I joined Shutterstock a year ago and stepped away from it because they rejected my first batch...... This may be due to the fact that those 10 images were bad flower shots

Two weeks ago I thought, why not try again?
So I gave it another try and 10/10 images were approved. I uploaded only 34 so far but they do very well and I already have 75 sales! I must say its worth it!!

so what do you think made the diff between first batch rejected and second 10/10 approval?
were they not all "bad flower shots" or what?

I've been doing this for a few months, small portfolio,  but have made 10 times more on SS than on DT.    Almost all the sales on SS have been subs, but at least it maintains my interest. 

I've been hearing that over time SS goes down and DT takes off, but after 4 months I haven't seen any hint of that. If anything it's going the other way.  I recently had several "well covered subject" rejections at DT and haven't had a sale since - my ranking may have gone down as a result.   Those guys are mean.

As others have made clear, success at these sites varies with the type of photos you do.  For me, only SS and Fotolia have been worthwhile.  StockXpert is currently dead for new images and DT just hasn't done anything for me.  I don't do IS at this point - I don't like the attitude they project.

Like many people, I got accepted at IS and then found they rejected the same photos that got me approved in the first place      A bit mind-boggling at first.  I did their tedious keywording on a batch of my images, and all but a few were rejected.  Review took 2 weeks, an appeal took a month.  I was trying to get going in microstock and IS was just too slow and tedious.  I let the handfull of survivors sit there for a few months, they each got 20-40 views but no sales. 

Meanwhile SS took 90% of what I submitted and gave me lots of sub sales, which at least is teaching me what catches buyers eyes. 

So by 'attitude' I don't mean anything personal, just all the hoops they want you to jump through, plus the extremely long review times.  And the *-up on the forums, and the hokey blogs.  But at some point I'll give IS another try. 

It's different for everyone Marc.  My Shutterstock earnings were several times more than Fotolia per month, even with images which were established (not new uploads).  Fotolia seems to be hit or miss.  Some people do great there, others make next to nothing.

If there is a big secret to Fotolia I'd like to know it! I get a mere 2 or 3 sales a month. Plus a lot of rejected files.

Stockastic - your IS experience is not uncommon. Same happened to me where I got accepted with three photos and then two out of the three were rejected when submitted. I believe that the acceptance process is judging the composition, sense of stockworthiness, and basic things like that. Once they deem you worthy to supply stock to them, then they hammer you on the little details artifacting, purple fringing and model release etc. - assuming you have the basic stock skills and now just need to refine the details. It works because I quickly learned to deal with those little nasties and now my approval rating at IS is quite strong compared to what it used to be. And if you can crank out some vectors, they can be very lucrative. I have just a handful and the sell very well!

I'd like to get into vectors, and I think I could do some that would sell, but I know zero about the techniques in use today.  I don't even know what applications people are using to create the vectors I see.  Of course many are obviously 3D renderings requiring a major software investment.  But where are the 2D things coming from? Photoshop?  Excuse my ignorance - I'm strictly a photographic guy. 

For vectors I use Adobe Illustrator CS3, although I do nearly all my preparation work in AutoCAD and then import into illustrator.