Bad Goals Versus Good Goals for 2015 Working Writing Homeschooling Personal

Here are some bad goals for me to make for 2015:

1. Go from 157 pounds to 100 pounds.
2. Homeschool my kids so they are Harvard-ready by the age of 16.
3. Make one million dollars.
4. Travel the world.
5. Make sure all my friends think I am the bomb.com.

Here are some better goals for 2015:

1. Try to go to the gym to treadmill twice a week. Eat fewer sweets and cut back to two cups of coffee per day. Rest when I need it because when I am overly tired I tend to eat.
2. Homeschool my kids consistently every day while still going on outings and field trips and having fun with them.
3. Make $30,000 working solely from home with Younique, Jamberry, Scripted, BlogHer, regional parenting magazines, Amazon Kindle ebooks, blogging and whatever other small jobs come my way.
4. Go to Colorado with the family during the first part of the year and New England during the fall.
5. Make an effort to listen to my friends when they are talking to me. Be less selfish and focus on them more. Talk less and listen more. Be forgiving and less judgmental, yet honest. No small task!

Got goals? Id love to hear about them!

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Offering Good Customer Service on Fiverr or Anywhere

I was so excited to see that I was the #3 rated proofreader on Fiverr after only being on a couple of months. (The new Fiverr has come out, though, and I cant figure out how buyers can search by rating, which has slowed my business considerably).

I want to share how I do this, and its really very simple.

1. Deliver on time.
2. Communicate part one. If you cant deliver on time, let the buyer know.
3. Communicate part two. Put on your gig if you will be on vacation or taking some time off and that your delivery time has been extended.
4. Be fair. If you, for example, lower your proofing word count that you will do for one gig, give previous buyers the same rate you always gave them. Keep track in Excel.
5. Good customer service. Deliver more than you said you would. If I am proofing a book that is already on Amazon, I like to post a review as a bonus for the buyer. If I am to pin one image for one gig, I like to pin more than that if the content is well in line with my Pinterest followers.

What are your secrets to WAHM success?

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Fotolia is Rejecting my Vector for no Good Reason

Fotolia had been one of my best agency. I used to love it. It accepted everything I submitted and produced a decent sales all the time.

But recently, Fotolia has been rejecting my vectors... without giving me a good reason. I am really frustrated and annoyed. Below are the sample of rejected vectors. Bear in mind that these vectors had already been accepted by all other agencies and they are selling already.

And below is the rejection reason from Fotolia.

Fotolia: Photograph Declined - Technical Problems 

Hello leremy, 

We regret to inform you that photo 39961352 was not accepted. Photographs submitted to Fotolia must meet high technical standards.
The image contains one or more technical problems:

• Blurry or out of focus

• Over/Under exposure

• Framing problem

• Over or under saturated colors

• Problems with contrast

• Noise or Pixelation

• Quality of routing

• Interpolation problem

Looking at the rejection reason, one vector contributor can clearly understand that these reasons are standard reasons for declining a photograph, not a vector. Vectors will not have the problems mentioned above. What I am really questioning now is whether my reviewer is a qualified vector artist himself or merely a photographer who dont understand anything about vector.

Since Fotolia did not gave me a reason that make sense, I guess the problem could be having jagged edges in my vector when Fotolia requires us to submit a 15MP resolution JPEG for the vector. You know, when you save any artwork of that size, your artwork will have jagged edges because the DPI in our screen could not accommodate such a precision. This is actually a limitation. That could be the reason for rejection. Thus, I have resubmitted my vector and explained to them about the problem in the Note to Moderator column. What happen was, they rejected it again with the EXACT SAME reason like above. I was hoping that they could at least give me a clue on whats my problem was. This is utterly frustrating.

I then, wrote a message to Fotolia about all the problems mentioned above. Below is the message.

Fotolia keeps rejecting my vector work recently and the reviewers did not specific the problem. They only give me a general reply to the rejection which doesnt make sense at all. This is making me very frustrated.
The REF in my Inbox for these problems are:9054164490541643905416419054164090541639
Can you please explain in details what are the problem with these submission?
From a very frustrated contributor. 

And this is their reply. Again, another standard reply which makes you feel the that you are unimportant to them.

Hi,
Thank you for your e-mail. 
All of your images and videos have been reviewed by our selection team. Please note that the selection team is a separate department, so we have no influence on their decision. The main criteria for validation or rejection are: the quality of the image/video, the technical requirements, the similarity to existing Fotolia photographs and the images/videos sale potential. We know that it can be difficult to have an image or video rejected but please bear with us. You would be able to view your deleted files by going to: "My Files > Manage My Files > Show Deleted Files (green button located on the right side)". We encourage you to continue uploading your images and videos.
Kind regards,
Fotolia.com 

You see, up to this point, there is almost nothing I could do to get my artwork approved. These artworks had taken days to produce. It is not just about tracing photograph. It takes days and months to gather the resources from real objects and human model I photographed myself.

To conclude this, I will give up submitting to Fotolia for the time being, and hopefully there will be a change in the reviewer system one day later. Of course, this will not break my spirit to continue since all other agency still love my work.

If you are a vector contributor and having the same problem, please share with us. Thank you.

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Finally some Good News in these Gloomy Days of Microstock Industry

Extremely heavy competition among contributors, sales drop despite heavy uploading, tricky stock agencies manipulating our royalties, and the devaluation of our stock vectors and photos have been among all the bad news we have had in the past 2 years. We are demoralized by all these and got very fed up. Every other time when a stock agency wrote to us, we will be expecting for another cut. Not this time, though :)

First, ever since Adobe has taken over Fotolia, good news have been limping over and over again for contributors. Adobe raised our royalty ranking to one level higher for everyone - a very generous move. This is a big increase to our overall earning. Apart from that, Adobe has "cut ties" with the ludicrous DPC (DollarPhotoClub). I have also been witnessing an increase of Extended License and total number of sales at Fotolia too. I really hope this trend can continue for a longer period of time. 

Secondly today, IStock-Getty is giving us a raise to our subscription royalties rate. Although, I really dont like the idea  of "mini-subscriptions", but a raise, is nevertheless, still a raise. Furthermore, a credit sales download at iStock only yield us about $1.60. Given that iStock is now "forcing" buyers to commit to 10 or 25 downloads a month which yield $1.00 per mini subscription download, it may actually result in a higher total revenue at the end of the day.

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