Below is a summary of what’s been selling well over the last week and some ideas of how you can create images to profit from these popular themes:

Business people

These images are consistently our best sellers, especially those showing ethnic diversity. Also popular are business people using computers and making relevant gestures.

The best selling images tend to be very sharp images with the people clearly in business dress (ie a male or female suit), either doing something (eg using a computer or making a gesture) or interacting (eg in a meeting), often isolated on a white background. A variety of ethnicities and types of people is also important. We’re currently lacking black women, blond men and mature women in our business shots, so if you can provide some of these you may well find that your sales increase.

Family

Images showing a family, particularly those which demonstrate togetherness or having fun, are always popular. These can be outdoors images or studio shots on a white background. It’s helpful to co-ordinate the clothing of the family and ensure that they do look like they’re related (even if they’re not!).

The vast majority of family group photos on the website are of caucasian families, so if you have (or can produce) good images of asian, black or hispanic families, then you could corner the market for these!

This is also an area where we get far fewer illustrations, so if you’re bored of creating business or metaphorical illustrations (which, we hasten to add, are still popular!) why not consider if you can turn your talents to lifestyle images?

Healthy living

As we’re still at the beginning of the year it perhaps isn’t surprising that healthy living related images, particularly of spa treatments and weight loss, are selling well. Images both with and without people in them are popular.

While we have a lot of images of people doing positive things for their well-being (eg eating apples, drinking water, having a facial treatment) we have fewer showing the other side, ie people doing bad things! So you might find you can create a niche for yourself by providing these images. What about a very fat person stuffing a cream cake into their mouth, someone with decaying teeth or an overweight person working out at the gym to lose weight?

Couples/love

Images of happy couples always do well, particularly at the moment while we’re in the run up to Valentine’s Day. We’ve also seen an uplift in images relating to love.

Yet again, we’re lacking in ethnic diversity for these images (particularly black models) so this could be an opportunity for you to stand out from the crowd!

Couple images tend to sell best when they’re doing something together, either going through an important life event (eg getting married, moving house) or doing something romantic (eg drinking wine, running through a field of wheat, kissing).

Remember that if you’re producing images for Valentine’s Day then you should aim to submit these in December as people often look for ‘event’ images a month or two ahead of the date.

Plants

Images of plants are popular at the moment, and we’re also selling more gardening images than normal. While plants are always popular, this slight uplift may be because spring is just around the corner.

As we’re only just approaching spring this might be a great time to get more plant/gardening photos in to us. Rather than ‘static’ images of plants, why not have someone picking the flower/fruit, sewing seeds or digging the soil nearby? These will stand out from the still life images we see so many of.

Young/sexy women

Perennially popular, these images always sell well, particularly when they are very crisply and stylishly taken. Yet again, this is an area where we are lacking ethnic diversity, so if you have access to black, female models in particular this could be a good area for you to explore further.

Communications and networking

With the need for businesses to work internationally and the seemingly never-ending popularity of social networking sites, this type of image is always in demand.

Images which refer to social media functionality (eg like, share, follow, following, blog, blogging, microblogging etc) are popular and we don’t have a great variety of them on the site at the moment; just be careful that your image doesn’t infringe copyrights/trademarks.