Some Background

IPTC

Back in the 70's when ties and collars were wide and suits were brown, images were wired across the world on a machine that printed a single row of pixels and a time and could take 30 minutes to send a photo. To help newspapers organise images which were being telephoned in from around the world the International Press Telecommunications Council defined a series of attributes that could be assigned to images.

Leap forward to 1994 and apple worked out a clever way of embedding that information into jpeg and tiff files (to be specific jpeg files with embedded exif data)... back in the day tiff files were 'THE' format for exchanging images on different computers.

The tips and ideas in this post are mostly aimed at microstock photographers / image creators, and for the most part are ideas for promoting work, your profile(s)/website(s) and selling more images...

1] Only upload to the top sites,
You might want to upload to some of the up and coming microstock sites to evaluate your earnings, but in general it will take a lot of your valuable time which you can use more better elsewhere. But always keep your uploaded images ready for submission to other sites as the market changes will will find yourself wanting to upload them again elsewhere.