How can I sell my picture?

[Chongbum Thomas Park]

How can I sell my picture?
Not a single cut sold in a month.
Is there a wrong part of my account?
Please answer that.

[CarloBo]

Hi, I'm the last who can judge quality and salability of your port, but one thing for sure you have to add the location (place, town, region, country) to all of your photos.

I guess it's South Korea? You live in a beautiful place full of photo opportunities.

Good luck!

[Nigel Kirby]

Hi,

Take a look at Portfolio help on the Portfolio critique page.

The comments by Steve will help.

By the way you have some nice images its just your captions that need working on.

Best Nigel

[M.Chapman]

If you only joined Alamy in May 2022, you need to be patient. Alamy isn't like microstock. Sales can take months, or even years to appear.

 

Mark

[Joseph Clemson]

Mark's comment is most pertinent - sales at Alamy are less common than you might experience on microstock sites. However, there is more potential for more valuable sales at Alamy, though these are less common than they once were due to the degrading effect of microstock on prices overall. Even here at Alamy we have become used to an increasing number of sales at little more than microstock prices.

 

Typically in the UK a contributor may hope to sell one image per month for every 1000 images in their portfolio. I don't know whether your location will make it easier or harder for you to sell your images - time will tell. Try to avoid too many similar images - choose your best. Duplication of images (or similars) does little to improve your chance of sales and will eventually harm your position in the search results.

 

The one big change you can make is to take a different approach to your captions and keywords. Be very factual about the content of the image and less concerned about the asthetics. The words 'beautiful' and 'wonderful' add almost nothing to the likelihood of your image selling. What you need is much more detail - the location, precise place names where possible, description of what is in the photo. If it is plants, make sure you are correct in your species identification and include the Latin name too.

 

Example: 2J9W7AT. Which temple and where is it? How old is it? What is its history?  Describe aspects of the construction - materials and building style. What is the tiered stone structure in the centre and the collection of stones on the large flat round stone? Which religion is the temple associated with? Leave out 'clouds' and 'sky', they are not a significant feature. Remove 'deep blue' there is nothing of that colour in the image. The term 'plant' is too generic - if there are plants which for a significant aspect of the image (that large tree?), identify them specifically if you can.

 

As you can see you need to do a considerable amount of work in order to produce useful captions and keywords. The actual photography is just a small part of being a stock photographer. 

 

Also, make sure you don't include anything in the caption or keywords which is not included in the photograph. If you do, it will, as with too many similars, eventually count against you when it comes to your placement in search results.

 

Alamy's market is primarily editorial sales, often for use in newspapers, magazines, textbooks and websites. Picture editors buying at Alamyare usually looking for something specific, not just generic pretty pictures to fill space. Io address this market you need good pictures (which you have), but most of all good captioning and keywords (which you will need to work hard on). Once you have addressed these issues you will have a better chance of making sales.

 

 

[Cal]

Be more specific about the location as others have said. For instance image ID 2J9Y9C4

 

Which airport, where? Add the location and specifics to more of your images as buyers may not just be looking for generic types of images but shots of actual specific locations.

[Skyscraperfan]

Your keywording needs to get much better. It seems you just embedded some keywords in each photo and the uploaded the photos.

 

Image 2J9Y9F3  for example shows a bridge and the keywords are:
beautiful blue.sky bridge fantastic grand night red reflection river view

 

Some of those keywords are so generic that hardly anybody will search for them. Like "fantastic" for example, but on the other hand some very important keywords are missing. I noticed that you have the same photo also on Shutterstock and there you at least mention the name Banghwa Bridge and the location Seoul. The name of the river should also be added. I would also add "Korea", maybe the district and also "steel architecture", "bow bridge" and things like that and also the name the architect and other related stuff. Just think which keywords people would use. They all have to be relevant though. Otherwise your "Alamy Rank" will go down and all of your photos will appear further down in the results.

A good test of how well your photos get discovered on Alamy is searching for the keywords you used and looking where your photo will appear in the results. Most people will not scroll through five pages or so before they find a photo they will buy. So if your photo is too far behind, people will not buy it.

You also have a lot of flower photos, which are probably very hard to sell. Seoul should be a good place to take some good selling stock photos. Especially if you focus on the blue hour.

[Chris Burrows]

I have had a look at the first page and I am afraid that if you wish to sell any flower pictures you will have to learn a bit more about the flowers you take pictures of.  

The first picture you have is 

The beautiful pink lily, Lilium longiflorum Thunberg in garden.  Image ID: 2J9Y21D and several more captioned similar.

This is not Lilium longiflorum a lily that has a long slim flower and is nearly always white.  Never heard the term "Thunberg" before but having googled it I doubt 

if it will be of any use.

Then there is 

The beautiful red lily,Lilium longiflorum Thunberg in garden.  Image ID: 2J9Y1WN

Again not Lilium longiflorum nor red and not even a Lilium this is an Hemerocallis or Day lily

Most of the rest appear to be captioned "The beautifuk flowers and trees in the garden."

Often no tree is visible and even correcting for the spelling your pictures are going to be lost among over 2 million beautiful flowers.

Flower pictures do sell but they need to be fully captioned.

 

 

[John Mitchell]

Useful information on creating tags and captions can be found here.

 

Best of luck.