average person might think, this has not happened due to social media, which some people seem to think is a factory churning out new millionaires every single day. Instead, success has come through microstocks – agencies that specialize in selling content (stock images and stock footage) to multimedia producers. In many cases, those who sell their content on this market earn just a few bucks per month. But there are also people who have professionalized the business, with some earning more money than professional soccer players.

You might not notice it, but the world is full of content bought on microstocks. On the Booking.com homepage, if you see pictures of places from around the world, it will almost certainly not be the webmasters who shot those photos; rather, freelance photographers uploaded them to websites like Shutterstock and Adobe Stock. The same is true for many billboards you see on the street, for the leaflets in your mailbox, and even for most book covers.

For several years now, microstock – which started out offering only stock images – has been expanding to incorporate other types of content as well, such as music, sound effects, graphics, and, particularly, footage. When you see a show on National Geographic in which a voiceover is playing over footage of different situations, that footage has likely been purchased from a microstock.

Producers use this means because it is much more convenient than creating the footage they need from scratch; besides being expensive, shooting film yourself requires organizing a film crew and sending people to multiple locations, massively slowing down the production process. If, instead, producers source their footage from stock agencies, they need only carry out a quick search to access millions of high-quality pieces of content, which they can then download immediately at a low cost.

Stock content existed before the internet. It was sold at much higher prices via catalogues and cassettes. However, the creation of stock images and stock footage was handled only by large studios, as the equipment needed to produce the content was incredibly expensive. Over time, the technological revolution changed the landscape of buyers and producers. Today, some Academy Award-winning movies are edited with the same free software that I use, and you need only a cheap camera to create quality stock images. Therefore, the main suppliers of microstocks have become independent producers who can easily adapt to the everyday changes in the market.

Around the world, more than one million people sell photos and videos online, even though it’s not that easy to make good money with it. Contributors who want to earn thousands of dollars per month – even those who would be happy with hundreds – must work with a production strategy and learn how to use the right tools in order to achieve their goal. These are pieces of software that most good photographers and video makers would probably already be familiar with, as well as online services created specifically to improve the saleability of stock content.

Everybody in this world wants to make money, and doing so by practicing your passion is the greatest pleasure. But I'm not here to tell you the fairy-tale that anyone can sell the photos they would normally just post on Facebook. And I'm not even saying that all professionals can simply use the technical skills they already have to make more money in a new marketplace. I know this will disappoint most of the people reading it, but the earnings I have generated on microstocks over the last fifteen years prove that, to be a serious contributor, you must keep learning every day of your life and be patient and humble. If you can do this, the work will eventually pay off.

The importance of creating a passive income

Photography and video making are the best tools for making money on the internet today, and microstock is the best starting point for those who don't know anything about online business but who want to try it. To explain why, I'll tell you the story of my Italian blog – stockfootage.it, the first commercial online project I launched in 2015.

At that time, except for the production of stock footage, my internet usage consisted only of reading the news and watching videos I found on YouTube. Like everyone, I was curious when I heard about influencers making hundreds of thousands of dollars publishing stupid photos of themselves holding some product or marketing their own lipstick brands. I also wanted to earn money, but even though selling my photos and videos online had taught me something about online business, I didn’t know how to achieve such a high level of success.

After about a decade of production, I had started to feel like being just a stock image and footage contributor was keeping me in a small cage. It was not a matter of profits; it was simply an awareness that the internet was huge and that considering only one kind of business was limiting my potential. Being a microstock producer, I already knew a little about marketing, search engines, and production processes; it was a pity that I wasn’t applying this knowledge to other projects as well.

The first good decision I made was launching a project based on something about which I already knew a lot: microstock. That way, I could dedicate all my time to deeply studying the things I needed to learn to be successful, such as copywriting, sales funnels, and web design, because I already knew everything about the topic of the website.

The two assumptions I made when I launched the site were:

I had to be proactive in finding an audience, because if people didn’t know about the site then they wouldn’t visit it.

I had to monetize from day one.

Many professional photographers who try to sell their stock images make two mistakes:

They think their technical skills will be enough to draw in customers.

They do not consider the fact that getting steady earnings is crucial if they want to continue producing.

Forming a strategy to ensure that people who are interested in buying your product find your website should be the first concern of every online business. For a professional project to be successful, it must make money. Otherwise, you will always find an excuse to do something else, be that resting on your sofa because you're tired when you come home from work or looking for a different business.

With my blog, I didn't want to launch just another average photography enthusiast’s site, which would start with a couple of articles being published a week only to peter out after a few months because of a lack of time and interest on the part of its creator. I knew that I could use my experience to teach others how to be successful with microstock, and that the best strategy to make a profit from teaching is to produce a large amount of free content to prove that you are a master of your subject, alongside paid content containing the better part of your knowledge.

This is not easy because it takes a long time to start earning enough money to make online teaching a full-time job. The revenues I initially received from my video course wouldn’t have been enough even to allow me to work on the website for longer than a few hours a week.

However, stock footage and stock image sales are passive income. Though I had stopped producing stock content to devote myself completely to my blog, I was still earning enough through microstock to pay my bills while investing my time in something else. Thanks to that money, I was able to create a professional blog and reach an audience which, after a couple of years, was providing me with a real salary.

The strategy of living on the passive income of microstock royalties (and then of other automated businesses that I launched) while working on new projects has allowed me to expand my business, even if not all of my ventures are successful. In a world where banks don’t help people like me, if I hadn't had the passive income of stock footage to support myself when I was focusing on other online businesses, I would still be a clerk in a department store with a small second income and no motivation.

Everything has its strengths and weaknesses. When it comes to microstock, I will always believe that the former massively outweigh the latter. Unfortunately for newbies, however, the downside of a passive income is that they must wait months to see results – and in a world that runs so fast, waiting is not easy. The satisfaction that you get when someone spends their money on your content is enough to keep you going at first; after that, only money can encourage you to keep producing.

For this reason, one of my greatest challenges is to convince the hundreds of photographers I introduce to the microstock business to also create stock footage, which is far more profitable than images. It is also much easier to create than some might think, as many photographers already have the skills needed to succeed. This is because:

The dynamics of subjects in stock footage are low. Therefore, the framing rules are the same as for static photography.

Video editing for stock footage is elementary; you just have to choose the best ten seconds of the segment you’re working on and cut it using a technique that can be learned in a day.

No great investment is necessary; aside from the camera that every photographer already owns, only a tripod and free editing software are needed.

The reason why many photographers fail to take this step is the same reason why two billion people connect to Facebook every day: an unwillingness to step outside of their comfort zones. It’s not easy to step away from the easy and the familiar, but the reward of receiving your first sale notification from Pond5 is well worth it. It can happen at any time, but the situations that give you the greatest satisfaction are when the message arrives as you’re leaving a movie theatre, or enjoying a lazy Sunday afternoon at the beach. It’s not only because you’ve earned money while relaxing, but also because you believed you could achieve success in a business that many claimed you’d never succeed in, and now that belief is paying off.

Thanks to microstock, I’ve experienced so many little moments of revenge: the revenge of someone from a small town that, in a globalized world, seems to have become a place for people who don’t dare to aspire to anything better; the revenge of proving that, to reach your professional goals, only merit counts; and the revenge of someone who worked hard to build something better for themselves rather than doing nothing and hoping that the solution to their problems would simply fall from the sky.

Every sales notification I receive tells me that I was right.

School didn't teach me the skills I use today

My last school experience was in 1996. I had only one classmate who regularly went on the internet, taking advantage of the connection at his father's office. It was a world that, today, feels as distant as the Stone Age.