In this lesson, you will understand how this business works, who are the key players and where do you fit in the process.

These are the online companies that you would be working with. These showcase your vector illustrations to millions of potential customers and make them to sell. Let us get to know the top 9 of them.

This provides you with the list of top online companies and the links for you to apply as a microstock illustrator for them.

It is important that you understand the typical terms and conditions of this business which you are expected to understand and follow. Each online company will make you read and agree their own set of terms and conditions and this lesson gives you an overview of what to expect when you join.

We need to have goals in life to make the most of our lives and similarly, to make the most of this course, this lesson will provide you with a structure that you can make use of to set and track your goals. If you set and achieve all the goals that we define as a part of this lesson then your journey in this business will begin in the most optimal way possible.

In this lesson you will understand all the different types of artworks that are being sold through these online companies other than vector illustrations. This will enable you to expand your portfolio and earn more in the future.

Your income is also dictated by the way your association with your online company is defined. In this lesson let us look at the different types of association and what is the best option for you.

Finally, in this lesson, you will learn about how you will make money, what are the different ways you will get paid and how does this vary across companies.

In this lesson you will gain a good understanding of how you add value to your end customers. This will make it easier to analyse what to create.

Understanding your customer's needs is critical for you to be able to create successful vector illustrations. So, in this lesson, you will gain good insights into what customers are looking for when they come to these online companies to purchase your vector illustration.

We need to be sure that our approach is accurate when it comes to understand what customers are looking for. So lets perform a quick test.

Top 100 keywords which were published previously by one of the top agency. This will give you ideas about what type of vector illustrations you must be creating.

Before you get started, know which are good niche to consider and which are not so good ones, so that you give yourself a great chance to succeed.

In this lesson let us look what you can do to reach more customers and increse the sale of each artwork you create.

In this lesson, let us look at different types of niches. This understanding will help you plan your creation process to achieve maximum success.

This is a document which lists the Top 250+ keywords which are prompted by one of the top agency. This will give you additional ideas about what type of vector illustrations you must be creating.

Creativity is not an elusive talent as it is made out to be. It is also a skill which we can learn but we just need to look at it from a different perspective. This lesson explains this with my own example.

If you are new to the business and to Adobe illustrator, you would want to consider this approach of starting with simplier vector illustrations and then building on from that. This will enable you to build your confidence in a step by step manner and stop you from getting overwhelmed.

Not every vector illustrations that I created was successful and everytime an vector failed to succeed, I learned a lesson from it. In the end, I have managed to narrow the success factors to 5 focus points which are explained in this lesson. If you aim at these for every illustration you create, you not only give them a great chance to succeed well but also enable them to succeed well for a long time.

One of the biggest risk of setting up a business in the digital world exposes us to the risk of copyright infringment. In this lesson, you will understand it in more detail as what are the different ways in which it can affect you and what you can do to be as safe as possible.

The vector illustrations you create are generally from scratch and hence, unlike other artists, you dont have to submit too many supporting documents. However, you do have one document which is important for a vector illustrator esp. if you are new to Adobe Illustrator. Let us discuss about it and some of the challenges that arise from it and how to deal with it.

This document provides you the free access to Adobe Illustrator tutorial which will help you to learn some critical functions of the tool. As I value your time, I want you to learn only whats needed to get started and as you get more comfortable in this business you can learn more about the tool.

You can obviously learn from any other sources, paid or free to enhance your knowledge. However, there are currently none around which is created with an focus to help illustrators to succeed in this business.

You must need Adobe Illustrator. I dont know if you want to waste time trying to find an alternative to that. Let us look at what other tools might be important for us which we need for sure.

You have your first illustration ready and you are eager to submit it to different microstock agencies. However, you still need to take care of a number of things before we do that. So in this lesson we look at all the critical aspects and activities that follow after you have created your illustration.

Keywording is the simplest way to get your illustration to your customer. Without proper keywording, even the best of illustration will go unsold. Also, most agency provides you the opportunity to associate 50 keywords with your illustration which is perfect. However, you want some way of quickly identifying the best keywords for you to associate. You need the best of both words - great keywords for your illustration but without having to spend a lot of time. So here is one of the two tools for you just for this.

This is the best tool out there for keywording your vector illustrations. It is easy, convenient and streamlined into your submission process. Once you see this, you will never search for another one, I promise.

Having the right keywords is critical for the success of your vector illustration and hence the this and all the next lessons focus on key best practices that you can follow when choosing the keywords for your vectors. This first best practice helps you identify the really dangerous keywords which must avoid at all costs.

This second best practice highlights those keywords which, if used, will most probably lead to rejection of your vector illustrations. So knowing this will help you keep away from them.

This Third best practice highlights those keywords which probably cause the most confusion and even contribute to bulk of rejection of your vector illustration. So knowing this will help you be clear about what types of keywords to use and which confusing ones to avoid..

This fourth best practice highlights one of the most subtle issues of keywording which might impact your sales, some time significantly. In this lesson I will provide a detailed demo with some solid examples. This is not to be missed.

How can you think outside the box to use the description along with the keyword section to increase your reach? This lesson spills the bean.

Once you create your artworks, you will be submitting them to a number of different online microstock companies. This lesson provides you the way to miminize the effort needed to upload your keywords for every company to ZERO, well almost. We will look at really good free and paid tools out there you can use to achieve this effeciency.

This is the best free tool to perform a lot of functions during your creation to submission process. A paid version of this costs much less thanAdobe's Lightroom over an year but also packs some very good functions. However, what we get out of the free version is more than enough for most of us.

Each online company is different and hence this section provides a detailed walkthrough of those top 5 online companies. In this lesson what are the ways you can upload your illustrations to different companies and what is the best method to employ and based on what conditions.

This is a detailed demo of how you would go about uploading and reviewing your vector illustrations to the top online company. With this, you will not have any questions about how you would go about uploading or submitting your first set of vector illustrations to this company.

This is a follow up lesson for the upload and submit process for the top online company which explains some of the submission options which is really handy to know.

This is a detailed demo of how you would go about uploading and reviewing your vector illustrations to the online company Dreamstime.

This is a detailed demo of how you would go about uploading and reviewing your vector illustrations to the online company CanstockPhoto.

This is a detailed demo of how you would go about uploading and reviewing your vector illustrations to the online company BigStock.

This lesson takes a detailed look at the after submission process, what to expect and what can be done once your artworks have been approved?

This lesson explains the how I decided on my next simple concept which I will bring to life in coming lessons and upload it to two of the agencies.

In this lesson I will use some of the basic functions of Adobe Illustrator to bring my idea to life.

Ahhh! I missed saving the file previously. So let us do that here and you will also learn how you should go about saving the file for every illustration of yours.

In this lesson we will look at the most important problem that we as microstock illustrators should avoid and what approach you can take to ensure that.

The one of the ways you can make your simple object based artworks come to life is by following this simple tip. 

This lesson explains the review process that you can follow to identify rasterisation problems so that you can fix the isolated issue.

This lesson explains gives another set of mistakes we must avoid to ensure we face less rejections.

This lesson explains how you should deal with texts in your artwork and why? This will help you avoid another rejection reason.

This lesson explains two different methods that you can use to create your JPEG image preview which is needed for submitting your artwork.

It is essential that you review your JPEG file to ensure there are no mistakes and in this Lesson, I will show you examples of how you can do it and what kind of issues you find when you review your image files.

In this lesson, Let us quickly find a way to keyword our artwork and update them so that we dont ever have to do it for this artwork again.

OK, we are all done and now in this lesson we will upload and submit this artwork to two of the agencies.