Earn Residual Income Selling Your Photos on Shutterstock

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If have basic photography skills and you are looking for a way to make residual income online, you may want to consider selling your photographs on Shutterstock. Shutterstock is an example of micro stock photography. I have been submitting my stock photos to Shutterstock.com for the past two years. I now have over 300 approved photos on this website and I typically earn between $100 and $150 per month in residual income.

If you are not familiar with Shutterstock, let me tell you how to get started selling your photos online. First off, you??ll need to have an eye for getting a good shot and a camera that takes photos that are at least 4.0 million pixels. For example: a photo which is 2400?1800 adds up to a total of 4.32 million pixels – a photo of this size is valid – however, a photo which is 1000?1600 adds up to a total of 1.6 million pixels which is smaller than Shutterstock??s minimum size requirement. A digital SLR with multiple lenses is the best choice for those who are serious about making residual income selling photographs online.

Now the trick is finding out what type of photos you should take. The best way to do this is to browse through the top 100 images. You can find this link by signing up with Shutterstock here: Shutterstock and then clicking on the link that says ??Most Popular Images?. Take a look at the top images and you??ll notice that the quality of these photos is very high. You don??t need perfect photos to make money on Shutterstock, but your photos do need to be good enough to pass a check by Shutterstock??s reviewers. Typically I get about 60% of my images approved. Although it is frowned upon by Shutterstock ?? I do sometimes wait a month or two and resubmit rejected images. Many times these photos will get accepted on their second time around.

If you want to take photos at home indoors, you can set up your own mini-photography studio and create images at your convenience. Set up a small table and some lights and you can shoot food related shots, which are very good sellers. This is called table top photography and believe it or not there are photographers who make their living doing table top photography alone. From what I have seen however, the best sellers are photos of people and vectors. Getting high quality photos of people can be tough and when you do submit these photos, you??ll need to get your models to sign a model release. This release tells Shutterstock that these models are giving up the rights for their image to be purchased or sold royalty free.

People also sell illustrations in vector format on Shutterstock and in many cases these illustrators make even more money that the photographers. There are some folks earning thousands of dollars per month in residual income through micro stock websites such as Shutterstock. One example of a photographer making a ton of profit is Yuri Arcurs. He is known as the top micro stock photographer in the world. You can visit his website at http://www.arcurs.com/

If you decide to pursue micro stock photography with Shutterstock, you will probably face a few hurdles getting started. But those people who are committed to creating high quality photos with great concepts can be rewarded very handsomely. Make a commitment to submit a certain number of photos each day and you will see the financial rewards in no time! Before you know it, you??ll have created a stream of residual income that has limitless growth potential. Happy shooting!

You can visit Shutterstock’s website here: Shutterstock

Let us know what you think about this review of Shutterstock, if you have compliments, complaints, comments or you think it is a scam – let us know by commenting below…

Best regards,

Michael-John Wolfe

TAGS: Residual Income, Make Money Online, Royalties

One Comment to “Earn Residual Income Selling Your Photos on Shutterstock”

  1. Tresame24 26 June 2009 at 12:59 am #

    Thank you for this review. I recently joined shutterstock.com and have submitted about 20 images or so now and have made a whopping $1.75 in the first week. Haha! But…since I have to wait until I earn a total of $75 (paypal) or $300 (physical check) before there is even a payout I imagine it will be a while before I see it’s worth if there is any. So, like anyone, I am suspicious of it’s validity. So it’s nice to read a few positive things about it. We shall see.


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