HOW TO MAKE MONEY SHOOTING STOCK FOOTAGE By Doug Jensen

hello I’m done Jensen The Vortex media I’ve been a professional in the television video production business for over 35 years and I’d like to tell you about a great way of making money in our industry that doesn’t rely on convincing clients to hire you your prior experience or having inside of connections with the right people you can earn money while you’re sleeping while you’re working on other projects and even while you’re on vacation and if you enjoy the creativity of Freedom that comes from shooting video as much as I do then it might not even seem like work at all sounds too good to be true well it’s not as I’m sure you figured out already I’m talking about making money from stock footage I’m already earning nearly $2,700 a month even though I spend less than 4 hours a week working on stock footage and best of all that income is almost pure profit because I don’t spend money on Talent models location fees employees or any of the other typical expenses of running a small business other than some basic camera equipment that I already have my main investor

stock footage or just spend some of my spare time and please don’t make the mistake of confusing stock photos with stock footage stock photos are a waste of time because there’s no money in it but stock footage now that’s another story when I divide how much money I’ve earned so far but how much time I put into processing my portfolio of Clips my income turns out to be some around $279 per hour and growing every month as the clips that I’ve already uploaded continue to sell over and over again that number sounds crazy doesn’t it will stay tuned because in a few minutes I log into my contributor account at Shutterstock and I’ll show you exactly how lucrative stock footage can be when it’s done right and that’s really the key right there isn’t it you have to know what you’re doing stock footage isn’t to get rich quick scheme where you can go shoot some video uploaded to the web and then watch the money roll in it’s easy but it’s not that easy you’re going to need some training if you want to do it right and that’s where I can help you as I say

I’ve been in the television business for more than 35 years as a cameraman editor and director I work for all the major broadcast networks of Fortune 500 corporations I produced about 20 end up master class training videos and I think several production classes at Maine media workshops every summer I really enjoyed taking the skills and knowledge that I have Acquired and passing them on to others but I travel on teaching it always surprises me how few of the people I meet realize how much money can be made from stock footage to me stock footage is a no-brainer and I can’t believe everyone isn’t doing it already and that’s why I decided to produce an in-depth masterclass on the subject and share what I’ve learned with others in fact my five-hour Workshop is exactly the training that I wish I could have taken advantage of when I got started I’d probably be making twice as much money now if I knew back then what I know today

I’ve learned a lot from hands-on experience trial and error and making many mistakes Mistakes by the way that are still costing me literally hundreds of dollars every month because I got started off on the wrong foot

my workshop is available for on-demand streaming at Vimeo and includes 26 chapters of in-depth step-by-step training that leaves no stone unturned I cover choosing the right stock footage agencies to work with creatine effective metadata that ensures your Clips will get seen by customers what type of footage sells best recommended camera equipment the differences between commercial and editorial footage including how to get both types of proved how to prevent rejections before they even happen fast and efficient editing basic color grading techniques and exporting your footage with specifications that customers are looking for time-saving methods for uploading submitting Eclipse to multiple stock footage agencies with practically no extra work and importance steps that many people are unaware of that need to be taken after your Clips have been approved by the world’s most successful stock footage producer absolutely not but I do think my study $2,700 per month income is no

sneeze that especially when you consider that I only spend about three or four hours a week working on stock footage no matter how you cut it that’s good money so stock footage is a topic you’re interested in and if you’re serious about doing it right then I encourage you to sign up my workshop or I’ll teach you everything I’ve learned about making money from stock footage and how much does my training cost just $158.37 which is about what you learn when you sell 34k clips at an agency like Shutterstock for the first time in other words if I can help you sell just three extra clips that you wouldn’t have sold otherwise you will have covered the whole cast of taking my workshop all the rest of the money you learn and countless hours of time you’ll save by following my advice would just be icing on the cake now if you’ve already tested the waters of stock footage but aren’t getting the results you and hope for them this Workshop is designed for you if you’re still a photographer who is considering moving into the much more lucrative Market of stock footage than this Workshop is for you to

if you’re an experienced videographer who wants to increase your income by tapping into a passive but steady Revenue stream this Workshop is also for you or if your student who is just getting started in filmmaking what better way could there be to supplement your income in improve your shooting skills at the same time the reason stock footage is so profitable is because you’re not working for an hourly wage you’ll be the owner of hundreds or even thousands of clips that can each be sold over and over again year after year let’s take a closer look at my own numbers by logging into my contributor account is Shutterstock here we see my earnings so far this month and over here we see that my lifetime earnings since joining Shutterstock seven years ago has surpassed the $112,000 Mark if we come down here there’s a bar graph that shows my monthly earnings for the last 3 months

I can change it to show the last 6 months

or the last 12 months as you can see my sales vary from month to month but on average it was about $2,200 per month last year but that’s just my income from Shutterstock and because they do require exclusivity I also sell the exact same footage to other agencies which brings my total average income up to about $2,700 per month 100% of my portfolio is video and I don’t waste any time on photos why because the income from photos can be as little as $0.25 per sale for beginners up to a maximum of $2.85 if you’ve already made at least $10,000 in lifetime earnings and also if the customer is paying top dollar for a single high-resolution on-demand image on the other hand look over here when someone down with one of your video clips you’ll get 30% commission no matter what Shutterstock sells it for had a job me the commission is even higher at 35% it doesn’t matter how big your portfolio is it doesn’t matter what your lifetime earnings

and it doesn’t matter who you are 30 to 35% for everyone all the time that is a Level Playing Field if I ever saw one so what do those commissions mean an actual dollars and cents you may ask well shutterstock’s price right now for a 4K clip is $179 so that means that $53.70 is my share of the sale and their price for an HD clip is $79 so my share is $23.70 but those prices aren’t carved in stone and there are many variables that can affect what a customer actually paste and consequently what my commission will be some high-volume customers purchase Clips in bulk so they get discounted pricing and therefore the commission’s are lower but sometimes the commission’s are much higher it’s not uncommon for me to earn hundreds of dollars from a single cell example just a few weeks ago on January 29th I earn $400 from the sale of One Clip In fact I sold a total of 7 clips that.

a my combined income was $555 I honestly can’t understand why anyone with a decent camera and some basic skills isn’t in the stock footage game now if you’re concerned that the stock footage Market is already oversaturated and that you’ll never be able to get your foot in the door you can put that where you out of your mind the use of stock footage by broadcasters advertisers news organizations documentary producers and all kinds of businesses is growing by Leaps and Bounds every year there will always be a demand for fresh footage and just because someone else already uploaded a shot of a particular subject doesn’t mean that you couldn’t shoot the same thing better or differently so the buyers which was one of your Clips instead and what about 4K go to any stock footage website and look at the millions yes I said millions of clips that are only available in high-definition someday those HD Clips are going to be just as worthless as standard definition Clips are right now every one of those HD clips

represents an excellent opportunity for someone like you or me to replace it with a fork a alternative besides you don’t have to wait for 4K to catch fire to start making money from four K Clips when you upload a 4K clipped a certain stock footage agencies they’ll automatically create an HD version for you so customers can buy the resolution that best suits their needs today and in the future with no additional effort on your part and I should point out that nobody buys one of my Clips because Doug Jensen shot it and nobody is following me to see what footage I posted most recently my Clips only sell what an editor or producer has a specific app to fill in their editing sequence and they decide that one of my Clips best meets their needs so that means that if you and I both upload similar Clips my clip wouldn’t have an advantage over yours it’s a Level Playing Field and both of us would have an equal chance of getting our clip purchased by the customer. Right there for a second on a Level Playing Field

some stock footage contributors such as myself do have an advantage because of our experience I’ve been doing this for several years already and I know things that you don’t know I don’t think that you don’t even know you don’t know my point is that there are many things that a Savvy stock footage contributor can do to increase their chances of making a sale and that’s the idea behind my workshop if you want to get serious about building a nice steady income then I can give you the jump start you need but is anybody knows profitability is determined by income alone income must be offset by the cost of doing business including the time and effort they have to put into it so my workshop will also teach you how to process your Clips more efficiently the saving countless hours that would give you more time for doing other things that you enjoy or better yet time to produce even more stock footage to keep adding fuel to the fire I’ve got my work load down to a science and I can process a lot of Clips very quickly and efficiently I only spent about 45 minutes working on each

when a batch processing a bunch of footage at the same time here is how that breaks down ingesting my raw footage from the camera’s memory card takes about 10 seconds each sorting and trimming my Clips takes me about 20 seconds each every clip needs to be colored graded or enhance to one extent or another and that takes me about a minute trust me when I say that there isn’t a camera made by any manufacturer that will produce footage that couldn’t be improved upon in post and this stuff is mandatory if you want to maximize sales my method of exporting or rendering the individual Clips after editing and Grading is automated so I don’t even count whatever time that part of the process takes I go away and when I come back dozens or even hundreds of Clips will all be finished and waiting for submission

next comes my least favorite part of running the stock footage business creating the metadata this stuff which I called metal logging accounts were about three minutes of the five minutes I spend prepping each clip for submission without good meditating your Clips will never be seen my customers and therefore will never sell if you’re under the impression that success hinges on who shoots the best footage and the customers will naturally buy it you got a lot to learn about how this business Works metadata is just as important if not even more important than actual footage itself metadata is what separates the successful stock footage contributors from the wannabes a my workshop will help you develop a super efficient workflow that will ensure that you create excellent metadata with the least amount of effort possible the techniques you learned will literally save you hundreds of hours processing your clips

a big blunder I made in my early years was using the online submission system is Shutterstock to add metadata to my Clips I wasted tons of time doing it online and what’s worse in the end I had no way of getting my meditate at that I had created myself back out of the Shutterstock website which led me to my second biggest mistake when I wanted to submit those three thousand Clips to other agencies lo and behold I have no meditator for those clips I was looking to starting all over again from scratch fortunately the nice folks and a jovi kindly offered to do the metadata for me and naturally I took them up on it because to be honest I may never have gotten around to doing it myself but as they say there’s no such thing as a free lunch and that decision has literally cost me tens of thousands of dollars because the metadata for those clips that someone else did for me isn’t good enough those 3000 Clips in Adobe are only earning 10% what they’re earning that Shutterstock

now the point of this story is not to say that Shutterstock is better than Adobe just the opposite might be true for all I know but in my analysis of my Adobe sales results I put the blame squarely on poor metadata metadata that I foolishly allowed to be created by someone else another mistake you don’t want to fall victim to the temptation to let an agency’s big powerful computers automatically generate the metadata for you yep that’s the next big thing in the stock footage industry supposedly computers can analyze your Clips identify the subject matter and create all the best meditative for you they call that artificial intelligence but I call it being very lazy maybe the automated systems work better for photos of the do for video I don’t know maybe the systems will improve over time I don’t know that either but what I do know is that right now there is no way I’m going to put the fate of my Clips in the hands of a dumb computer that can’t tell the difference between an airplane and a helicopter

or a missile from an airplane

or a snake from a boat a system they can’t tell the important subject of this shot is an alligator

that the subject of this shot is in chess not at church or at our or a building

and if there’s bird is an osprey not an eagle and then it flies from the top of the tree in slow-motion where are those critical keywords that need to be associated with this clip if I want customers to find it you know I could probably hire a third way to do a better job on my meditate it at least he or she would probably be able to tell the difference between an orange gecko on a tree from a gold fish in an aquarium the bottom line is that you absolutely must do your own metal login and also store that valuable information on your own computer so you can’t roll it in my workshop I’ll teach you how to do both of those things quickly and efficiently now you might be aware that there are the third-party services that you can hire to do the metadata for you are there any better than the automated computer systems well I can’t really say but I’m definitely glad I don’t use them because I’ll be stuck paying a 15% fee from now to Eternity on are resale I make in my case I’d be losing more than $400 every single month totaling more than $5,000

in 2018 alone and those figures are going up for month-to-month using a third-party metadata service would definitely not be worth it for me if you really don’t want to do your own metadata then why not team up with a trusted friend or partner and let them help maybe you can shoot and edit and your partner could handle the metadata the key is that you must retain some control over this part of the process to ensure that it’s done right do you may have noticed that there’s one thing conspicuously missing for my time chart and that is a county for whatever amount of time I put into shooting my Clips why isn’t that on my chart well because it would be difficult to quantify I have no interest in punch in the time clock when I’m out shooting and I don’t consider it work I didn’t get started shooting stock footage because I wanted to make money and I wouldn’t continue doing it if my only motivation was money I love shooting the $2,700 per month I’m earning is just a bonus

but here’s something that may surprise you most of my Clips might never sell a single time do I care nope because the ones that do sell them more than make up for the ones that don’t being successful in this business requires that you accept the fact that a certain percentage of your Clips will do all the work while the rest just come along for the ride the case you’re interested let’s dive deeper into my sales figures at Shutterstock since it takes me about 5 minutes to process each clip and post that means I can submit about 12 new clips per hour when I’m bull processing my footage which then means that it must have taken me about 408 hours of Labor the process the 4900 clips that I had in my portfolio during December when I crunch these numbers so if I divide my combined earnings from Shutterstock and Adobe by 4:00 that works out to be $279 per hour that I have already been paid for clips that are still earning thousands of dollars every month with no signs of slowing

so if anyone tells you that you can’t make good money shooting stock footage you should ask them if they can show you some place else where you can earn more than $279 per hour while doing something that you enjoy this is really a great business if someone like me can make money from stock footage there’s nothing to stop you from doing the same and I can help you get there but I’ll need your undivided attention for about 5 hours of everything I know so if you’re ready to start making some serious money from a passive income stream and save a lot of time doing it efficiently then please sign up my workshop and let’s get down to business I’m ready to help your stock footage business the Boost it needs to achieve great success