From the course: Earn Money as a Stock Contributor

Existing content or create new items

From the course: Earn Money as a Stock Contributor

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Existing content or create new items

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- So you're ready to start selling your content. Let's talk about the most obvious place to look first. Existing content that you've already captured or designed. You're gonna want to turn to your own library. Now, this is an easy place to start, so I recommend, particularly if you have your content online already, or on hard drives or backup materials that are searchable, that you should start here. Remember though, don't just upload your entire library and leave it to the organization to sort things out. You might find yourself not welcome as a contributor. You're gonna want to explore the library and search for content that matches specific needs. Some content might not be dated. In other words, if it's professional dress, well, the wardrobes might not have changed much. But if it's fashion and not meant to look retro, well, things change every few years with hairstyles and clothing. You're gonna also want to compare what you have to what you see on stock sites. Do some searches on the subject matter and see if you're finding content like yours. Now, if you find tons of content like yours the market might already be saturated. But you might find great stuff to sell nonetheless. So be sure to search. You also can take a look using your own rating system. So if you've already applied metadata, such as flags, picks, or stars, you can use this to quickly find your best content. I recommend using a file browser like Adobe Bridge or Skylum Luminar so you can quickly examine assets. This'll make it easy to go through and look for content and pick out what you want to share. Being able to scan quickly as well as sort and sift by keywords or by other things that you've added to content over time will help you narrow down a large library very quickly. You're also gonna want to take a look at technical issues, making sure that the images don't have a lot of noise, and that the photos have sharp clear focus on the subject matter. Besides what you've already captured, it's also good to start thinking about creating new and original content. This is gonna give you a bit more flexibility and make it easier to get all of the things you need in order to license something as stock. You'll have the ability to make sure that the content is really relevant by being able to keep in mind what's selling and by studying stock photography websites. It'll also help ensure that items like the release forms are properly captured and completed so you have them for submission. I've got a photographic library that goes back for years, but much of it was captured while I was a journalist. So while I have editorial usage to a lot of images, a lot of them can't be sold commercially, because I don't have rights to do so. Even though I'm the copyright holder, it doesn't mean that I have commercial rights to sell that content. So these are the things you have to keep in mind. Shooting new content means that you can go in being aware of this and capture what's needed at the time. This will also allow you for greater variety. You could actually make sure that you're capturing different poses and directing the models and actors in the scene. In other words, instead of just getting what you thought you needed you can run through a range of emotions or do a quick wardrobe change and change things up a lot.

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