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.

Ok, I know Powerweek was over awhile ago and I haven’t written.? To be honest I needed time to think about my next steps.

Here’s what happened

I submitted 550 images in 4 days.? Easily enough to beat the 700 in 7 days mark.? The “fail” for Powerweek v3 was our image quality.? On day 4, we had a BUNCH of images reviewed across many sites.? And the results were absolutely terrible.? Not my editing, not my keywording – but I had 4000 trip images to sort through and many were unusable at 100%.? I hadn’t noticed that while culling in Lightroom but upon closer inspection I knew it was going to be a hard week.

The second major issue we ran into was overdoing it.? Honestly it’s not a great idea to submit 1000 images in one week.? You lose the benefits of continued growth and spread as well as you “feed the beast” once instead of continually, which results in another loss for you.

1) My process ARE better.? I could easily edit and key MORE images than I should rationally submit in a week.? I like that.

2) I still need to get more new images up – we had several shoots since Powerweek which has kept me busy and one of our major goals is to improve our photography dramatically in the next 12 months.? I definitely think that will help all around.

3) Our trip images were not what we needed.? We had a great time, I’ve sorted through and picked another 1200 or so we can use but overall the images themselves were iffy at best and not very good stock.? Lesson learned.

What’s Next?

I think my next goal will not be a Powerweek but a Growth Month.? I would love to grow our gallery fast still.? I think a better way than 700 in a week and 150 for the rest of the month would be 50 new images uploaded 3 times per week.? 150 new images a week for a year is not enough but I can add some in whenever possible to add to that.? I still want 10k up by the end of this year although I’m not certain I will close N2M if I do not, given our new education.

I still need – I still hunger.? I have to work on my lessons and what is next for us.

? 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.

Yuri Arcurs, the world?s top selling microstock photographer, just recently became officially sponsored by Hasselblad and will produce exclusively with the Hasselblad H3D-II-39. Only a handful of photographers world wide are sponsored by Hasselblad.

Most microstock photographers who are into the business at all know Yuri. Most also probably know about his Hasselblad sponsorship. I think that?s FANTASTIC for Yuri and I also get inspired and competitive when I hear this sort of thing.

We?re competitive by nature – we wanted to let Canon know that anytime, anywhere you want to throw down against Hasselblad and Nikon in this race, we?re in. I?m easy to find – matt@niltomil.com or comment here.

(Short addendum)

Dear Yuri,

You have ABSOLUTELY no idea who I am. You will.

Love,

Matt

Leaf had an interesting question in the Microstock Group Forum – What are your lifetime microstock goals?

Like many photographers, my goal would be to travel all over the world. I would love to have the resources to drop everything, fly to Europe and shoot for a month. I would like to see Africa, revisit the Great Wall of China, freeze my butt off in Alaska. Life is not a journey, it?s an experience. For me, traveling would be that ultimate experience.

My top places to visit, not in any particular order:

1 ) Hawaii – I want to take my parents to Hawaii before it?s too late. My grandmother wanted to visit Hawaii and never had a chance to visit. My mother has internalized this dream herself and I feel like I must make it happen.

2 ) Australia – home of my best friend and kangaroos. What better way to spend winter in NY than NOT IN NEW YORK?

3 ) Africa – Kenya, Egypt. I would love to see the desert and the sand. View the pyramids and see old Cairo.

4 ) Italy – mainly Venice, Rome and Tuscany region. To drink wine and float down the rivers (I?ve heard gondola rides are not all that in person – I?d still like to!) And spend a relaxing week at a home in Tuscany – relaxing so far from everything I know.

5 ) The Galapagos Islands. They were on my short list of honeymoon destinations. I would like to see things you can?t see anywhere else, to experience what Darwin saw. I am about the experiences and nothing can beat seeing creatures that just shouldn?t exist, living in the wild.

6 ) Ireland. Green and castles. That?s what I think of. And rain. I would love to see the old Irish land, castles emerging from the hillsides. Stonework, architecture – what a great getaway.

7 ) Alaska – there?s something about being thousands of miles from anything you?ve ever known and in a situation beyond your immediate control that feels freeing. I speak from experience having spent a year in Korea alone. Alaska is another exotic must on my wish list.

8 ) New Orleans – strikes me as something everyone should do once. An interesting place, from all I?ve heard.

9 ) All 50 US States – what can I say, I?m a guy who likes statistics and completing tasks. 50/50 is a great stat!

10 ) Cheju Island, South Korea – I was ill and had a twisted ankle the first time I went. I would like to go back, healthy and ready to see the island for all it has. I had so many beautiful ideas about my trip there and they turned out to be ? less than ideal. I would like another chance at Cheju.

How do you make all your dreams come true?