Although I am not new to the microstock world, I found your website to be very informative and will be recommending it to others who have have asked me about the microstock world.

Thanks for all your efforts.....

I started a blog too, recently.

Instead of trying to convince people to join up and come compete with me (even training them to do so), I've tried to give some tips to buyers, the people who actually spend money on our wares, to help them find what they want on istockphoto.com .

http://seanlockedigitalimagery.wordpress.com/

Great site!

Cool - glad people are reading it.  I'm really having fun writing it.

Great idea Sean. Now I wonder how long it will take to see dozens of buyer-based blogs popping up.

Let's hope so. There's likely a lot of potential microstock buyers out there who we haven't yet reached. 

I actually setup a microstock buyer blog a year ago after the penny dropped about how lucrative microstock agency referral programs are for referring buyers instead of contributors.  I got the domain name registered, setup the server, installed Wordpress and even wrote an article or two.  Then I thought about it:  I already struggle to produce enough content for my existing blog, so it wasn't too smart starting a second one!  Plus, it is hard enough writing about contributing microstock when I know so little about it, but writing about *buying* would be pushing smelly runny stuff up hill for me!

So I was pretty envious when I saw Sean's blog emerge, though it can't be too bad for the rest of us if it takes time away from his shooting! 

I just set up my first ever blog (on stock photography). Obviously not much on it yet but feel free to check it out via the link in my profile. On the blog you can provide links to other sites so I have one which takes you straight to my istock page. That was simple enough. However I've signed up for the referral program but cannot work out how to get my referral code from istock over to my blog. The code is massive so do not think writing it all down and then retyping is very practical. I assume this is a copy and paste job but don't know how to do. Any advice welcome please. On the other hand the bigstockphoto code was only a few symbols and was easy to set up! Thanks, David

I have a little microstock site and blog I try and keep up with, and continually add new content to.  What I've done is taken my 3 years of experience selling stock, and compiled all of the personal advice I could into this little web page. 

I've also added some photoshop tutorials videos recently, including how to keyword in Photoshop.

Check it out if you're new to this whole stock game, and let me know what you think! 

Thanks I just watched the video about using the dodge tool to isolate your sunglasses.Seems alot easier than using the pen tool.I shall try it.

You are also supposed to be able to add ?refnum=sjlocke to any page addres, like www.istockphoto.com/index.php?refnum=sjlocke

awesome new blog sean - but tried to leave you a comment and it doesn't appear.  Not sure if you have comments moderated or if they're turned off but there's no notification or anything to me about what's going on. 

M

Here is an awesome newer photography magazine and they talk about micostock and many other things to do with photography. You can submit your own article and they will post it if you are interested in writing a review or article.

http://xposurepro.com/ [nofollow]

Here is an awesome newer photography magazine and they talk about micostock and many other things to do with photography. You can submit your own article and they will post it if you are interested in writing a review or article.

http://xposurepro.com/

Interesting magazine.  Thanks.

Also would like to mention my series of blogs on Motorsports Photography.  I offer advice and tips from the days of film and typewriters but there is some valuable content ... and a few laughs:

http://www.warrenpricephotography.com/blog/

PS:  would also give a shoutout to CutCaster.  John's acceptance of "editorial images" has given me a market for my "antique" images.