If you are any good with a camera then there are people out there on the internet who may well be interested in your photos. Provided you know where to go and you know what you need to submit, you could already be sitting on a huge amount of potential revenue.
And there is nothing stopping you from taking even more pictures to suit the needs of the people looking for them, so grab your camera and your computer and get started. Read on to find out more…
If you are often online you’ll probably be aware of the existence of stock photos. These are held by a number of websites which offer them – either for free or for a fee – to anyone else who wants them. And you would be surprised at how many people do want them!
Webmasters need them for their websites; publishers need them to illustrate books, articles and courses, and some people just want to create their own screensaver from a selection of photos they particularly like.
That’s where you come in. While websites that hold stock photos already have thousands in stock, they also have thousands of visitors every day who are looking for the right shot – and yours could be the one they want.
The most important thing to remember is to read through the requirements of each website carefully before submitting anything. Some of these sites don’t pay their photographers at all so you’ll need to be sure you’ll earn something from it. Most of them also have very precise submission rules that you need to follow in order to get your pictures accepted. Don’t worry too much about these, since if you know a reasonable amount about photography they shouldn’t present too much of a problem.
Once you’ve found a website you like, you need to think about what kind of photos to send in. There may be restrictions posed by the site itself, but other than this you should think about branding yourself in some way. If you can stand out from the thousands of other photographers on the site you’ll sell more photos, so it makes sense to play to your strengths and make sure you concentrate on a particular subject area rather than trying to appeal to anyone and everyone.
If you have two strengths that you’d like to promote, the best plan can be to join two different sites and have a different username for each one. That way people won’t link the two names together and you can brand yourself as an expert wildlife photographer on one, and an expert still life photographer on the other. It also doubles your chances of making new sales!
While we are on the subject of sales, it’s a simple mathematical truth that the more photos you display on these sites, the more sales you are going to make. Aim for as many as possible but only ever submit the best photos you have, otherwise they may be rejected.
The great thing about stock photos is that people will be paying a small fee for using the photo. They are not buying it outright. What this means is that you could have two thousand photos on a particular site, make two thousand five hundred sales in a year… and still have two thousand photos available for downloading!
This makes it a great automated stream of income that will keep on coming in month after month, once you have set it up and uploaded your photos initially. All that remains for you to do is to take some more photos and add those on as and when you can.
As far as money making opportunities on the internet go, this is one of the best if you have any photographic ability. Leave us a comment below and then go and see which site you like the look of – it could be the start of something big.
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