Shutterstock and iStockphoto are now allowing video submissions to sell short video clips to local news stations, documentary producers, and the like. If you can produce video footage that would be useful to these types of projects, it could be well worth your while to upload them to Shutterstock or iStockphoto.

This is a short sample clip I took to submit to Shutterstock. I can imagine local newscasts  using this clip in a story about recent Supreme Court proceedings, or documentary filmmakers using it in a commentary about a particular case, and so on.

MacWorld has seven tips for would-be microstockers (see below). It's always helpful to read other people's summaries of the things that they find important. This is a decent list of basics.

1. Understand how it works: "...Selling stock photos is not easy money. It will take time to build up a decent sized portfolio (at least 100 pictures) before you see any sizable return..."
2. Think like a designer: "...Designers want photographs with ample amounts of uncluttered negative space so make sure you leave room for a headline or other text..." [Click the title above for more]

Shutterstock and Dreamstime allow you to sell images on an editorial license, meaning that purchasers will only be able to use the images in editorial formats (e.g. magazines, newspapers, etc). This is useful for images that you have taken which are of specific interest (famous people, places, current events...) and may not have model or property releases.

This sample editorial image from my collection was taken on the day of George W. Bush's inauguration and depicts items that might not normally have passed as royalty-free for various reasons. It is usable as editorial imagery because of the public nature of the event and the public interest in the event.

Dreamstime offers four extended licenses which could increase your earnings significantly: Increase Max Copies, Web Usage, Print Usage, and Sell the Rights. Each of these extends the ways in which the image can be used and pays a much higher premium. If you sell the rights to the image, you no longer control it and cannot sell it elsewhere, so use it with caution--noting that you can make a large chunk of change using this option (you can set your own price). Further details are below.

Sell Your Digital Images: Dreamstime pays $0.50 to $1.00 per basic download to the photographer (50%) and has a pretty good upload system. 

Buy Digital Images:
Dreamstime charges more for photos that have been download 100 times or
more, and again if they’ve been downloaded 500 times or more. They have also recently implemented a system where print and web images are separate purchases. You can currently download images for less than $1.

If you want a constant (and constantly growing) revenue stream from microstock--upload new images regularly. Many of the sites sort images in a number of views from newest to oldest by default, so that designers who are regulars can find the fresh photos and vector images quickly. This means that the more new images you keep in front of them, the more likely sales will be. As well, the more images  that you have in your library, the more statistically  likely they are to show up in keyword searches.

Microstock, like most things, disproves the old saying, "Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door." (Ralph Waldo Emerson?). If you want to make a sale, you need to get the image in front of people's eyeballs, and to do that, you need to find as many relevant keywords as possible. The more searches that hit your keywords, the more that your image comes up in front of designers. (Note that it is important not to "spamdex" your image in an attempt to get your image viewed using keywords that don't match the picture.

A number of microstock sites offer free downloads as a way to give you a taste of the types of images and image quality they offer. It's not a bad idea for designers on a budget to peruse these offerings now and then. Most notably, Dreamstime has a rotating selection of seven images available for free download at any time. Log in to the main page and look for the "More Free Photos" link to see all seven.