How to Make Money With Your Digital Photos

I've loved photography ever since I first picked up a camera, but up until recently I didn't know there were outlets for everyday people to be able to sell their photos. If you have a talent for photography, you may be interested in these ways of making money.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Digital camera and equipment
• Computer with Internet access
• Ability to upload your photos to your computer

1. First, it's important to know what people are looking for in a good digital photo. It definitely needs to be clear and sharp, and many digital artists need high resolution photos so they don't loose a lot of detail by the time they finish their project.

2. Especially if you have a lot of great photos, you may want to try an online stock agency such as istockphoto.com. It and similar stock photo agencies give you a percentage whenever a photo is sold. You'll need a large inventory to make a significant income, but it's better than having them sitting on your hard drive earning nothing.
   
   The positive aspect of these agencies are you have a large customer base that you don't have to develop and track down. The downside is your prices are generally set for you based on the size and resolution of the image.

3. Two other options include the sites Lulu.com and Constant-Content.com. Both allow you to set your own prices and only take a small percentage of each sale. With these however, you'll generally have to do most of your own marketing to make money. If you already have a website in place, you can direct people to the site and have a safe way of making money that requires little maintenance on the financial side of things.

4. A third option is using your photos for a site called CafePress.com. This site allows you to create t-shirts, bumper stickers, posters, and other items and sell them through an online store. After you upload the images, you can create different items and add your profit on top of the price to produce the item. That's what it's sold for to the general public.

5. It takes a little while, but if you want to create a blog around a particular theme of photos you can make money through Google Adsense and other affiliates.

Tips & Warnings

• I've found there's a lot of similarity in selling photos online and selling articles online--it takes time and patience, and you need a lot of high-quality inventory to do well. It's so much fun though that it doesn't really feel like work.
• Make sure you don't sell exclusive or full rights to your photos unless someone pays you a lot of money--otherwise you're throwing away your opportunity to sell the photos on multiple websites or even traditional outlets. Read the fine print on any agreements. "Use" and "Non-Exclusive" rights are the options that are best.

Resources

• Lulu
• Cafe Press
• Constant Content
• IStockPhoto
• Patricia Gilliam's Author's Blog (For Updates/News/Latest Articles)
• Patricia Gilliam's Twitter Page
• Recommended Reading: Microstock Photography: How to Make Money from Your Digital Images by Douglass Freer
• Recommended Reading: Digital Wedding Photography: Capturing Beautiful Memories by Glen Johnson
• Recommended Reading: 99 Ways to Make Money From Your Photos by The Editors of Photopreneur

[ala003]

on 6/2/2009 Thank you so much!!! I was wondering how i could sell my pictures!!!

[mscharming]

on 4/16/2009 appreciate you telling us of these ideas

[sherryeam]

on 2/26/2009 Nice article. Definitely something to consider doing. Good point about being patient.

[chryssy67]

on 2/12/2009 Great article! I have some really beautiful photos and I'm definitely going to look into the sites you mentioned in your article! Thanks!

[2plus2]

on 11/20/2008 Very good article, I have actually took the step to upload a couple of pictures to start and have every intention of uploading more when I get the chance.

THank you for the well written article.