Getting any Richer from your Photography?

Have you ever just stared at that beautiful piece of technology you use to take pictures (you know, your digital camera) and asked yourself, “I wonder if I can make money with my photography?”

Of course you have. We all have.

Maybe you don’t even want to make that much, just enough to take a vacation or buy your next lens (we all have that “next lens” sickness… er.. desire), but you don’t even know where to start looking for a market for your photography.

There are actually several avenues or categories to explore for selling photography. And inside those there are quite a few possibilities. And of course, there are many photography enthusiasts who really do make a living selling their photos, either at festivals, galleries, or online.

Let’s take a look at some ways of selling your photography online.

Shooting for stock

Are you that photographer that always has a camera in hand, no matter what time of day or where you are? Then stock photography may be a good fit for you. Artists and graphic designers are all over the place creating pamphlets, brochures for travel agencies, menus for local restaurants, and just about any other thing you can think of to advertise. You never know when a graphic designer will need a photo of a shopper holding a beautiful piece of fruit.

Stock Photo??

They will not be looking for you to get their images. Almost 100% of these creators use stock agencies to supply their photography needs. And YOU could be the ultimate supplier for those image needs by uploading your photographs to the stock agency.
There are two categories of stock agency – stock and microstock.

As a beginner, you will have more of a chance to have your photos accepted by a microstock agency. With microstock agencies, there is a rather small fee for those who are using the images, which also depends on the size of the image that is downloaded. The return to you, the photographer, could be about $.30 for a small image. I know, that’s not much. But consider the alternative. That image is probably sitting on your hard drive doing nothing, right? The up side is that if you happen to hit on a keyword that is highly sought after, you could potentially have dozens or hundreds of downloads of your image.

It is a good idea to find the place on the microstock photography website that lists “under-represented” images. That is those images that are in need or short supply. If you upload lots of images that are in high demand, but in short supply, your chances for downloads increase accordingly.

Stock agencies, as opposed to microstock agencies, are much more discerning, with more stringent requirements. They accept only top-quality images from top professionals. It is not impossible to get your foot in the door of a stock agency, but it is more difficult than getting in with a microstock agency. Payout is not that much better either, especially if you happen to get noticed with a very popular photograph.

The three most well known stock photography websites are

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What about Creating your own website.

Getting People to your own web site will take some work.

If the thought of getting only a small percentage of the sale at a stock agency does not sit well with you, maybe you should consider putting up your own photography website. If you own a copy of Photoshop CS4 or Adobe Lightroom, you have a built-in tool for creating an entire photography website.

The problem then becomes how do you get folks to view your web site? This is a whole new problem and it takes a long time to get noticed on the Internet, simply because there are so many photography web sites out there. Probably the best way to get traffic to your own photography site is to start visiting blogs and forums related to the type of photography you do. But visiting is not enough. You must make your presence known by leaving valuable comments with your web site URL in your signature line. Each time you do this, you will be leaving a link back to your site (called “backlinks” in the Internet world). The more valuable your comments are, the more people will click on your link. It does take time, but this is a proven method for getting traffic to your web site. Of course, if your photography is good, these folks will tell their friends about you. This is true of Moose Peterson – see, I just gave him a backlink by adding the URL of his web site to his name.

Another way to get traffic also involves getting links, but this one is by using Web 2.0 methods. Basically it is by using social bookmarking at places like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social web sites.

The process of getting traffic can be quite tedious, but it can pay dividends in the long run.

Join Photography web sites.

There are lots of web sites that have a membership for photographers. Most charge a small fee, which makes sense because they have to pay for having a large bandwidth to their web site due to lots of visitors and many images. This can pay off for you, too, especially if you are an active member, commenting on others’ photography and adding comments to help with techniques for improving photographs. Two such web sites are Digital Image Cafe and BetterPhoto, but there are many more to choose from.

Use a service to promote your photography

There are places that will allow you to put links to your images and actually sell them for you. This is really cool because you get two major benefits. First, you get lots of exposure (not the photographic kind) for your work. These sites already have an established presence on the Internet with plenty of visitors. The second benefit is that they will handle the sales transaction for you. This is huge if you don’t want to have to handle the technology to set up a payment vehicle on your own web site. The fee is not too bad either, usually less than 25% of the sale. Now, if that sounds like a lot, just consider how much you are making from photography sales on the Internet right now. If it is $0.00, then you will be way ahead of the game. Two services that offer these sales agreements are FotoMoto and SmugMug.

Of course there are other ways to make money with your digital camera. More suggestions for making money from your photography are available in some of the product links on the right side of this web page.