Min DOF Photography

It’s the next best thing! Just kidding . I’m writing about it, because I’ve started doing it seriously since of the beginning of May. I’m currently posting my photos on four microstock sites. Here’s a quick summary of those sites:

1. iStock: I’m sure you all know it. They’re nitpickers when it comes to reviewing your submitted photos, waiting period for submitted photos is terrible, by far the worst of all sites that I’m registered on. It takes 7-10 days to review your batches or just a single photo. Upload limit is 15 images/week, which is very low, especially when you’re starting to build your portfolio.  Acceptance percentage is also the lowest, because they’re so strict. The reason for refusal in my case is usually:”The following keywords used for this file do not appear to be fully relevant to the subject”. It looks like they want to force people to use less keywords. Besides that, submitting process is a pain in the ass, it’s by far the longest in the industry. On the other hand iStock a very good RPI (return per image) in my case almost 1,5$/image. All in all I really don’t like that agency, the only reason I’m still submitting on that site is because of the RPI and high traffic of the site. Otherwise it really drives me crazy.

2. Dreamstime and Fotolia: Submitting process is a lot faster than on iStock, but still not as fast as on Shutterstock. And the limit of uploads on DR (Dreamstime) depends on your approval ratio, it ranges from 15 to 30 images/day. Images on DR are validated within 5-6 days and on FT (Fotolia) within a few days. RPI on both sites is around a dollar per image. Support’s response time is pretty good on DR (within hours) and pretty lousy on FT (usually 24h or more). I’m submitting photos on those two sites only when I have the time, meaning when I don’t either shoot, postprocess images and when I’ve already uploaded all the photos on SS (Shutterstock) and IS (iStock). It’s not worth more of my attention since they earn me (combined) around 20% of SS income.

3. The last and by far the best (for me) and currently by far my biggest earner is Shutterstock. It has a great batch upload UI, where you can apply some or all of the info for a batch of photos. Even if photos are different, it’s very useful that you can chose the categories, model release (needed or not) for all the images at once. But usually that’s not the case and you upload photos from the same series, so the only thing that differs is the title and a few keywords.  And there’s no upload limit, besides that photos get reviewed within hours (depends on the time of upload, it takes just a couple of hours if you upload it around 16h and between 12 and 16 hours if you upload it late in the evening or around midnight). That’s very useful for microstock beginners, since you get a feedback on your photos almost instantly. Approval ratio is very high, there’s no illogical or nitpicking declining like on IS.  I just love it! It’s an industry leading subscription based microstock site RPI is 25c/DL at the beginning, but RPI rises along with your ranks. Besides 25 a day downloads, there are on demand downloads starting from $1.88 (again for the lowest rank) and enhanced downloads at 28$/DL. Those figures sound really low, but don’t worry, your photos will be downloaded every day, unlike on other sites, where you might not get a download for weeks. So the end figures each month (well after my first month) are much, much higher than on other sites. Support is also great and as responsive as their inspectors.

A clear winner for me is Shutterstock. You can build your portfolio faster then anywhere else (no UL limits, ultra fast reviews and they’re not nitpickers). And earnings are best by far and all of that really motivates me to keep on doing microstock photography. If you decide to give it a try at Shutterstock, please use this link http://submit.shutterstock.com/?ref=209254 since it won’t cost you anything and I’ll get a buck here and there if your sales will be good .

I’ve just received the answer to my question regarding last weeks absence of ad clicks. I got only 3 clicks in 6 days, very unusual since the clicks ranged from absolute minimum of 3 to absolute maximum of 108 a day. The reason for such a drop in the click rate was that WidgetBuck$ no longer count the international clicks. Only US and Canadian clicks count from 15th november. So if your visitors are mainly from countries outside the USA and Canada, you’re better of withoutWidgetBuck$ widgets. They’ll only take up your valuable ad space. I’ve decided to remove it from this blog, since I get virtually no US and Canadian visitors and leave it on the other blog that I have, where most of the traffic comes from USA and Canada.

Here’s the quote from the email, that I received:
Your traffic may be being affected by our recent change regarding
international clicks. Since our merchant partners will not pay for
clicks from users outside the U.S. or Canada, as of November 15th, those
clicks are no longer being counted or earning commissions. You can read
the full details here: http://widgetbucks.blogspot.com.

So how do you like the cleaner look of this site? Enjoy it while you can :evilsmiley: .

As you can see my enthusiasm was well based. WidgetBuck$ has really nice RPC (revenue per click) rates, up to ten times higher than most of the other ad networks. Besides that, it has a much nicer appearance with some amazing offers. Ok, I won’t describe it any further since I’ve already done that in my previous WidgetBuck$ posts. I must say I’m very satisfied, but I’d be even more satisfied if I’d have better referrals, LOL. 6 referrals have brought me only 2.54$ (as you can see in the screenshot below) and I got 10% from their earnings. A friend who referred me, made 9$ by himself and 36.5$ just by referring me. Don’t get me wrong, I ain’t bragging (I’m not John Chow, who makes money by telling other people how much money he makes – 24k in October BTW), I’m just saying money don’t fall from the sky and you have to work for your earnings. Basically all of the real world business rules apply to the online money making .

Here’s the screenshoot from my october (26 days to be exact) WidgetBuck$ earnings. If things would go on like this, I won’t have to work a 9 to 5 job much longer (along with all the other web incomes that I have).

EDIT: you can sign up (I’ve added that since some of you are already asking about it ), by clicking on the cool banner below:

I’ve already wrote a post about WidgetBuck$ so I won’t get into more details about the program itself. What I will get into, are the revenues. And those are, compared to all other networks that I’ve tried so far, crazy. It seems that the main reasons for high revenues are higher click rate/CTR (click through rate) and higher RPC (revenue per click). Click rate is a lot higher than what you usually get with other ad networks that are mostly showing text ads, because WidgetBuck$ have banners that really look good and therefore attract more clicks. RPC is around 10 times higher than its competitor’s (Adbrite, Kontera, Bidvertiser…), Adsense is the only one with “only” 2,5 times lower RPC (in my case).

I hope my excitement won’t be ruined with payment issues (yeah, there’s a lot of scam on the net). But even if, I really won’t loose anything. All I did is, I slaped a banner on my site and wait for the cash to roll in…Here’s the printscreen of the last few days revenues (not that RPC are always lower when pending, so revenues are always higher at the end…):

Do you wan’t to make money with WidgetBuck$ as well? Click on the banner below and get started .

I’ve found another interesting ad network. Their ads not only look good (I believe most of the users don’t find text ads interesting and most of the people don’t even spot it), the revenues are really good. I’m using it for a few days now and so far CPC (cost per click) is around 30c. That’s almost 50% more than what I get from Google’s Adsense. And Adsense had the best CPC rates for me so far. And I have tried various ad networks, from Bidvertiser which payed around 3-4c per click (and I’ve heard they are baning a lot of publishers just before they were supposed to get their first payment), Adbrite ranges from 4-7c per click and Kontera around 4-5c. Slovenian ad network Toboads has a flat rate of 12c (but those are euro cents, which is equal to cca US17c). So I can only recomend it, its averagely 5x higher CPC rates are really appealing. And what’s even better is that you get a 25$ SIGNUP BONUS. Since the minimal payout level is only 50$, you only have to generate $25 in clicks to make your first $50 with this program.

The widget is very customizable, you can choose what category of products you want to feature and easily copy the code to your blog layout.You can see Widget buck$ interactive banner in my sidebar. If you have more queatins about it, than this FAQ link should help. If you’re interested in more first hand experiences, please don’t hasitate to ask them.

If you’re still interested, click on this cool banner and get started .

A lot of people is asking me about adsense and making money online generally lately. So her’s a post which I already posted on my blogspot blog a while ago, but it wasn’t imported to (this) my WP blog. So here’s the complete copy/paste and the ADDED new second part of the post:

This post is going to be totally non-photographical, but still very useful to many of the visitors of my blog. As you can see, I’ve already put google ads on my blog, which are already bringing me revenue. I like adsense, because it’s so easy to use. Once you’ve signed up and copy/pasted the code, all you have to do is wait for the commercial ads to work (at first public service ads will be displayed, for which you will not receive earnings), this may take up to 48 hours (it took less then 12 hours in my case). From then all you’ll have to do, is to make your site interesting enough to get a lot of visitors and to keep them coming back.

A few tips that will increase revenues:
1. match every aspect of your AdSense ads to the theme of your website. What you want to do is remove the borders from your AdSense ads and match the background color of the ad to your website. Additionally, you want to match the color of the AdSense links to the rest of the links on your website plus choose an ad format that makes the ads look seamless
2. ad placement:
-the closer to the top of the page the better
-the closer the left of the page the better

Ofcourse there are many more tips floating on the web, I’ve written down just the most important ones. Besides that I’m pretty new to adsense and I’m still looking for ways to improve ad revenue myself.

Here’s a link to the official Google adsense help center where you can get more detailed info o how to get started, everything about earnings, improving performance etc.

ADDED: The best ad placement is, from my experience, in content, or better said in blog post. People just can’t miss it, they spot it right away and that’s the main reason for getting more clicks on the ads, which bring revenue. You can see the example of this ad in this post.  I use the Adsense Deluxe plugin to control and place ads on my blog. It’s really the easiest way to create various ads, with various sizes and decide which ads to show and ofcourse where you want to show them. I usually align it to the right and make the text wrap around the Google ad. I use this div command: <div style=”float: right; margin: 5px;”> <!–adsense#rectangle–></div> .

Man those were the days! Or better said, that was THE day. If things were going like this every day, I would have a nice, comfortable 4 hour workweek. But if you can’t generate that type of traffic and if people don’t click on the ads, than once reached reality becomes an illusion. But there’s another reason for this post. To shut up all the wise-asses, who think they know everything, when they really know shit. Here’s the link to a thread on slo-foto – the thread was really about yuwie, but it later involved adsense as well. If I owned a site similar to cnn.com, I’d be making millions off of advertising every year…

View LARGER if you want to see a 43$ daily adsense income

You had quite a few questions about this social network I wrote about a couple of days ago. I did answer most of your questions to the best of my knowlege. But then again, my knowlege about it is far from perfect. So I’m writing this post to clear things up. To get to the virtual presentation of Yuwie, just click on the banner below. You might want to skip the first presentation (if you know the basics and hate the standard propaganda) by pressing on the next button. All the next presentations focus on explaining how money can be made. Presentations are good and give you a good picture about how this social network really works. The bottom line is you get a cut from the advertising.

I hope this post was helpful. Please share your thoughts about Yuwie. I see you are quite interested, 10 people have already signed up in the first 24h…

Today’s post is dedicated to a social network, similar to Myspace. The concept is pretty much the same, you meet new people, new people meet you, you can get a nice model for a session or even a client that needs your photographical (or other) expertise and you earn money. But that’s is what you can do and those are the opportunities that might be in store for you. What is more important and really sets it apart from Myspace is, that you make money just by “using” it. If you refer people to Yuwie and they refer people to Yuwie and your pages generate a ton of traffic, you can make money. Yep, Yuwie is sharing it’s ad revenue with it’s members, at least to a certain extent.

Here’s the “earning scheme”:

LEVELS – REFERRALS – PAGEVIEWS – EARNINGS
1—————3—————3,000—————$0.15
2—————9—————9,000—————$0.45
3—————27————-27,000————–$0.54
4—————81————-81,000————–$1.62
5—————243———–243,000————-$4.86
6—————729———–729,000————-$14.58
7————–2,187——–2,187,000————-$43.74
8————–6,561——–6,561,000————-$328.05
9————-19,683——19,683,000————-$984.15
10————59,049——59,049,000————-$8,857.35

TOTAL——88,572 —–88,572,000————$10,235.49

The other nice thing about is, that it really works. Not like Myspace, that’s on and off, with all the errors driving you nuts. At least that’s the case with me, since I’m not a pacient man.

You can sign up here: http://r.yuwie.com/bernik

Have you ever asked yourself that question? I didn’t, but I immediately became interested when a friend of mine told me, my blog could be rated. Nowadays that you hear about major multinationals buying sites for millions or even billions of $ (Google bought youtube for 1.65 billion $), it makes you wonder what fraction of that could you possibly make, if there was a remote possibility someone wanted to acquire your blog.

Here’s what mine is worth:

You can check out how much your blog is worth here.

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