Sell Photos To News

If you believe photography is a costly hobby, you are correct, it can be. But that doesn’t mean you need pro-quality equipment to make money from your own photos! Sell Photos To News

In actuality, if you’ve got a decent phone cam and a steady hand, you’re already in with a shot.

But you get your clicks, there are an increasing number of opportunities to monetise photos you have already taken. And if photography’s already your luggage, you will find heaps more ways to develop your abilities, and income; from selling your Insta inventory to pulling a Brooklyn Beckham (famous parents optional).

You know the drill: read, learn, and give it a bash for yourself!

If you’ve got a digital camera (or fancy picking up one for a steal), you’ll have more options for selling pics to stock libraries, to sites for prints, or for print-on-demand products. This is because cameras will usually produce larger file photos (although some camera phones are trumping digi cams nowadays so this is not necessarily the case).

Got a camera phone? A growing number of inventory libraries are catering for cellular snaps, plus you still have a shot at the other biz thoughts below. Keep reading!

It helps to have…

Some type of editing program can help buff your pics for best results, so it’s worth sniffing out a decent package (and learning how to use it!) So you can make more money with your photos.

Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop are industry standards for photo editing. But they cost bucks! Don’t crack open your wallet until you’ve checked out the freebies:

FastStone Image Viewer can open RAW files directly out of your digital camera and save them as JPG, TIFF or PNGs. OK for basic edits like colour correction, straightening, cropping and contrast.
Raw Therapee is a Lightroom-like editor with loads of tools for tweaking colors, curves and more.
PIXLR is a persuasive alternative to Photoshop, and even simplifies the very same shortcuts directly out the bag. You can run it straight from a browser through the app for free.
GIMP can do much of what Photoshop excels at, though some users guess it’s a more demanding learning curve.
There are loads of phone editing programs to be obtained for free or a couple of pence, but Snapseed (iPhone, Android, free) always makes the best-of lists.
Do not forget the bloatware picture software bundled into your’puter, telephone or notebook. Most can make light work of the fundamentals.

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Selling Through Stock Libraries

Stock libraries buy’n’ sell digital photographs to use on websites, in books, on products and even in ads, together with the photographer getting a cut of the sale each time.

Selling photographs through a stock website is a top way to surf passive income streams: you can upload a photo once and sell it over and over again, pretty much forever!

You might have to submit a selection of pics (and be accepted) before you can become a stock library contributor. After that, some websites will continue reviewing all your submissions, and will gladly bounce any they do not think meet criteria.

What that means is you will always need to be on the ball about choosing your best shots. Don’t get too hung up about rejections, however; combine a number of sites and post pics to all of them to get the best possible policy.

Which Websites Pay Most?

Swing by Alamy first. Their student contributor scheme gives you 100% of the sales price of your pictures for two years. Total win! Your uni will need to be part of this scheme, but loads of UK and US institutions are already on the books. Sell Photos To News

Alamy reckons images typically sell for $90 (USD) each, but you could get anywhere from $20 to $500 depending what it’s used for. If you are not a student, or your uni isn’t registered, the pay-out’s still a fairly decent 50%. Selling phone pics through their Stockimo program (iStore only) earns you a 20% reduction.

Other Websites to Check Out:

Picfair has a twist: you decide how much your pictures sell for. Picfair then add 20 percent on top for their cut, but the sales price you set is what you get if your image sells.
EyeEm: if Instagram and Alamy had a love child, this is what it would look like. EyeEm is a photo sharing site but, if you want to earn more than’likes’, you can also pimp your pictures through the market. EyeEm divide every sale with you 50/50, with photos selling from $20-$250. EyeEm Bonus: regular how-to articles, themed missions run by big brands, plus you’ll be able to upload pics via the net or phone.
Foap is constructed around telephone photographers, with everything handled through the program (Android, iTunes, free). Foap sells photos for $10 each and divides it 50/50, so you’ll make $5 a pic. They also run monthly Missions, where you are able to submit photographs on a theme to be in with a chance of winning extra money and perks.

Big Name Websites

Dreamstime provide up to 60 percent for exclusives. How much your photograph sells for also goes up the longer it’s downloaded: newbie images start at between $0.34 and $2.38 (USD). If you are shooting on a phone, begin with the free Dreamstime program (Android, iPhone).

IStock palms over 15% of a picture’s sales price, but guarantee a bigger cut if you make the pic exclusive to the website. Photos typically sell for #7 or #20 a go, but the type of license or subscription program the customer buys determines how your slice is calculated.

Shutterstock coughs up $0.25 (USD) per sale on the most frequent subscription programs, but say you will find a bigger cut as your lifetime earnings pass various levels. To put that into context, once you’ve earned $10,000, you’ll be bumped up to the heady heights of 38 cents a picture…

Playing the Stock (photo) Market

Making money with stock photographs can involve a substantial cash-in, but there are a couple of things worth bearing in mind…

Stock photography is a numbers game: if you want sales, you’ll need to upload a great deal of quality pics to a number of sites.
Photos of individuals are always in demand, but anybody you pap might want to signal a model release form to say they are OK with you with it (your inventory library will have template forms you can print, sign and publish ).
Assess the account terms! When are you going to get paid, and in what currency? What happens to your photos if you want to cancel your account later on?
You often won’t get a say in how customers use your photos, so in case you don’t want your selfies turning up in advertisements for STDs or benzoyl peroxide, don’t upload’em!
Sign-up for contributor newsletters, as they could clue you in on what sells, what to snap next, as well as how to enhance your camera or editing skills.
Add plenty of keywords when you upload your pictures. It helps people find (and hopefully buy!) your pics.

Selling Your Prints

There’s loads of liberty in selling prints (i.e., printed copies of your photos). You decide what to shoot, who to market to, and for how much and, like selling through stock libraries, it can be a wonderful little passive revenue earner.

Now, before you leg it down to Boots to batch publish your holiday snaps, there is a bit more to it. While you can run off pictures on your home printer or at a high-street laboratory, better quality means greater profits! Sell Photos To News

That means using a suitable printing laboratory (one which excels in art or framed prints), opting for specialist paper, or even selling restricted or signed editions. Sounds like a drag? Not necessarily; there is inspiration below to get you started.

Use a Photo Host

Photographer-friendly site hosts provide you with a safe place to store your digital pics, a portfolio (which means you can show’em off) and shopping tools (so you can sell prints, downloads and wall art).

They even handle the printing and any stamp each time you make a purchase. Hashtag hallelujah, right?

But the big catch is, not only do they charge for hosting your site, they also take a cheeky cut from each sale — and that is not everybody’s cup of cocoa! If you wish to give it a whirl, look out for free 14-day trials before you pony up the money: try Zenfolio or Smugmug.

Get Your Own Photo Shop

As an alternative, you could always get your own website or Etsy shop and hang onto more of your gain!

Obtaining prints or gifts to sell is also super easy; go for print-on-demand and you won’t have to store some stock (or be out of pocket if you can’t shift it!) .

Sell on Social Media Platforms

Eventually the social networking giants will wise-up and start letting us sell photos and other content directly from our profiles.

But until then, take a hint from street photographer Daniel Arnold: he offered Instagram followers the chance to order prints from his feed — and made $15k in a single day. Obviously it helps if you’ve already got a strong fanbase, but if you have talent (and the right hashtags) it’s worth a shot!

The best thing about selling on social media is that you don’t even need a website: your feed is the portfolio, and you’ve got a enormous potential audience!

>>LEARN HOW TO SELL YOUR PHOTOS AND VIDEOS ONLINE HERE<<

Go print-on-demand

Print-on-demand is a brilliantly simple way to make moolah from mouse mats, keyrings, t-shirts, bags, books and much more — often with zero setup costs.

The real beauty of print-on-demand is that while you can advertise tons of goods, none of them really exist until somebody buys’em — so there is no inventory to store, lose, or fall over. Better still, there are sites out there that do all the printing, printing and submitting for you, so all you have to do is take the photographs!

Photo books

First stop: Blurb, the self-publishing publishing platform (learn how that all works here!) .

Blurb enables you to create photo books by simply importing your Facebook or Insta pictures — and you can sell your finished novel on Blurb or Amazon.co.uk. You can even advertise books on your own website (if you have one), but have Blurb/Amazon manage the payment. Easy! Sell Photos To News

Gifts and Goodies

Turns out you can slap a photo on pretty much anything, from shower curtains to pet clothes and PJs; and you do not even need a glue gun to begin!

Most print-on-demand outfits allow you to upload your photos (or illustrations), select which products you wish to sell them on, and give you a cut of the profits if they sell.

CafePress pays you 10% if your products sell in their marketplace, but you may opt to have your own online shop and add a mark-up to the cost (which you get as your royalty) rather than It is free to set-up and run a store, but CafePress take 10% of your royalties monthly, up to a $10 max.
Zazzle enables you to set your own royalty rate between 5 percent and 99 percent but, while it’s tempting to dial it up to full whack, remember that your cut is added to the sales price: go OTT and you may find it harder to make sales.
With Spreadshirt you may add a mark-up of $1 to $20 on items sold through the market, or you can open your own store and catch 20% commission.
Redbubble begins with a product base cost and lets you add on a mark-up — the default is 20%, but you can tweak it as much as you like.

Running a print-on-demand shop is low-fuss and low-cost — if you are contented with the occasional sale, it can be a nice way to make cash on the side for relatively little effort.

The word from successful vendors is that, to earn proper bucks, you will want to put in the hours (so the same as a job, sadly). We’re talking uploading plenty of photos or designs, getting the word out, and generally try!

Go Freelance

Selling photographs anonymously online is simple enough. But if you want to build a rep, get more glory or just have clients of your own, here are some tips to get started as a freelancer photographer:

Know your niche. When it’s individuals, pets, food or something completely left-field, it’s a lot easier to market yourself whether your portfolio showcases what you do best.
Take the time to learn your craft. You can get lucky selling stock in case you don’t know your aperture from your elbow, but you can’t afford to chance it when someone’s paying you for wedding pics!
Work out your rate and make sure it covers your time, your prices and leaves you a little on top for gain. And get insurance for your gear!
Give to photograph events, parties or portraits for family and friends to build up a portfolio, and ask them to spread the word for you. Or search out your favorite bloggers and pitch them your pic ideas!
Batter your social networking account with your best pics, let folk know you’re available, and tell’em how to get connected. Get cheeky and choose alternative promo shots for brands, then label them to get noticed.
Get in touch with picture editors at magazines, newspapers or websites and ask if you can submit photographs or cover local events.
You may have more chance of getting adopted by Madonna than getting a press pass, but it is like a golden ticket which can get you into sports, fashion and other exclusive events. You’ll need to apply each time (or become a member of the National Union of Journalists) but, once you’re in, you’ll get plenty of saleable photo opps!

While everybody with an Insta account appears to reckon they’re a pro photographer, the truth is that being a freelancer is probably the toughest route you may take.

You’ll need a great deal of patience, perseverance, good shoes and adequate pics — and you may well have to give away images for free when you first begin to get noticed. If you’re in it for the career, do not give up. If you are in it for the money, get your game on with the other ideas on this page in the meantime!

Bonus Tips for Aspiring Photographers

Carry your camera everywhere — and not just when you are doing something or going somewhere special. Loads of companies and brands are after photographs of daily life and often it’s the simple things that produce the best pics — believe streets, food (street food?) , facial expressions, family, pets, sports… anything!
Back-up your best pics (or some you would hate to lose): keep copies on an external drive or in cloud storage (Dropbox gives you 2GB of space for free).
Once you start getting sales, get to grips with tax and the freelancing fundamentals. It will save you stress in the long term, and could save you money on your tax invoice.
You might not be able to sell photos if they include trademarked products, brands or even specific buildings. Check out the terms with your stock library, or contact the company involved and ask if you need permission to hawk your snaps.
Do not just do the same-old or what everybody else is doing. Quirky, cute or weird is always in vogue. Amen to that! Sell Photos To News

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