Quick Update

November has been pretty good so far. According to the Yuri Arcurs Projected Monthly Income Calculator, I'm on track to meet my $20.00 goal (if my sales continue through the end of the month, of course).

The front runners for this month have been surprising. iStock has dominated my sales, followed by Fotolia, BigStock, and Dreamstime. Last month, the big site for me was Stockxpert. I have yet to get any sales at SXP this month. So it's interesting how things are flopping back and forth between the agencies.

I am in love with iStock. I have made 4 sales totalling $7.44 (my portfolio only has 10 images). My views seem to be consistent (even though I drastically cut down my keywords) and my commissions have been outstanding - even on subscriptions. Granted, it's a little tough to get images approved through them, but once they're in, they do seem to sell. I hope the trend continues.

Also, I downloaded DeepMeta last week for my iStock uploads. I highly recommend this program to anyone that uploads to IS. As you already know, after uploading your images, you have to go back in so that you can clarify keywords, select categories, etc. DeepMeta allows you to do this for your entire batch of photos at one time so that when you click submit, you're done. You don't have to follow through with the extra steps. They also have great reporting features that allows you to check all of your sales, approval ratios, lightbox additions, etc. And it's free, so that's always a plus :-) One downside, though, is that I can't seem to opt-in to the partner program through DM. I have to go back in and do it through the IS website. Does anyone else have that problem?

Finally, I'd like to voice my disappointment over one of my agencies, CanStock. I hardly get any views and have yet to make a single sale. They seem to approve pretty much all of my submissions, so I wonder if they're just overloaded with images and the buyer can't locate my contributions. Or maybe there are no buyers. I've decided to give them 6 months. If I don't see an increase, I'll probably drop them.

People have often said that if I like iStock, then I will love Shutterstock. My next application is coming up in a few short weeks, so hopefully I'll have some good news to report!

Here are the links to my current portfolios:

iStockPhoto

Fotolia

Dreamstime

BigStockPhoto

Stockxpert

123RF

CanStockPhoto