Are you an amateur photographer? Do you enjoy taking digital photos? Do you have good quality digital photos to share with others? You can do that and also make some extra money from it. This article will show you how you can enjoy sharing your photography work and also get some cash at the same time.
This article is not about turning you into a professional photographer or about making your digital photos your main source of income. It will show you how you can share your digital photos with others and also make some extra cash at the same time. This money should be considered as extra income usually a good source of cash to invest back into your digital photography hobby maybe to buy a new camera, lenses, batteries or anything else that you need.
Photo stock websites: Photo stock websites are becoming more and more popular. Photo stock sites provide a market place for photographers to show off their work while others can view that work and buy it for a price usually set by the photographers. Some photo stock websites allow you to define the exact rights that you grant to the buyer so you can better protect your work. When users buy your digital photos you get a commission out of that money. There are many flavors of photo stock websites examples of two are: www.photostockplus.com and www.smugmug.com.
Your own photo gallery site: Putting a website together is relatively easy using some free commercial tools. For example you can easily set a photo album web site using tools from Yahoo. On your website you can allow users to browse and download full resolution digital photos for free or you can sell the high resolution versions of the digital photos. Implementing a shopping cart and collecting money is easily done using checkout tools from companies like PayPal, Yahoo and Google. Another option is to make money by placing advertisement on your site for example by using Google Adsense. Advertisement however will only generate noticeable revenues if you can attract a high number of visitors to your site. If your digital photos are unique and interesting you might be able to do just that. Another option is to create a dedicated Blog website or to add a Blog to your digital photos website. You can easily do that with tools such as Blogger and Typepad. In the Blog you can present your digital photos and also write some interesting descriptions of how you took them, what is unique about them and anything else that might trigger the visitors’ interest. Tell your friends and family about your site and post information about it in forums and chat boards.
Work for hire: This is a more conservative and traditional option. You can offer your photography services by posting ads in local classifieds website or newspaper. If you have your own site you can also offer your services through that site or add a link to the site on your ads to allow potential customers to view your work. Make sure that you are candid and up front with your potential customers about what you do, your work and your experience. They should understand that you are an amateur photographer and view your work to decide if you are a good fit for their needs. To get a sense of how much to charge contact other local photographers and get quotes for their services. If you have never done photography for hire before it is a good advice to start with jobs that are not very important to the clients and that can be done again if the results are not satisfactory. For example shooting digital photos of a wedding is probably not a good idea to start with. Taking digital photos of someone’s car is a better option.
Coffee shops and galleries: It became trendy for coffee shops to hang local photographers or artists work on their walls. This is a win-win offering for them they get free decoration for the shop and also allow customer to buy work that they like. The coffee shop gets a commission of each sale. Although this option requires more work and upfront financial investment it can be a lot of fun and a good way to connect with the local community. Walk around and find a few coffee shops or galleries that you would like to have your work at. Print and frame a few of your best photos and go back to those shops. Show your work and convince them to showcase it. It is best to start with just a few prints to minimize the risk.
These were just a few options to make some cash from your digital photos. There are other options and with some creativity you can find your own original ones. One thing to remember though is to make sure that you have the rights to sell your photos and that you are legally covered when showcasing them, selling them or working for hire taking photos for others. For example copyright laws change from state to state and country to country and you should make sure you have the rights for your digital photos.
I met a designer at a party this weekend. He says he buys a lot of stock photography…and always at iStockphoto. This brings up for me a continuing concern. By not being in the Microstock world, there are a ton of buyers who are not seeing my images.
I have also spoken to a lot of designers and art directors who use RF but not RM because of their perception that RM is too expensive. I create most of my work for RM and am concerned that so many potential licensors won’t even see my work if they are limiting their searches to Micro and RF. The good news; the designer I met at the party said he also uses Google to look for images.
It is a relief then when I hear that designers and art directors do use Google to search for stock photos. That gives me the ability to get my images in front of them and at least have the possibility that they may license those images.
I have been working hard to bring my site up in the search engines. I started that process about six months ago. I am happy to be able to say that I have gone from about one visitor a week to about 300 per day. But that is a mere drop in the bucket, as my web master is fond of pointing out to me. We really want over 10,000 a day!
I have not moved up significantly in the search results yet. I am getting more people finding me through long tailed keywords, and I have experienced some sales through that. I am selling one or two products through CaféPress each week, I have made a spattering of print sales through Imagekind, and have licensed a few images through my site.
I am also sending about 20 people a day on to Blend Images, Corbis, Getty and Kimball stock. What percentage of those people, if any, go on to actually license an image I have no idea. But surely some of them must license an image! If so, I am ahead of the game.
As I mentioned, I fully expect to have thousands of visitors to my site each day. It might be months from now, or years. I don’t know. But I do know it is important to get my images in front of people, and that I am making progress with my site.
I think it is important for any stock shooter to get their site up, optimized and functioning well. As the stock photo world gets more and more cluttered with photos, getting seen will become ever more important.
As photographers, insuring that our web sites are art director friendly, and search engine optimized, is something concrete that we have control over and that we can do to increase our revenue.
I believe as time goes on this will be just as important for Micro shooters as for those of us in the traditional stock photo model. As hard as it is to fathom, getting our web site functioning well for us may well be more important than creating new images.
