My upload strategy

Originally I have only contributed to Fotolia. They were really patient because I have uploaded so many bad images and luckily they did not fed up with me. By the time I have joined dreamsitme and the others I have had several photos that were accepted by them so I used these photos to get accepted or have a look on how other sites perform with the same images. By march this year I was part of shutterstock, fotolia, dreamstime and istockphoto. I also have had some experience on how much time does it take to upload an image. I have read discussions on whether the upload times worth dealing with. However I usually see if someone considers a site worth uploading then they will try to upload to every site all of their images.

When I realized that some sites review images considerably slower than the others I decided that I will not submit there such images that does not have a chance. So I started to upload to only my two favorite sites Fotolia and Shutterstock. It is easy and fun to upload on these sites, and their review process is so fast that I practically don't waste any time by delaying the uploads to the other sites.

So here is how I work: first I upload to both fotolia and shutterstock in parallel. Then I keyword the photos at shutterstock, because they have more strict keywords policy. After they have accepted all my keywords and titles I copy these details to fotolia. At fotlia I rearrange the keywords to have the most important words in front. And then I submit the images at both sites. After the review finishes on either of the sites (e.g. fotolia) I upload the accepted images to dreamstime and stockxpert. If the other site (e.g. shutterstock) accepts some images that were not accepted previously, I also upload these to dreamstime and stockxpert. Finally my protfolio is not so heavy in sales so I have enough sales only on shutterstock to decide on the best pictures. So the most downloaded pictures on shutterstock go to istockphoto. I upload only the best of my pictures because the istockphoto's lenghty upload procedure. Currently I upload a picture when it reached 6 downloads on shutterstock.

I hope it helped someone, if you have an upload strategy to consider feel free to comment.