How to Sell Stock Photography

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By bradmauer
User-Submitted Article

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How to take a hobby of photography and make some extra money selling photos with a royalty free stock photography agency web site. Royalty free photography is cheap stock photos for graphic designers on a budget. Sell stock photos and make a modest income doing what you love.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

camera
quality photographs
computer
internet
photo editing software
patience

Step 1

If you have been taking photographs for a while than you already have a small library of photos built up. Once you are ready you need to go out and find new subjects and take quality photographs, and keep building your library. You will also need to do a search on a search engine such as google for stock photography. There are a lot of good micro stock sites out there I belong to one called fotolia.com.
Step 2

Now you have a website picked out and your library ready to upload. After you create an account with your user name and password you will need to upload your photographs to the website for review. Once your photographs are on the site they have inspectors look over the pictures for aesthetic quality. The photos that they feel are of good quality they will approve and will be ready for sale. This process can take a couple of days to a couple of weeks so you will need to use patience here, time to snap some more pictures. Just because you are waiting on approval of one batch of pictures does not mean you can not upload more keep snapping and uploading.
Step 3

Do not get discouraged that some of your photographs are rejected happens to everyone. The more you submit the more will get accepted, but only put on your best photographs. If you submit a large batch with a couple of good ones and a bunch of bad ones chances are they all will be rejected. If the inspector looks at 3 or 4 of them and thinks they are bad they will think the whole batch is bad. Keywords are key to being successful you need to think of anything this picture could be used for, represent, or any other reason people would buy it.
Step 4

You now have your first photographs submitted, keywords, and accepted now is the waiting period. This can take a very long time before you get the first sale don't worry this is normal. If you get sales in your first year you are doing good. Keep snapping, submitting, and start linking your stock page on other web sites. Use social networking sites to get your name out there and let people know you have a stock library. Get in with some graphic design groups and other visual artist that may need your work. After a lot of hard work and patience you will start collecting sales while you are on vacation or watching a movie.

Good Luck and Thanks for Reading
Brad

Comments

nanamusicgirl said

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on 8/29/2009 Very goo information, thank you for sharing and letting us know!!!!

cutcaster said

on 8/21/2009 Wow not a bad step by step. I am the founder of Cutcaster which you can see at www.cutcaster.com. In addition to your point you make in number 2 regarding the uplaoding process. There are companies out there that will allow you to distribute to multiple sites at once via ftp. Check out iSyndica.

as for Cutcaster, we are a new source of royalty free images and vectors that can be downloaded immediately. let me know if you have any questions. john