If you’re looking to make money with photography, you’re in the right place. This is the second post of a series on how to make money with microstock sites. If you haven’t yet, be sure to check out: How to Make Money by Selling Photos on Microstock Photography Sites Part 1.

People like people

Other types of images that are high in demand at stock photo sites is of people. The thing to remember is that microstock sites will require you to submit a model release form for any images with people in them, so be sure to obtain a form from your models before you submit any photos of people to stock photo sites. Photos of people doing business, or dressed in corporate style clothing can be quite valuable. Whether they’re standing together and just posing (but clearly in a business environment), or in action giving presentations, running meetings, working collaboratively, etc. These photos can be highly sought after by businesses and corporate customers.

Use the seasons to you advantage

Seasonal images can also be great for stock photo sites, as business will need photos for seasonal advertisements and sales. Just think of what the stereotypical images of winter, spring, summer and fall. If you have snow in your area, take photos of people (especially kids) playing in the snow, or of just different objects in the snow – use your imagination. For spring, flowers, rainbows, plants, gardening, cleaning, etc are all types of photos you could take. In summer, the beach, barbecues, swimming, tanning, hiking, or any other summer activity would be great to photograph. And in the fall, the leaves changing colors, people raking, harvest photos of veggies, could be good candidates. Also think about holidays and structure your photos around Valentine’s Day, Labor Day, Halloweeen, Thanksgiving and Christmas – what kind of photos could businesses use for those holidays?

What sites to use

There are a variety of sites and I’ll just list a few here. I’d recommend you start with these sites, but also feel free to conduct your own searches and see what works best for you. Shutterstock.com is pretty popular, and the way it works is that people pay for subscriptions to download up to 25 photos a day. Because of the mass quantities of photos, photographers usually only make about 25 cents each time your photo is downloaded. But it is easy to use this site, and if you have lots of photos you can submit them and over time you’ll get more and more downloads! Istockphoto.com is another good site. You have a chance to earn more money per photo, in the range of $1 to $10 or more each time your image is sold. Additionally, the more photos you upload and customers download your photos, the higher % commission you will get paid per photo. Other sites include canstockphoto.com, fotolia.com, and bigstockphoto.com. Good luck submitting to microstock photo sites!