How to get started selling stock photos and vectors on Shutterstock

1. Introduction: high skill chair. I'm an Bracker, and I work from home as a graphic designer and illustrator. I've been a vector artist at shutter socks since 2015. It's my greatest source of income, so that's what I'm going to tell you all about. Today. I have about 6000 images on cheddar stocks, and I really been able to streamline my process and avoid pitfalls. So today I'm going to kind of give you a download of everything that I've learned on Cheddar stock so that you could take that information and do what I'm doing did not make all the mistakes that I made along the way. This class is good for graphic designers. Vector artists, photographers and videographers will mostly cover vectors. But pretty much everything I talk about will also apply to photography and footage. If you want an extra way to make a little money on the side in addition to your regular job , this is a great way to do it. And who knows? After a while, you might be able to completely focus on this as your regular full time job. All right, let's get started 2. Why do companies use stock images?: So why do companies use stock images, stock photos, stock vectors and stock footage? The number one reason is the cost is very expensive to go the alternate route, which is create a photo shoot or a video shoot. It costs them a lot of money to pay a vector artist to sit there and make eye concepts for them. Photo shoots and video shoots are great if they absolutely need custom images, but a lot of times they don't really need custom images, so stock photos and vectors and footage are a good option for them. The nice thing is, with shudder stock, you're not actually selling your photo itself. You're selling a license so that your customers can use it, and a lot of different customers can use the same license on the same photo, so you can continue to make money with just that one photo. The licensing agreement is different for every stock website that you sign up on, so you want to read all of the stock image license agreements for every stock website you sign up for. That way, you'll know what rights you're allowing. Your customers have 3. Pros and cons of uploading stock photos and vectors to Shutterstock: Now we're going to talk about the pros and cons of creating a shutter stock portfolio. First. It's a nice side business. This is something you can do in your free time that will actually make you a little money. If you're willing to commit a lot of consistent time and effort into this to get quality sellable images, you'll almost certainly make some money. You might never be able to quit your job to pursue full time, but it is a nice little side income. The next awesome thing is that it has low overhead. That means you don't have to put a lot of money into this. You just need a computer, a camera. If you're taking pictures or footage and a subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud or some other editing software, and a lot of that, you might already have another. Pretty nice thing is no boss. The great thing about that is you don't have someone giving you changes to your work. You can make those decisions yourself, and you're free to make your own schedule. But on the other hand, you have to be pretty disciplined. Right along. Those same lines is no deadlines. Well, sort of. You actually will have deadlines, but they're ones that you set yourself. You need to set those so that you maintain a consistent upload rate. I personally set deadlines for myself all the time, just so it keeps me on track and I maintain consistency for me. The number one benefit uploading on Cheddar stock is its passive income, and by passive. I don't mean 100% passive, but we'll go over that a little later on. But when I do mean is, you create an icon set or a photo once, and it's on that site forever. It is making money forever, so that's a pretty great thing. And then the last thing about Shredder sack is it has a really great name recognition. Everybody who's in the industry knows about shutter stock, and so you get a lot more traffic to your site. You do not have to drive your own traffic through, you know, Pinterest or Facebook or anywhere else. Cheddar start kind of does that for you, and they actually take a big cut of the profit because of that, too. So that brings us to the cons of uploading your portfolio. Each other stock. So the first kind of negative thing about shutter stock, as you really will make pretty low earnings per sale. For the most part, stock agencies will take most of the sale, but they're doing a lot of work to their, uh, driving traffic to your portfolios. I just mentioned and doing a lot of other marketing behind the scenes. You're probably going to be a little bit put off by that pay rate. At least I was when I first started out. But think of it this way. Are your image is making any money just sitting on your computer where no one could see them? I'm guessing. Probably not another sort of negative. Well, I guess it's more of a challenge. Is the competition. Competition on Cheddar stock is fierce. If you go to shutter stock right now and type in Willow tree, there are over 100,000 results, so you have to figure out a way to make your image is unique. If you go out each other stock and type will a tree with swing, you'll get about 150 images, so if you change something about a normal willow tree and upload that you're going to get a lot better results. Just find a way to make your image is a unique The next issue is is actually quite a lot of work. You'll be taking a lot of time toe, create the images themselves. But then you also have to factor in all that time. It takes to upload the images key word, title them and then write the descriptions. And then you also have to think about all the time you take to research new ideas for new work. Another thing that might discourage you a little about shutter stock is sometimes your work will be rejected. It happens to everybody. And some common reasons for this is your images don't have enough commercial cell ability. Or maybe there are just too many of them already on the site. Maybe something's actually technically wrong with the file. Much other stock generally does a pretty good job of explaining the problem. If you're uploading photos, you might get rejected for, um, blurriness or like out of focus or, um, lighting issues. Those two they are very, very picky about, and then you might even be crossing over into copyright territory. If you have anything in your photo that has a trademark or copyright, they'll reject that. So this would be like a Disney logo or something like that. Now, the nice thing is, you can just fix all those mistakes and resubmit their totally okay with that. The next thing that might pose a little bit of a problem for you is that you're sort of at their mercy. So this is their website, and they can change their processes at any time. So you would have to make changes to your process to accommodate that. They could even close your account if they want Teoh. So just keep those things in mind. I I don't think they'll probably closure account without a very good reason. All right, so those are a few of the pros and cons of applying to shudder sack, but I think you'll see that once you start making a little money and you get used to the way they do things, you'll see that the pros definitely outweigh the cons 4. Shutterstock is hard work!: all right, so I want to go over what passive income is and what it isn't, especially when it comes to shutter stock. Passive income is the idea that you can make something once like a product and continue to sell that product over and over again with no extra work. Some people kind of refer to it as making money while you sleep. And while that can be true, sometimes you wake up and look at your account and you made a few bucks overnight. The thing about it is, is that it is not easy. A lot of people think that passive income is a way to get rich quick, but it's actually the opposite of that. It takes a lot of work at first, especially without knowing that you'll ever make any money off of that. And then when you do start making money, it's a little tiny bit. Um, my first month on Cheddar, Sakai had about 10 images on there and my first amount of money. I made money that first month, but it was a dollar $81.81 for many, many hours of, you know, creating the images and getting them uploaded learning, shudder, stocks, website and all of that. So I was pretty discouraged. But I didn't quit, although I kind of, you know, was very slow to get more images on there. But when I did put new images on, my income grew slightly over time. And now that I've changed my strategy, and I'm also very consistent with new images being put on every single week, I've started to see a nice monthly income from that. And you can, too, with shudders talking other micro stock agencies. You can't just put a bunch of images on there and just forget about it. You need to keep consistently adding new images to the side. Basically, you need to be in it for the long haul. 5. Stock image process: I want to go into the creation upload process a little bit. This is just going to be, ah, high level overview, but will really dive in deep later on. So first you'll be creating images and editing them. If you're a photographer, this means taking photos and bringing them into something like Light Room or Photoshopped. Edit them. If you're a vector artists, you're going to be using illustrator or another vector program to create your images. And also you had a set of your files and export later on. Uploading. This is just a matter of dragging and dropping. It's very easy title description, categories and keywords. Also, you had it in. Put this info in a later lesson. Uploading releases. This could be a model release or a property release will go over these a little later, too. Submitting after you've double checked everything to make sure it's perfect. You'll hit the submit button and then your images will either be approved or rejected. The approval or rejection process can take up to a week. After your images are approved, you just wait until someone buys them and then you get paid and that money will go into your shutter stock account, and once you hit a certain threshold, you'll be able to cash set out and send it to pay PAL or a couple other payment options. 6. Shutterstock pricing tiers: If you want to know how much you're going to make every month, that is really going to vary based on how good your images are and how sellable they are meaning. How often do people want to buy them? But over time, as you build your portfolio, you'll be able to guess month over month about how much you're going to make. I was able to see a really consistent income with about 100 images a month, so let's talk about the price you get paid. Per timis sold their certain tears of payment based on who buys that image. If you want to see the current pricing tiers, you can go to this website. I'll also put this down below in the description. Now these prices that I'm going to talk about our four images, not footage. But did you get paid quite a bit more? As you can see on that Cheddar stock Web page, the first amount you'll notice is about 25 cents, and this is one. Someone with the cheapest subscription to shutter stock buys your vector or photo. For me, this happens daily. The next year is somewhere around a dollar to $3 per image downloaded, and this is when someone with an image package buys it. His type of sale isn't nearly as common as the 25 cent sales, but you will see them from time to time. The third tier is $10 to $100. This is when someone buys a custom or extended licence for your image, and this does not happen very often, but when it does, it is sweet. Once you've built up about $35 in your shoulder stock account, they'll send you a payment and you'll have to have gone in there and set up a payment method, so don't forget to do that. 7. Target audience Who needs Shutterstock images?: So who's your target audience? As a stock image creator, this is a group of people that you should be focusing on every single time you make an image. The first group of people that download a lot of stock images are small and large advertising agencies and in house designers. Even the large agencies have clients on a limited budget, so they can't always do photo shoots. It's just too expensive for their client. Large clients might also be on a time restraint, so they need to use stock photos in a pinch so most of them keep a subscription to one of the stock agencies, like Adobe stock or shutter stock. With the subscription to shutter stock, they can pay anywhere from 200 to $300 a month for 750 images to download. So when someone download your image with a subscription like that, that's when you see that 25 cents in your account. Advertising agencies are probably going to be your biggest client, so you need to really appeal to what they need. But you'll also have other clients like freelance graphic designers and illustrators. You'll have bloggers who need images for every single article they publish. A few crafters and hobbyists need images for their articles as well. So when you're creating your images, just keep in mind what that group of people needs. If your favorite thing to take photos of is your dog or some flowers, that's nice. But number one, the competition on those things, is so high because everybody loves to take pictures of those. And the second thing is, designers and illustrators are not going to need very many pictures of dogs. They need something industry related, like business related health care, something like that. So trying to tailor your images around an industry that's a really great idea. 8. Goals and consistency with stock images: now. I talked a little bit about my first month on shutter stock and only making a dollar 81. That was pretty discouraging, so I didn't really upload very consistently for quite a while. But I want to show you what happened when I decided to set goals and be very consistent and deliberate with my shutter stock up loads. So in my experience, you need two goals. First, a monetary goal. I think it's good to start with a goal of, say, $30 a month or $500 a year. Your first months will most likely be pretty inconsistent because you don't have a lot of images on the site, so just keep in mind you might not hit your goals every month. The second type of goal isn't upload goal. You want to commit to a certain number of images every week and stick to it. Consistency is so important with cheddar stock, and it'll help you rank higher. I try to create one image every single day, but if you're too busy for that, you can probably dio like three a week or something. Just don't do a lot less than that or you might find You're not going to make your goals, and then you'll want to commit to one day a week that you upload your images for me, minus Thursday to kind of drive home how valuable it Issa set goals and be consistent. Here's a graph that shows what happened when I started focusing in on setting goals and being consistent with my uploads. The bars on this chart represent my income from shutter stock, and this was in September 2016 before I really decided to really go all in on goal setting So you can see I had a good month in December. But everything is pretty consistently low. During this time, I uploaded whenever I had a bunch of new images that wasn't consistent at all. The number of images I put on Cheddar stock really varied, and I really didn't have any specific goals. Now, here in March is when I decided to make a change. This is March of 2017. I decided to upload new images every Thursday. I decided to create at least one image every day, and I said specific monetary goals. My goal at this point was to make $30 a month. And so once I did these three things take a look at what happened to my chart. It just went crazy. My April sales almost doubled what I made in March. And then every single month, my income really really grew. So for me, setting goals was key. Now, I realize this data is from quite a long time ago. I started back in 2015. But I honestly believe that if you're consistent and you set good goals for yourself, you will see similar results Right now is probably not gonna matter too much what year it is. 9. Tips before starting your Shutterstock journey: Here are a few tips to keep in mind before you start creating images. Number one think like a designer. Try to think about what they need and then make images around that and the unique Don't do what everyone else is doing. I know that's easier said than done, but you want to try to make images that are different from everyone else's. And you also want to make images that air unique from stuff you've already done. So just keep it really fresh and unique. I recommend starting your portfolio with 10 images. They need to be unique, great, very high quality images. Try not to focus too much on the money side of things, even though that is why you're doing this right. Just focus on being consistent, putting the time in and sort of I think of it as chopping wood. You're just doing the same thing over and over and trying to build something over time and keep in mind you don't have anything to lose. You don't have to put a lot of money in this. All you have to put in is your time, and if that's gone forever, it doesn't really matter. 10. Signing up for a Shutterstock account: All right, let's talk about signing up for an account. I really recommend doing this now before you started creating images because it is just it's kind of overwhelming when you haven't done anything at all, and this is a great first step. It's one of the things I procrastinated for so many months, and I wish I just jumped in and did it right away. Also of their issues. Some issue with your account. You'll be able to work it out before you're ready to actually put images on there. I'm going to give you to links to start an account. The first is my referral link, and the second is just the normal way you would started account. It's not a referral link, so either way that you want to sign up. It doesn't change anything for you, but I do get a small commission if you use my referral link, and that helps me keep the lights on and keep on making more videos. But of course, it's your choice. Go here bit dot li slash a broker to sign up for an account. This is my referral link, and if you don't want to use that link. You can also go to this other link, which is Submit Dutch other stock dot com. Both of these links are in the description. Make sure your info is correct as you fill it out, because in the U. S A. You have to report earnings to the ire s. And if you're in another country, you'll have to find out your tax responsibility with that country. And once you verify your email address, you're ready to go. 11. Creating stock photos: All right now we're going to dive into creating images. I wanted to be giving you some tips and tricks on the best ways to create both photos and vectors, and we'll start off with photos. If you're creating photos, you can use a digital SLR camera or even your iPhone. Your photos will need to be very high. Resolution Designers might be putting these on billboards, so be sure to set your camera to its highest setting. Part of creating your images means making sure they're perfect. So you'll want to use photo editing software like Light Room or Photoshopped and make changes so they are even better than how the camera originally took them. And shutter stock actually recommends editing every single photo that you send them because they also want the best for their customers. Here are a couple of examples of really awesome photos that are on cheddar stock right now . These aren't my photos because I'm not the best photographer in the world. But I wanted to point out a few things about these photos that I think make them really high quality and sellable. First, we've got a perfectly in focus subject with a nicely blurred background. The lighting is just absolutely perfect, and I can guarantee you that a lot of thought went into this in a lot of work to. So it's not just a matter of point and click. This photo was most likely set up. His clothes were styled, and then a lot of other factors were tweaked, like lighting, focus and all of that. And here's another photo. This one's a flat lay food scene. The colors really work well together and were probably planned out. The composition was planned, and there's probably a lot of post production in light room of photo shop, so try to be mindful of every single part of your photo creation. 12. Getting your vector images ready for upload to Shutterstock: this lesson is all about creating vectors and vectors make up about 95% of my shutter stock portfolio. So I feel like I know a lot about this, and I'm excited to share all of my knowledge with you. Now let's jump in the illustrator and start getting our image is ready for upload. When I'm creating a new vector graphic I go to create new an illustrator. I changed the units. Two pixels. Your images have to be four megapixels. So that's 2000 by 2000 or 1000 by 4000 or just a dimension like that that ends up being at least four megapixels. So I'm gonna make this 2000 by 2000 and will create shudder. Sokal always look for the actual size of your image, not the size of your art board. So I always put a big white block the size of my art board on the document. So hit him to get my rectangle tool, and then I'll start up here on the corner and click and drag all the way down here. I'm gonna hit D to get a white fill in a black outline, I'll click on my outline and just hit my question mark or slash key to clear it off. So now I just have a white Phil on this. I'll come appear to transform, and then I'll make sure this is 2000. By 2000 I'll uncheck this. We'll go the align palette just to make sure it's aligned. If you don't see all of these options, go to your fly out and choose show options and then come down here to the line and we'll go to align Toe Art Board. Now we could just hit these two buttons. Horizontal line and vertical line is perfectly lined up with our art board now and now we can create our image in here, and I've already copied some artwork, so I'm just going to pace it in. This is a shipping and receiving icon set, so I'm going to save, as we'll call it, shipping and receiving. You want to make sure your document color mode is RGB, and when you're completely done with the artwork, make sure there's nothing off to the side. No vectors or straight points out here, and you'll want to make sure that all of your effects are expanded. When you're creating your vector images, you have to be careful about not leaving um, like non expanded effects in there, because when someone goes toe open that it's been saved down to an E. P S 10 and UPS 10 changes those effects into raster images and cannot have any raster images in your vector image is one thing I always do is I just check after I've created the E. P s. I open it back up and make sure there there's nothing in my links window. And while we're at it, I want to mention my stock vector checklist. This is a checklist that I used to make sure my files go through the review process really smoothly. This is available as a downloadable. PdF in the resource is section below this video. First files need to be saved US E. P. S. 10. If there are funds, they should be outlined. And you can do that by selecting the font and hitting shift command O or shift control O on a PC. You'll need to expand pattern fills and strokes that you stroke profiles. You don't have to expand normal strokes, but you will need to expand the ones with stroke profiles. And to do that, you can goto, object, expand or object. Expand appearance. Make sure there are no links in the file. All of your layers need to be unlocked. And finally, there should be nothing outside the art board. Okay, so let's save this as an E. P s 10 will go to file, save as, and then we'll choose GPS. Here. You'll want to choose, use art boards and then save. And here is where you choose what type of VPs it iss. So let's click on this and go all the way down here to illustrator 10 ups. It will give you a little warning up here, and you can just read what it says down here. Okay, we'll say, OK, we'll take a look in our folder and we have to files here one that is in no one and one that doesn't I just get rid of that other E. P s file and then I'll pull this one open in Illustrator. And now we can select everything and kind of take a look at what illustrator did with our files. So if you look in links, there should be nothing in here. That's a big giveaway that you might have had some effects that didn't expand correctly. And that's it. All you need to upload to the shutter stock site is this E p s file. And if you're having any issues at all, feel free to leave me a message in the discussion section underneath this video. 13. Uploading photos to Shutterstock: Now we're going to walk through the process of actually putting our photos and vectors on cheddar stock. So if you have photos, they'll be high rez J pegs and via vectors, they'll be E P S 10 files. All right, let's go to the site, submit Dutch other stock dot com and we'll log in with our user name and password that we used earlier. Now, once we do that, this is a screen that we're going to see, and we'll come right over here to upload images. So now we can drag and drop our files here where we can select from our finder. I'll go ahead and grab a photo. Now, this photo is not my photo. This is just a example. I actually downloaded this online, and as soon as this tutorials over, I'm going to delete it from my shutter stock account. But I just want to show you the process of uploading. So depending on your Internet connection, it might take a little bit of time, Teoh upload to the site. These air generally pretty large files. Then we come down here and say next, and your screen properly won't have this little error message on it. I was actually testing out a few other files and I deleted those so they did not get approved. And that's why I'm seeing this. But our images here now and we have a note over here that says Select an item to add details, so I'll click on that. And now we have some fields to fill out Over here. We've got our image type, which is a photo. Um, it will be available for commercial usage, not editorial. Editorial images will have famous people or places in them, and you have to submit those a certain way. So if you want to learn more about that shutter stock has some information about it on their site. Well, it entered a description here, and then we'll enter our first category, which I'm going to use people. But you can go through all these and decide which one is best. And for the second category, I'm going to choose beauty and fashion for location. If it makes sense, you can fill this out. I usually just leave this blank because it doesn't really matter where this picture was taken. But if you had a city seen in the background, it would make sense to fill out what city that is. When we click here for more options, you'll see we have some notes for the reviewer, and I only fill this out. If it's something that came back, Maybe it was rejected for some reason, and I fixed the problem in a resubmitting Now, So I'll put Previously submitted here says that reviewer will know this has problems that were fixed at one point and then releases. So if you have people or property in your images that is recognisable, you will have to have a model release or property release. So when you're taking your photos at a photo shoot, you need to have your model sign a model release, and you can find one of those online shutter stock has their own version of a model release , and you can find that by going to this girl so you would get the model, the sign this and you would upload it here. Next. We have the keywords section and were allowed 50 keywords, and the really nice saying is that Shudders thought gives us a lot of suggestions for keywords, so we don't have to just come up with these ourselves. So I'm going to use a lot of these. Some good ideas for keywords are mentioning what they're doing, what they're wearing, Um, what color hair they have, how they're feeling. Maybe they're sad or happy or whatever, and we'll enter a few more of these. I've only got 26 keywords in here, but if you have more than that, absolutely put as many as are relevant to the image. Do not put spammy keywords in there and don't put stuff that is not applicable to that picture because every artwork that you submit is reviewed by an actual person. And if you have a lot of spammy cures, your image is going to be rejected. If you have images that are for mature audience, you can click mature content here. That just means you have new to the or something like that in there, and they do. Except those images. I think there are filters on those, though, so your best bet to reach the biggest audience is not toe have mature content. All right, now everything is filled out. We've got our description, categories and keywords all put in, and then the final step is to hit. Submit, So that's the basic process of uploading a photo. It's pretty simple, but if you want to upload a lot at one time, there are a lot of tools in here, too. That can help you with that. So if you have more than one image, you can select more than one. Um, let's say they have all the same information. You would only have to enter that one time, and then once you've submitted all your images, they will go into this pending box. I went ahead and deleted that one image we already submitted, so there's no pending content and then you'll also have the images that have been reviewed in your account. If you want to see all of your earnings, you can come up here toe earnings and then Goto earning summary. And this will tell you every image that's been downloaded and what type of image it waas and also tell you how much you've earned. And you have the ability to download a spreadsheet that has all the sales you made. So shutter stock really makes it easy to keep track of everything to 14. Uploading vectors to Shutterstock: If you're a vector artist, the process of uploading your images is very, very similar. Toe uploading photos. The only difference, really, is that you're uploading GPS files instead of J. Pegs. So go out here to submit Dutch cheddar stock dot com and log in with your user name and password. Once you've done that, you'll get to this screen, then just go to upload images. I'm going to go out and find the shipping and receiving whom we just made and just pull it onto the screen. Okay, then we'll click next, and then the image will show up here. When we click on the image, we have a lot of fields to fill out, so we'll start with the description. I'm just going to put shipping and receiving. And we have 200 characters that we can fill out, Um, icon set. And then some of the things in the icon set box trek calendar etcetera for our category, we're going to do probably transportation in Category two can be business. I usually do fill out both categories, but the 2nd 1 is optional. Location for vectors. I always leave it blank unless it's a recognizable building or a recognizable skyline or something like that. If you click on more options, you can click this little carrot and see three options case number illustration without reference and previously submitted. I usually leave this section alone unless this image was rejected before and then I made changes to it, so in that case, I would just put previously submitted. But for now, I'll leave a blank. If this is mature content, like nudity or something like that, you want to check this box. I usually don't include any mature content because it really limits your viewership. And then, if you're vector, is like a character of a recognizable face. Or if it's something like a well known building, you'll have to upload model and property releases. You can download a release form here. That's the one from shutter stock. But if you already have a release form, that's okay, too. Keywords go here and there. How people are going to be able to find your image so trying to keep them very relevant to what your images. I'm going to add shipping, receiving boxes, trucking industry. And then there are also some key words suggestions down here this is an icon set, so definitely want thes. It's vector. Actually, most of these are very relevant to my image, So I'm gonna add quite a few of those. Right now, I've got 26 of the 50 possible keywords. I recommend doing as many keywords as you can, but still stay very relevant to your image. Don't do any spamming. If you do spamming your images will get rejected and that sort of a mark against you, you wouldn't want to get your account closed because you keep putting irrelevant keywords in your artwork. So after you've got your keywords filled out, that takes care of everything over here and now we can go to submit this artwork so I'll go ahead and do that. Now, once you submit your artwork, it'll go into this pending Q. I just deleted the one I showed you because this is not really my account. This is just an example account. So I don't want it to actually be submitted to the site. And then once they get around to reviewing it, sometimes that can take anywhere from two days to a week. It will slide over here into the reviewed images Then when somebody makes a purchase, it will go into your unpaid earnings total, which is right up here. You can also see how much you made per image right up here under earnings and then earning summary. We haven't made any sales yet, but you can see all the statistics for past months. You can even download a spreadsheet right here. All right, that's the process of getting your images on the shutter stock. It really doesn't take too much time for each image. If you have a lot of images, of course, it will take quite a bit longer, But you can select several of the same image, same types of image and then add all the keywords and description everything all at once to those images. So it's really very simple keywords, titles and tags and then, of course, model releases in that kind of thing and then just hit. Submit 15. Project: for your project, please upload 123 images that you're working on that you plan to put on cheddar stock. I'll take a look and give you feedback and also let you know whether I think they'll sell well on the side. That could be a little hard to know at first if you enjoyed this class, please leave me. Review those. Help me so much. And please let me know if you have any questions about any course material. I'm always happy to answer everything. All right? Thank you so much for taking this class. 16. Bonus What to Draw and What to Shoot: bonus, what to draw and what to shoot. These photos are just examples of some things that you could take pictures off and you want to come up with your own ideas. Of course, it's important to be unique, so don't try to recreate these exactly for photos is a great idea to focus on an industry so industry specific. This would be like general business, general health care, even more specific business like restaurants, construction, education and teaching. Any of those would be great images of people are going to sell the best. And that's because the graphic designers here downloading them once they're in user to be ableto kind of connect with the image more. If someone feels a connection to an image, there are a lot more likely to buy something. So those images are really popular. Give people doing normal activities, some looking at the camera and then some not looking at the camera. Try to get people who are doing normal activities and wearing normal clothes. As a designer, I've had to pass by so many images because what the people were wearing was just a little bit off. It was a little weird. It wasn't necessarily risque or anything like that. It just seemed sort of abnormal. And 90% of my clients, as a graphic designer want me to find images that are sort of a day in the life instead of post people who are smiling at a camera. So they always request people who are not looking at a camera. But I think those images sell, too. So maybe a good mixture of both is the best idea. It's best to get shots of people doing work in their industry. But if you have recognizable people in your shots, you, of course, have to have model release. This is just a document that a model signs and the model is giving you permission to sell their image. You can learn more and download a sample release form on the shutter stock website, and that link is also in my description. It's also a really great idea to incorporate diversity into your photos here in the USA were such a diverse population in most businesses here really embrace diversity, So if you can get diversity in your photos, they're going to sell so much better if you don't want to bother with getting releases, you can still use people in other types of images. For example, photos of hands in an industry setting are really popular, and you can also take shots that have people but no recognizable people. Maybe they're facing away from the camera or they're too far away to recognize. Or they might be blurry in the background so you wouldn't need to get a model release. In those cases. You could even add vector elements to your photos, and these would actually be sold as photos, not vectors, because the entire image has to be vector in order for it to be sold us a vector. Another thing you can try is to try to create a photo or a photo shoot around an idea like victory. You can try to create several images that get that idea across. Then you would add victory as a key word. And whenever people search for that, your image would show up for better ideas. You can create images around holidays and seasons, or even like holiday sales. Like this image. I concepts like thes are also really popular. You could just pick a topic or industry and create icons that relate to it. You can make single icons, but Icon says, like having nine or 16 on a page are generally going to sell much better than singles because you're basically giving the user more for their money. Another ideas character sets. You can have characters doing different things related to a theme. So maybe your theme is banking. You could have men and women and different poses doing bank related things. Here's an example of the same character in different bank related poses. You could even combine some of these ideas and create a seasonal character set like the Santa Claus characters doing different things. And finally, full illustrations are really popular. Here are a couple. This one gives a really techie feel, and here's just a mountain scene. And although this one is really a beautiful image, I don't think it's going to sell a swell as the others because it's hard to imagine a context where it could be used in So trying to keep in mind the goals of urine user. They're going to be using this for a client most likely