Selling Photos On Your Own Website

If you think photography is an expensive hobby, you’re right, it can be. But that does not mean you need pro-quality equipment to make money from your own photos! Selling Photos On Your Own Website

In fact, if you have got a decent phone cam and a steady hand, you are already in with a shot.

However you get your clicks, you will find 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 stock to pulling a Brooklyn Beckham (famous parents optional).

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

If you have got a digital camera (or fancy picking one up 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 always the case).

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

It helps to have…

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

Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop are industry standards for photo editing. But they cost bucks! Do not 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 color correction, straightening, cropping and contrast.
Raw Therapee is a Lightroom-like editor with loads of resources for tweaking colors, curves and more.
PIXLR is a persuasive alternative to Photoshop, and even simplifies the very same shortcuts right out the bag. You can run it straight from a browser / through the program for free.
GIMP can do a lot of what Photoshop excels at, though some users guess it is a more demanding learning curve.
There are tons of phone editing programs to be obtained for free or a couple of pence, but Snapseed (iPhone, Android, free) consistently makes the best-of lists.
Don’t overlook the bloatware image software bundled into your’puter, telephone or laptop. Most can make light work of the basics.

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Selling Through Stock Libraries

Stock libraries purchase’n’ sell digital photographs to use on websites, in books, on products as well as in advertisements, with the photographer getting a cut of the sale every time.

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

You might need to submit a choice of pics (and be accepted) until you can become a stock library contributor. After that, some websites will keep on reviewing all your submissions, and will gladly bounce any they do not think meet standards.

What that means is you’ll always have to be on the ball about picking your best shots. Do not get too hung up about rejections, however; join multiple websites and post pics to them to find the best possible coverage.

Which Websites Pay Most?

Swing by Alamy first. Their pupil contributor scheme gives you 100% of the sales price of your images for two years. Total win! Your uni will need to be part of the scheme, but loads of UK and US institutions are already on the books. Selling Photos On Your Own Website

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

Other Websites to Check Out:

Picfair comes with a twist: you decide how much your pictures sell for. Picfair then add 20% 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 marketplace. EyeEm divide every sale with you 50/50, with photographs selling from $20-$250. EyeEm Bonus: regular how-to content, themed missions run by large brands, plus you can upload pics via the web or phone.
Foap is built around telephone photographers, with everything handled through the app (Android, iTunes, free). Foap sells photos for $10 each and divides it 50/50, so you’ll earn $5 per pic. They also run monthly Missions, where you are able to submit photos on a theme to be in with a chance of winning extra cash and perks.

Big Name Websites

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

IStock hands over 15% of a picture’s sales price, but promise a bigger cut if you make the pic exclusive to the site. Photos typically sell for #7 or #20 a go, but the type of licence or subscription plan the customer purchases determines how your slice is calculated.

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

Playing the Stock (photo) Market

Making money with stock photos 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 lots of quality pics to several sites.
Photos of people are always in demand, but anybody you pap may want to sign a model release form to say they are OK with you using it (your inventory library will have template forms you can print, sign and submit).
Check the accounts 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 state in how clients use your photographs, so if you don’t need your selfies turning up in ads for STDs or benzoyl peroxide, don’t upload’em!
Sign-up for contributor newsletters, as they can clue you in on what sells, what to snap next, and even how to improve your camera or editing skills.
Add loads of keywords when you upload your pictures. It helps people find (and hopefully purchase!) your pics.

Selling Your Prints

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

Now, before you leg it down to Boots to batch print your holiday snaps, there is a little more to it. While you can run off photos on your home printer or at a high-street laboratory, better quality means greater profits! Selling Photos On Your Own Website

That means using a proper printing laboratory (one which excels in art or framed prints), opting for expert paper, or perhaps selling limited or signed editions. Sounds like a drag? Not necessarily; there’s inspiration below to get you started.

Use a Photo Host

Photographer-friendly website hosts give you a safe place to store your digital pics, a portfolio (which means you can show’em away ) and purchasing tools (so you can sell prints, downloads and wall art).

They even take care of the printing and any stamp every time you make a sale. 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 everyone’s cup of cocoa! If you wish to give it a whirl, be aware of free 14-day trials before you pony up the money: try Zenfolio or Smugmug.

Get Your Own Photo Shop

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

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

Sell on Social Media Platforms

Eventually the social media giants will wise-up and begin letting us sell photos and other content right from our profiles.

But until then, take a tip from street photographer Daniel Arnold: he offered Instagram followers the chance to purchase 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 ideal hashtags) it is worth a shot!

The best thing about selling on social media is that you don’t even need a website: your feed is your 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 products, none of them really exist until someone buys’em — so there’s no inventory to store, lose, or fall over. Better still, there are websites out there that do all of the printing, printing and posting for you, so all you’ve got to do is take the photographs!

Photo books

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

Blurb lets you create photo books by simply importing your Facebook or Insta images — and you can sell your finished book on Blurb or Amazon.co.uk. You could also advertise books on your website (if you have one), but have Blurb/Amazon manage the payment. Easy! Selling Photos On Your Own Website

Gifts and Goodies

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

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

CafePress pays you 10% if your products sell in their market, but you may choose to have your very own online shop and add a mark-up to the price (which you get as your royalty) instead. It’s 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 is tempting to dial it up to full whack, keep in mind that your cut is added to the sales price: go OTT and you might find it more difficult to make sales.
With Spreadshirt you can add a mark-up of $1 to $20 on items sold through the market, or you can open your own store and grab 20% commission.
Redbubble starts 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 store is low-fuss and low-cost — if you are happy with the occasional sale, it can be a wonderful way to generate cash on the side for relatively little effort.

The word from successful sellers is that, to make proper bucks, you will need to put in the hours (so just like a project, sadly). We’re talking uploading plenty of photos or designs, getting the word out, and generally making an effort!

Go Freelance

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

Know your niche. When it’s people, pets, food or something totally left-field, it’s a lot easier to market yourself if your portfolio showcases what you do best.
Take 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 if someone’s paying you for wedding pics!
Work out your rate and make sure it covers your time, your costs and leaves you a little on top for gain. And get insurance to your gear!
Give to photo events, parties or portraits for friends and family to build up a portfolio, and ask them to spread the word for you. Or hunt out your favourite 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 in touch. Get cheeky and take alternative promo shots for brands, then tag them to get noticed.
Get in touch with picture editors at newspapers, magazines or sites and ask if you can submit photographs or cover local events.
You might have more chance of getting adopted by Madonna than getting a press pass, but it’s like a golden ticket which could get you into sports, fashion and other exclusive events. You will want to apply each time (or be a member of the National Union of Journalists) however, once you’re in, you’re going to get plenty of saleable photo opps!

While everyone 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 tons of patience, perseverance, good shoes and adequate pics — and you may well have to give away pictures for free when you first begin to get noticed. If you are in it for the career, do not quit. If you’re 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 only when you’re doing something or going somewhere special. Loads of businesses and brands are after photos of everyday life and often it is the simple things which produce the best pics — believe streets, food (street food?) , facial expressions, loved ones, pets, sports… anything!
Back-up your best pics (or some you’d hate to lose): maintain copies on an external drive or in cloud storage (Dropbox gives you 2GB of space for free).
As soon as you start getting sales, get to grips with tax and the freelancing fundamentals. It will save you stress in the long run, and can save you money on your tax bill.
You may not be able to sell photos should they include trademarked products, brands or even certain buildings. Check out the terms with your stock library, or contact the company involved and ask if you need permission to hawk your own snaps.
Don’t just do the same-old or what everyone else is doing. Quirky, cute or weird is always in fashion. Amen to that! Selling Photos On Your Own Website

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