Hi & welcome back! NiltoMil is officially off and running again – I’m keywording, submitting, pushing images and then working on shooting some new today.  I’m going to be pushing some older images even though I know they won’t sell as well as I’d like simply because I want the momentum to begin NOW not in a month when I get new stuff edited.

I’m ready for 2010!  January will be a very poor month since I’m starting so late but February should show some recovery.

In the last 6 months when I was mainly gone:

• Shot weddings – and we have 4 other photographers who shot during that time as well.
• Sold my house/bought a new house – a fixer-upper.  We’ve been working on it almost everyday since Nov 20th for 12+ hours per day.
• Delved into the food styling/preparing/photo world.  I’ve read almost every post on Still Life With, Matt Bites, and many other foodie blogs.  I’ve devoured four entire food photography books including Rinder/Smith’s new book and Lou Manna’s classic.
• Redesigned our business brand
• Traveled to Maine, twice.  Traveled to NYC.

Now that I’m back my goal is to create an income that will pay my mortgage first, other bills later.  Our mortgage is $680.  This is an achievable goal that I do have to reach for. I’ll do a more extensive goals post in the next week or so but that’s the start of it.

Current BME: $575.46, July 2008

Lookstat offers a trial of their new keywording & uploading back office services.  25 images will be uploaded to up to 10 sites for no charge, no strings, no payment info given.

Now, before anyone asks, you do have to provide your microstock site credentials.  If you aren’t comfortable with providing this to a service provider you need read no further.  Understandably, you’re not going to be interested in this service.  That’s the first stage of getting setup.

Onto my trial!

I ftp’d the 25 images to Lookstat and a few days later started getting confirmation of the accepted and denied images.  I did nothing much in the middle except look at the keywords and approve them.  While in this step you can update, add, remove, change anything you want.  They did a pretty good job on mine though and I didn’t change a lot.

For me, the trial went extremely well.  The images were uploaded, they were almost entirely approved and the rejections were for image stuff not keywords or model releases.

The PROS

Most of the non-creative work taken care of for you.

Better keywording than you probably do on your own.

More time to be shooting & editing.

The CONS

Cost – contact Lookstat for details but it’s not the cheapest service.

Time – the ramp-up time killed me. FTPd the files, waited…waited…then started seeing them.

Handing over credentials – some people will find this a major con.  I don’t, but …

Doing 10 sites for me meant that I had to do the rest on my own – which means either waiting longer to get the keyworded images to sub to my other sites.

Conclusions: Am I going to do it?

For now, no.  During our wedding offseason I’m full time at stock so I have all the time in the world now to edit, keyword, upload and push images through.  This is MY job for the next 6-8 months.  Unfortunately once weddings start in June I will lose all the momentum I build this winter.  I may use Lookstat then to keep uploading for me.  The more images I can get edited between now and June the better, no matter how many I can keyword and edit.  I’m still going to shoot to do as much as I can but it feels really great knowing there’s some backup to keep my flow going.

I encourage any Q&A in the comments – I know Rahul reads them and will respond.  I would love for him to jump in and explain the ramp-up time better than I can as well as anything else he’d like!

Let me quote myself.

I am not going to stick around and pretend to be something I’m not.  Too many people set goals and fail to reach them, yet still continue the journey unfazed.  I often share my experiences and ideas in hopes of helping you.  If I can’t help myself first, I can’t help you.

If I fail to reach both goals (10k images, $25k for the year) by 12/31/09, NiltoMil.com will close for good whether I continue to shoot microstock or not.

At this point in the year it is obvious that I will not reach 10k approved images OR $25,000 this year.

I am modifying what I wrote above.  I am not going to destroy or delete Nil. I am going to stop posting earnings, stop posting ideas until they are working better.  I AM going to keep Nil up for the archives and the posts that often get referenced.  I AM going to continue to put up posts of interest to me – whether that’s of interest to anyone else or not.  My journey will continue.

I need to help myself first.  I need to figure out the steps I should be taking to reach my goal  and when I do, I’ll be back full force with the full effort I can give Nil.  Until then, expect sporadic updates on what I’m doing, how stock is going and what I am trying to do to improve.

I’d like to address something – the time I spend on microstock.  I think some people who read this blog are slightly confused about me slaving away and getting nowhere.

In July, I added 15 new images to my sites.  That means I worked on it for under 1 hour in July.  I made $500 in July.

In June, I added 150 new images.  About 4 hours of work.  I also made $450.  I’ve now in 2 months made $950 on 5 hours of work.

In May, I added 160 new images.  About 4 more hours of work.  Made $400.

Grand total: $1400 while doing 9 hours of work.

What I need to do in order to increase my earnings is actually work on microstock.  I do need to continue improving – I’m just really starting my second year of being a stock photographer.  I need to upload with momentum – that’s proven very successful.  But I’m not sitting here day after day churning out work that isn’t selling.  I’m just simply not putting in the time.

Why?

Our studio has 4 photographers, we’re currently hiring 2 more and we’re going to do between 40 and 50 weddings this year combined.  We’ll likely do another 150 portraits and next year will come close to 70 weddings/250 portraits.  Our wedding and portrait business has brought in over $100k each year for the last 2 and will do so this year and next as well.  I am also in the midst of building a studio management software for photographers that will track clients, billing, orders, calendaring, expenses/taxes, and task management.  It’s a huge project but one I love doing.

All that to say, don’t cry for me, Argentina.  I’m here, I’m going to continue working on micro when I can.  Right now I’m being torn in 3 directions and this one is the least of my issues.

So I know I’ve gone about two weeks since the last update.  I’m still here – it’s just that season.  We’ve been meeting with brides a lot, shooting some early season engagement sessions, finishing taxes for 2008 and yes, working on a business plan for a new software we are developing.  So let’s take that in order.

Brides and weddings and such are the main thrust of our business.  We own a studio of 4 photographers, each shooting 15-30 weddings a year.  I do all of the editing, most of the marketing and a good deal of the shooting for it.  It has been interesting balancing a “shoot and edit quickly” type of thing like weddings with a “Shoot and then photoshop as good as you can no matter what” type of stock shoot.  I think sometimes I try and edit stock too fast which is why it ends up in rejection mode.

Taxes basically suck.  The more money I make from stock, the more I pay in taxes.  With our wedding business we have figured out where the expenses will go, what we’re spending on so we’re not paying taxes on EVERYTHING, etc.  Stock is basically using the same gear I already have, a few travel receipts and tons of income proportionally speaking.  Making $6000-10,000 in a year is good.  But when you only keep $3500-6000 of that, you have to wonder what you’d need to make for it to be worth it!

Oh and our business plan – we are creating a software for small service business management that will basically do everything – track clients, appointments, shoots, income, invoices, tasks to be done, everything.  It’s going to be amazing and should be done late summer, early fall assuming we can find ANYONE to finance us.  If and when that happens I’ll be sure to post about it as well.  I’m really excited for the possibility of solving some of our problems as well as helping others with it.

So that’s my last few weeks – Sarah’s still shooting and I’ve done some editing.  I think I have 300 edited but not yet keyworded to get on.  That should be a good goal for the next few weeks – keyword everything, edit more, get a few 100s submitted.

Coming up soon on NiltoMil: Picniche’s toolbars, Photoshop tutorials including “Editing without a mouse” and “Workflow Speed 2.”  With the trouble Cushystock has given me lately I may also pull out a Prostockmaster vs. Cushystock post.  Stay tuned (and visit the sponsors to the right who help keep us here!)

Most bloggers in microstock are very polite, respectful and friendly to everyone.   I try to be the same but there are some times and some issues that push my buttons and I think it’s appropriate to respond to issues that come up.  I would like to say that I will talk to, help and work with any agency that wants to listen.  On the other hand, I don’t feel bad for the agencies that get upset by criticism and don’t change.

(Short version: I’m going to bust some chops.  Don’t like it, fix it.)

• Categories – I would love to know the stats on images bought through categories vs. keywords.  Are these seriously necessary?
• Shutterstock refusing to update the photographer side of the site (views, easy image management, etc).
• Banning & removing contributors for having differing opinions on how things should work.
• Fotolia flat out changing the rules mid-stream without telling anyone ALL THE TIME.
• Flat sales in a down economy – this is when we should be picking up new business partners for life.
• 123RF’s negative review wording “bad this” “poor that” “Snapshot” – ack!
• Editorial captioning rules that are ridiculous – and this includes almost every site that allows editorial images.
• Some sites show off work on their main page that has blown highlights, poor lighting, and looks awful.  It wouldn’t be accepted if you submitted it today – don’t show it off!
• Submission processes that take too long: IStock, Fotolia and several smaller sites – I’m talking to you.  This is a time-oriented business.  Make it FAST for us.
• Small sites that promise to do things different and get no sales.  Ever.  That’s not different.  That’s the same if you’re a small site.  Here’s a hint: photographers + images + sales = more of all of the above.  Thousands of images with no buyers, thousands of buyers with few images – neither works.  Stop trying to do it overnight and BUILD your site.
• Inconsistency.  I subbed 50 to a site and 45 were rejected.  I resubmitted in anger the same exact 45 with *no* changes and 43 were accepted.  Please. Fix. This.
• Make things easy – how many times do I have to repeat this on the list for stock sites to get it?  Not just submissions – make getting our money easy, make resubbing for missing model releases easy, make updating an image data easy. (thank you Bigstock for nailing this!)
• If I submitted an image 3 years ago and I have better PS skills now, allow me to replace the image with a better upload without losing all my stats, views, etc.
• Sites without FTP annoy me.
• Great looking/usable sites without views/sales/revenue – what IS that?  You have the site right.  Just sell.  If you can’t sell, close the business.  This business is ALL sales.
• Get rid of images 4+ years old with no sales.

Okay I’m done for now.  Please feel free to comment, wish me luck in my next career…(laughing), etc.  Someone has to say it.

Thanks to a little prodding from Rahul at Lookstat I’ve come up with an easy way to startup an advertisement on NiltoMil.  This year we’re going to work on filling these ugly black squares with some great advertisers who can offer NiltoMil readers something worth having (I’m not going to approve any ads for junky stuff.)

So the new page is at
http://www.niltomil.com/advertising

All of the options now include a 1 month, 6 month and 12 month price.  We are offering a free trial on ALL subscriptions. For month-by-month subscribers, you will get a free week trial.  For 6 month and 12 month subscribers, you will get the first month free.  So if you’re interested in being in front of the NiltoMil readers please hit that page up and we’ll get you running!

Note: pricing is locked in for as long as you maintain a subscription so it’s worth jumping in early.  As of today here are some stats about our blog:

RSS subscribers: 105 (Feedburner)
Avg visitors per day (last 30 days): 215
Avg visitors per day (Sept 1-30): 75
Pagerank: 3
Google “microstock blog”:  4th
Average time on site: 5:20 (Analytics)

As you can see by the September and January traffic, the blog is growing quickly.  I hope to continue that by posting a lot more in 2009 than I did in ‘08 as well as our base starting to grow.  At any rate, I hope this is the last I’ll ever post about advertising so thanks for bearing with me.

A couple people lately have asked me for the new ThinkTank link now that the old program has been moved out and the new one moved in.  No more cameraclubadmin for us!  To order from ThinkTank through NiltoMil go to:

http://www.thinktankphoto.com/affiliate

Enter the NiltoMil code: AP-216

Should your order exceed $50 (and it usually does), you’ll also get a free gift of your choice.  Last time I looked, the free gifts are the All The Other Stuff ($34.95), Bum Bag ($34.95), Lens Drop In ($34.95), and Lens Changer 50 ($27.95).    That may have changed by the time you read this.

Note: Sponsors help us do the cool things we do like our trips and push us further than we would have been able to go.  I know people dislike “ads” but supporting a FANTASTIC company like ThinkTank is a small thing to do when the products are amazing and necessary to us as photographers.  I hope you can share my support for a great company and help us keep doing what we do.

© Tomas Marek, Dreamstime.com

It’s not quite the end of the year but it’s a great time to review my last year of microstock.

We were not microstocking in January or February. While we’d been part of this industry and have had images online since 2004, we uploaded very few new images in 2007 and the start of this year.

A conversation in late February prompted me to start researching more about microstock photography. I found out about the success of people like Yuri Arcurs, Andres Rodriquez, IOFoto and Vegas Visions Studios. I learned more about Lise Gagne and started reading Microstock Diaries and Micropayment Photography.

As March started up, I thought it may be a good idea to change direction from my “search for passive income” to my current NiltoMil.com site so I changed format for this blog to strictly microstock.  A search for other blogs to monitor and read quickly pulled up several on my feedreader. I currently read:

Microstock Diaries – Lee Torrens’ great site

All You Need to Know about Microstock Photography – Todd’s site

Yuri Arcurs blog – Uhh…by Yuri, of course.

Pixels Away – Marek

JRTB – by JRTB

Captured Little Moments – no longer a microstock blog

Lookstat – Rahul Pathak’s microstock stat tracking service

Snapvillage – although not updated frequently enough for a company blog

Microstock Photography Blogspot – CJ’s site

Microstock Junction – Lorraine’s blog

Driftless Ramblings – Allen

PDTNC – a new one on my list

MelastMohican

(now that I’ve added the links, let’s see who has Google Alerts setup for their names/blog  names)

Once March was over, I knew we could “do” this microstock thing.  We went from an income of $85 to $189 with little effort.  Our portfolios increased by approximately 90 new images per site.  April and May we turned up the speed to see what we could do.  We grew portfolios by 300 and then 350 images a month.  Our income in the same time grew from $189 to $350 and then $450.  The increases from our work showed us our future in this business.  We started to believe we could get enough images online to pay our bills and then much more with new images.  I still believe a consistent effort will get us there very quickly.

June and July were also months things improved.  Our income rose to a high of $575 on 1250 images.  Not bad but we hadn’t seasoned in images at Dreamstime OR Fotolia and we had not done nearly a single new image on Istock – plenty of room to grow!

August through October are difficult months for us – wedding season is cranked up, we’re shooting a lot and editing all the time and NOT for microstock.  We added zero new images from August 1 through Nov 1st on most sites and our income dipped to 66% of our high.  The strangest thing that happened was Dreamstime kept rising.  No matter what we did, Dreamstime income gained & gained as the images seasoned in – definitely an advantage to multiple pricing levels!

November ended our run of NO microstock work as we added 50-100 new images across most site and finished pushing some queued images we had left there from July/August.  Our income rebounded from $380 in October to $450 in November – more in line with our income from May when we were starting to add more images.

We learned a LOT in microstock this year – from how to add IPTC data before upload to how to upload to multiple agencies at once.  Both are huge timesavers, which matters a LOT in the micro world.  We also made new microstock friends – Todd at Micropayment Photography, Lee at MSD, Leaf (Tyler) at Microstock Group, Bobby at VVS and many many others.  We continue to learn from those photographers and microstock afficionados and a lot of our success is attributable to their influences, help and work on getting us up to snuff quickly and efficiently.

Our two microstock and travel sponsors came on board this year – ThinktankPhoto and Pro Photo Rental.  Both provided us with new gear to use on our October trip and we appreciate their support and hope 2009 is productive for all of us!

This year we increased our income from $2700 total to $6400+.  We have more than doubled but that’s not good enough by far.  Our goals for 2009 are to increase from ~$500 to ~$5000 a month by next December.  We would like to add roughly 10-15k images to our portfolios and we’d love to start pushing IStock images harder.  Our goal is to reach $50k on our total earnings as fast as we can.   That’s a good start on our ultimate and real goal of hitting $1,000,000.

Another goal for 2009 is to add more sponsors/advertisers to N2M.  We keep them fairly well contained so they don’t take over the whole site but by adding advertisers, we are able to become 100% focused on microstock AND this blog – to spend the time to help, educate, learn and teach that we need.

So that’s 2008 – and here comes 2009.  Don’t forget that you can follow our progress on here and also at our spreadsheet on Google.

Thank you ALL for reading NiltoMil.com  I appreciate everyone who’s taken their time to bookmark, subscribe, read us, link to us, and sponsor us.

I received a note this week from Brian at ThinkTank that the new Street Walker bags are out!  I’m excited about these!  I may even try to convince Brian to send us one so we can get into it!  haha

First of all, you can download the full press release here.

The StreetWalker comes in 3 configurations – StreetWalker, SW Pro and SW Harddrive.  The HD one fits a laptop in it – VERY cool!!  The Pro is little bigger than the SW and the HD is a bit larger than the other two.

I’m excited about this bag because it’s something I need – a way to transport while ON a shoot.  My current bag is the ThinkTank Accelleration.  I LOVE my Accelleration but it’s HUGE.  It’s actually a very heavy bag to carry and Sarah can’t use it.  She loves her Rotation 360 but it doesn’t work as well as she’d like at carrying a “lot” of gear.  We need something in the middle of the two and this may fit.  The ability to carry the laptop around as well is super bonus!  When I don’t want to bring our Airport International Roller this is awesome!

Just a disclaimer, we ARE sponsored by ThinkTankPhoto although I’d tell them if I didn’t like this bag.  If you’d like to order a new StreetWalker or other ThinkTank bag please use our referral link:  http://thinktankphoto.com/cameraclub/ and enter the code CC-166.  This way ThinkTank knows we’re sending them customers and will continue to sponsor us in the future!