The Microstock Niche
snowbound
Finding your microstock niche for submitting pictures is not the only strategy to succeed. Many different strategies can combine to make a successful microstock portfolio of saleable images. But it is a highly strategic way to make your output via photography a brand you can reinforce and a product only you can deliver.
Scarcity is always going to be part of any market. Access and scarcity go hand in hand. If you have access to certain materials, conditions, geographic places, or groups of those dynamics together, and these are scarce, you now have a marketable niche. Microstock photography will allow you to leverage that access as a microstock image niche.
The online world has a million pictures of daisies, but perhaps no pictures of the daisies that grow in your backyard. Those are your daisies, and you have the right to take pictures of them and sell those pictures. The setting and conditions are yours to compose and capture in images. Uniqueness can be a startling element in photos that sell.
The daisies as you render them via photographs are uniquely your work. This is a use based niche. Perhaps you have blue daisies, which are rare. And perhaps it snows where you live, also rare, especially when daisies are in bloom. Images of blue daisies in snow, in good focus, composed attractively, with adequate resolution, will make quality images for potential microstock customers.
Use based niches can be very practical ways to organize a portfolio that contributes working capital over time to a greater photographic mission. Identifying uniqueness when on a photo taking walkabout can deliver exciting images with attractive usage capabilities. This is what the microstock customer is looking to buy.
Concentration on unique subject matter can pay off when customs or online microstock members search for those pictures. Keywords will deliver your photographic renderings of the blue daisies for their usage purchase consideration.
