Midjourney Stock Photography Business Tutorial

Looking for a Midjourney stock photography business tutorial?

Be ready to be guided step-by-step with this how-to article.

Today, we’re going to take a look at how you can automate an entire stock business using the latest AI tools.

Now, you might tell me that stocks are going out of fashion.

Anyone can make an image with Midjourney.

Why would you need a stock website?

And to that, I say that there will always be an opportunity to stand out by doing things that other people are not.

By going the extra mile, selecting an emerging niche, and targeting a market that has not been fully served.

And that is the secret to business in any industry.

Midjourney Stock Photography Business Tutorial

I’m going to be sharing with you some secrets about how we can use the latest AI tools to address underserved markets in the stock industry.

We’re also going to take a look at simple ways you can use the latest AI tools to turn your static images into moving movies.

This, once again, will allow you to stand out from the sea of stock imagery.

We’ll also take a look at Wirestock, which allows you to submit your stock images to multiple marketplaces in one go.

So, let’s dive straight into our Midjourney stock photography business tutorial.

Analyze Trends and the Market

The first thing we’re going to do is look for areas and trends, markets segments that we can address that are underserved, and undersaturated.

And to do that, I’m going to recommend looking at a couple of tools.

Exploding Topics

Exploding Topics is a wonderful website built on top of Google Trends.

It shows you certain topics that are emerging in the cultural consciousness.

So you can look through it here.

Regenerative Agriculture

There are things like products or concepts, things like regenerative agriculture which you can see is getting a 646 growth in the last couple of years.

Its approach to agriculture doesn’t simply aim to limit the negative impact on the environment but to actually improve it.

Now, this is a great topic to target because what we can do is create a series of images that visually represent this topic.

They will be very popular for editorial pieces.

So, what I’m going to do is put together a little list of a couple of topics that we find interesting.

Psychological Safety

Let’s go back into Exploding Topics and see what else comes up.

Psychological safety, here is another interesting topic.

People are always talking about psychological safety, “I must be safe.”

“Are you feeling safe?”

Psychological safety is the ability to express oneself without fear of repercussions.

This allows people to take risks, challenge assumptions, make mistakes, and learn.

According to a two-year study by Google, the highest-performing teams have a high degree of psychological safety.

And psychological safety is a very important aspect, especially in the culture that we exist in where anything that you say online can be held against you forevermore.

So, I would say it’s actually quite difficult to have a sense of psychological safety whilst engaging in online activity.

Let’s add it to our little database of interesting topics that we want to target – Psychological Safety.

Other Topics

You can also scroll down on this tool, and you can see other related topics – Psychological trauma, trauma counseling, enmeshment, neuro-education.

Yeah, these are great topics we want to look at: ones that are really exploding, ones that are suddenly emerging out of nothing.

Serum K, C, and Retinol

I think we could do something with that for sure, Vitamin C,  serum, and Vitamin K serum.

Rice Serum, generally serums are hot right now.

So generally, I’m going to put in some serums for the final option – Serum K, C, and Retinol.

Now we’ve identified three separate topics which could.

They could potentially have a good opportunity for people looking for images that don’t actually exist in the library of stock websites yet.

Using ChatGPT to Engineer Prompts

Another step in our Midjourney stock photography business tutorial is making prompts.

So, I have trained ChatGPT to be my personal prompt writer.

And now it is extremely good at writing specific prompts which I can then use in mid-journey.

I’ll share my entire prompt wizard prompt for Chat GPT in the description below.

But essentially I’ve asked it to act as a prompt engineer.

And I will give it short content ideas and each stop is to elaborate these into full explicit coherent prompts.”

I then define exactly what makes a good prompt.

It includes nouns and adjectives, media, camera lenses, and certain visual aesthetics.

I also fed it a couple of example prompts to train it exactly in the art of prompt writing.”

Beyond this, I’ve told it to make sure to include a forward slash imagine (/imagine) at the beginning of prompts.

So, now, I can literally take these, copy and paste them straight into Mijourney.

Finally, I’ve told it what my first request is.

That is to suggest 10 prompts for regenerative farming stock photography.

Let’s whack this in and see what we get.

Starting any new project requires dedication and creativity for success.

Courage to Try Out New Things

It’s important to realize that this process requires a little bit of ingenuity and the ability to try something that other people haven’t done.

It’s also important to recognize when something is working and to double down on that and to really elaborate on those areas that are working well.”

So my suggestion is really to try and make as many different types of images as possible.

Go very broad.

And then as soon as you start getting some data coming in, you’re going to select the areas that you recognize are working really well.

Then double down on those as your niche.

But a little word of warning is that you can’t expect these to work forever.

At some point, other people will recognize that you’re having success with something and they will move into your territory.

But that is the nature of business itself.

That is why it is so important to move quickly.

Wirestock

I like to use Wirestock to submit my images.

They submit them to multiple stock sites at once.

So we can simply whack ourselves individually and copy and paste these straight in.

Sometimes I like to run the same prompt twice.

Now we’ve got some beautiful images that would work perfectly for a regenerative farming theme.

Look at this beautiful documentary-style image.

I’ve also asked ChatGPT to give me a couple of options for both psychological safety and Vitamin C serum.

Also, I’ve asked ChatGPT to give me two prompts that are visual illustrative metaphors for regenerative farming.

So I’ll hop back into Midjourney and try this out as well.

So I’ve asked it to take numbers five, nine, and ten and add descriptive words to make them realistic and cinematic.

Add a specific lighting composition and camera lens.

Balenciaga and Other Themes

So, another very popular theme these days is people taking famous films and turning them into Balenciaga.

This one is the Harry Potter film.

You are here to learn the subtle science and exact art of fashion modeling.

I would be careful, though, with the copyright issues here.

But this is another example of taking diverse concepts that would be impossible to unite without AI art.

Let’s take a look at how these are coming out.

Wow, I love this – astronauts playing golf on the moon, nothing like a quick round.

And here we have a dramatic scene of somebody riding a dinosaur through a dystopian future.

Upscaling the Images

The next step in our Midjourney stock photography business tutorial is to take our images, save and upscale them using an AI Upscaler.

This gives us the largest images possible and allows us to sell them on a number of different stock markets.

At the moment Midjourney is giving us a fairly low resolution.

We can use a number of different upscaling options to increase the resolution.

One is Gigapixel and the other is Let’s Enhance.

One of my favorites is Image Upscaler.

This gives you five images for free a week to start off with.

Otherwise, you can upgrade.

There are a number of free options that you can use to get started.

But if you’re serious about this, you will need to get a paid service to automate the whole entire process.

All you have to do is upload it, drag, and drop it.

And we can press Start, and it’s going to whiz away.

I’ve selected a 400 increase.

When it’s done, you will see that a green button appears on the right-hand side of the screen.

You can simply click it and the image will open in a new tab, then load, and you can right-click and save it.

There’s my lovely lady.

I’m going to save her.

Wirestock Explained

Next up in our Midjourney stock photography business tutorial is uploading images to Wirestock.io.

This is a fantastic automation tool that allows you to submit your stock assets to a number of different sites in one go.

They handle everything from captioning to uploading to websites, including Adobe Stock, Pond5, and Deposit Photos.

Wirestock does all the hard work related to captioning and keywording.

Most of all, you get your own personal portfolio where you can sell your assets, not through a platform.

So, you get your own online shop to promote your stock photography or other types of assets.

If you’re targeting a slightly different genre, this is a great opportunity to create a storefront very quickly.

How To Use Wirestock

Let me show you how easy it is to use.

Once you’ve made an account on Wire Stock, all you have to do is go to upload and select from either your computer, your drive, or Dropbox.

Then, you can choose the image that you have created.

I’ll upload our lovely lady and her serum, click on next.

From here, in the caption, you need to let them know that it’s AI-generated, so you have to say AI generator.

You need to edit the marketplace list because currently, Getty Stock and Alamy do not accept AI assets.

But the rest are okay.

You can go to Save and go ahead and Post.

You can come back into your portfolio and you’ll find your images uploaded.

I’ve been experimenting with a few different ideas for myself here.

This is one that I’m thinking is working pretty well. It’s a beautiful skull made of flowers.

The great thing about Wirestock is that it speeds up the process and it submits all of your images to a whole range of different stock photo sites in seconds.

It also goes through the process of captioning and adding specific keywords to each of your images.

So you can concentrate on the more exciting part which is generating your image.

Turning Images Into Videos

Now, there is an opportunity to use AI tools to go a little bit further and take your images and turn them into videos.

This is a great idea because number one, there are fewer videos available on stock sites.

Number two, you can charge a higher price for your stock videos.

I also recommend experimenting with vertical-style videos.

This is because there are a lot fewer videos available in this market than there are in the traditional landscape form of videos.

And I’m going to show you a tool that I like to use to quickly create my own videos, and that is called CapCut.

CapCut

In this part of our Midjourney stock photography business tutorial, you need to download the app CapCut.

Go to start a new project, go to your photos tab, upload a photo by selecting it, go to add, and then what you can do is select the photo.

Go to the bottom bar.

Scroll along to where it says Style.

Then scroll again until you see a few options.

The first that I recommend is 3D Zoom Pro.

You tap on this, and in a matter of seconds, it will generate a rather snazzy animation.

And to export it, all you have to do is go to the top right-hand corner, and click on the upward arrow.

It will pop up and export it.

You can go to Others and share it directly to your computer.

Now, here’s a little important trick to keep in mind: there is a minimum length of five seconds for the stock footage that you upload.

However, even though the image that you get from CapCut is only three seconds long, what you can do is you can take and copy it.

Then you can play it in reverse so that you have a looping animation.

This is good for two reasons.

It means that people can actually play the video on repeat, and they will have a seamless experience, as well as making your video twice as long.

Premiere

So, to do that, I will simply jump into editing software like Premiere.

I will copy and paste the video.

I will right-click on it and I will go down to speed duration.

From here, I will change the duration to minus 100, which essentially plays it at exactly the same speed in reverse.

And then I can export it, and it looks a little bit like this.

You can see that it goes all the way through and then it comes back out.

The best thing is that it will play continuously in a loop.

With this, we can follow exactly the same upload process inside of Wire tock.

What I absolutely recommend you do is take the content and repurpose it.

So, you can take an image, regenerate it in different aspect ratios, and create videos out of it.

Capcut is just one video application you can use to turn your images into videos.

So now we’ve got the process down, what you want to do is to start to automate this.

To do that, you can create this process and then hire people to do different parts of the process for you.

One thing you might want to do is to get people to create the listings for you.

So you’re just creating the images and videos.

You’re then sending them to an assistant who is going to upload them via Wirestock.

Getting Help from Freelancer

You can easily hire people using Freelancer.

I created an ad for a product listing assistant, and in just one hour, I got 43 bids.

People are offering their services for two dollars an hour.

So, you can really speed up the process because this is very easy manual work.

Get the Word Out Through Pexels, Unsplash, and Pixabay

Another couple of idea to improve your chances of success is to offer some of your images and videos for free on websites like Pexels, Unsplash, or Pixabay.

These are great because Unsplash has more views than the New York Times.

So you can get massive amounts of exposure.

It’s a great way to really publicize your own works and your profile.

I have only got 38 photos, and I’ve had over 10 million views of my 38 photos on Unsplash.

It’s a great way to completely channel your audience to your paid offerings.

If you create a collection of photos say we have the vitamin C collection, and you put one of these available on Unsplash for free, then people are going to find this.

And if they’re really serious about it, they’re going to want to buy the entire collection.

I can show you some of the photos that I have on here.

This photo I actually took in Wuhan on a layover three years ago just before the pandemic struck.

I was somewhat of an aspiring street photographer.

I was particularly captured by the innocent youth of this young girl with her ice cream.

Track Users of Your Images

Another thing you can do with the images that you give away for free on Unsplash is you can track people using them across the web.

So, you could search for where they’re being used.

Simply take your image, save it, then go to Google Image search.

Then you can see all the places where other people have used your free images.

This is great because what you can then do is you can reach out to them and make sure that they are linking from your image to wherever you’d like them to go.

This is good for two reasons.

One is it makes it easy for people to find you and two, you can actually increase your domain rating by getting a good follow link from a well-respected website.

For example, here you can see Envision app is using my image.

And so what you can do is you can reach out to them and say thank you for using my image.

I would appreciate it if you would link to my correct page.

This will be great because this is a very well-respected domain and you can see that Envision app has a pretty good authority score of 54.

So it would be a very useful backlink to receive for free.

Generate Backlinks

This is an interesting way to generate actual backlinks for free, which is also very valuable because people pay a lot of money for backlinks.

Even though that is frowned upon in the Google SEO guidelines.

Partner with Other Websites

Another way to package up your stock assets in a way that will increase your sales is to create large collections and then partner with deal websites that are going to sell these as packs on your behalf to their own mailing lists.

One that I have partnered with before which I recommend is Mighty Deals.

This is great because they have a large audience to which they can send targeted emails.

For example, there is this vintage bundle of 2500 vintage effects which you can easily create in Midjourney.

So, that is one type of approach you might want to explore.

Turning Images to Vectors

Another way to help you stand out is to turn your images into vectors.

So, if you’re creating graphic illustrative art, you can use an AI tool like Vector Magic.

It allows you to simply input your image straight from Midjourney and output yourself a vector.

This once again helps you expand the way that you’re approaching your work and target a larger audience.

Selling vectors is a way to really stand out at the moment.

There is no AI art generation tool that is going to give you actual vectors of a high enough quality.

So the opportunity here is to really create beautiful vectors and sell those.

Final Thoughts

We are living at a time when there is a huge opportunity to take these tools and create markets for selling our stock assets.

I empower you to be creative and combine these tools in original ways which allow you to target different niches in the market.

I think it is actually the most exciting time to create your own stock asset store.

Of course, you think “oh yes it’s only going to work for a short while” but that’s the same with every single business opportunity.

What you have to do is you have to move fast and you have to create high-quality content.

I hope you enjoyed this video.

Make sure to check out Wirestock in the description below and check out this next video for more on the state of AI.

I’m Samson Vowles.

This is Delightful Design and I hope you have a delightful day.

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