Before you look into this post, kindly answer yourself with below 3 questions. If you really want to make income through this topic, ensure that you are being honest with yourself and continue reading to increase your passive incomes with just uploading your stock photos into online marketplace.
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Are you the fans of taking photo every so and then? Yes.
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Is your hobby taking photos anytime and anywhere you go? Yes.
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Is camera your best friend? Yes.
If all of the above questions got a "Yes" answer, then you are good to continue reading this post and begin earning your passive income through selling photos. For real? Yes, there is in fact a website or online marketplace where they are looking to help you sell your photos and you can earn the commission through the sales made.
Who is Actually Buying Our Stock Photos?
The most common buyers of stock photos are usually, bloggers, local Newspaper, TV and radios, marketing firm, corporate marketing (who manage company's reputation).
By reverse engineering who your customers that you now known, then we can identify what they really want by targeting specifically to which one of them that you want to know more about.
1. Niche Focused Bloggers.
For your information, you do not want to miss the top customer who kept-growing more-and-more, which is the bloggers. You will noticed bloggers is indeed coming from tones of different backgrounds, so what they are writing can be ranging from cooking, until fitness, education, technology, bakery, travel, gardening, sports, pets and tones of hobbyist which can attract huge number of visitors from 100 to 100,000 each day.
In order to cope with the writing ideas of blogger, they are too busy to put physical works into every single one of their idea, thus complimenting what their blog post about is going to be really helpful. So this is why they are buying images from online image marketplace. Now you know why your pet's photo are very needed by bloggers who write post about pets and animals too.
2. Local Newspaper, TV and Radio.
These local media usually are finding for latest photos that are editorial or real life events. This kind of editorial images usually used for newsworthy publication, but news media often will look for photos that they don't have access to photos relating to international news. Thus, aware about any incident happening in your surrounding local location, but also ensure your own safety and other peoples safety at first before you became another paparazzi.
3. Digital Marketing Department.
Nowadays, a company should have their own websites, thus they began to hire more digital marketer to help them with digital marketing.
This department lookout to purchase stock photos for their company's websites, marketing purposes such as advertising in digital form now. They need images range widely depends on what their business is about.
4. Advertising Agency.
An advertising agency is creating advertising, promotion and marketing related works for their clients often to produce advertisements of TV, radio digital, outdoor, and mobile. Commonly, their help includes buying stock images to use within their works for their clients.
So, What We Need To Have To Start Selling A Stock Photo?
1. Cameras.
You can use the most professional camera such as DSLR, down to just using your mid-range I-Phone's camera. Since you are required to upload online "4 megapixels" in size format to be approved for uploading into Shutterstock. To compete with your competition, you should invest in both your skills and camera, not to forget the accessories that comes along.
2. Shoot With Broad Daylight.
Smartphone's camera works well in bright day light, you would want to ensure clear image was taken with a very great dynamic range. Also ensure to turn on your HDR mode, as this increases a much clearer image taken especially having a darker spot in some part of your photo. Even expert photographer requires great sunlight to help gets the exposure of brighter image or atleast a much more natural lighting than artificial one especially in photography industry.
3. Edit Your Photo Before Upload.
You should use light-room apps to brighten your image if you need to, it allows you to edit your image looks really alive.
4. Don't Use Digital Zoom in Smartphone.
Avoid using digital zoom in smartphone camera, just walk closer instead of using the zoom in your phone camera. If you are using DSLR, then that is good to go with, else invest camera lenses to help you increase your zooming range. Even smartphone does contain lenses for zooming, fish-eye, wide-angle, and more tool kits here.
5. Capture Incident Happening.
If you had noticed any incident happening, such as the natures of environment that is very rare like hail storm, rainbow, sunset at certain location and more.
6. Take Photos of Local Road Street Signs.
You could also take photos of amazing street signs that sometime can gets unique where buyers may want it in a way that can brings curiosity for viral purposes.
Tips Making More Money By Selling The Top Needed Genre of Photos.
Most stock photo seller will take photos in a very much diversify ways, but you need to complete each of the genre you are shooting for or at-least you had covered most of it, the move on to shoot genre that are different.
- Festive, Christmas, Holidays, with simple image, clean image are simple seller,
- Groups of people socializing, Profession, engineer, industrial, agriculture, lawyer, doctors, businessman, real-estate agent, architects, teacher.
- A person posting, family and children that are doing interesting things is also very preferred for family bloggers. But this kind of images that shows face are require to sign model release witness, signing that means your models allow you to sell this photo.
- Foods, Drinks, ingredients can be taken in home studio easily, noise of images can be adjust easily, also ensure to use side empty space for buyer to add wordings.
- Eiffel tower, big important cities sell very well too, shopping mall wide angle, many angles different lenses, different light condition, bank of England for financial purpose,
- Landscape, beach, environment, freedom, solar, sunset, sunrise.
- Aerial images taken with drones are indeed very unique images which targets local cities that are the hot spot.
Avoid repetition of same kind of photos, but some special niche which as food ingredients, can have multiple angle that can focus on this. Understand more here for top selling stock photo & online course here.
How Can I Make Money By Selling Stock Photo?
By selling your stock photos indeed can help you make money, but where is the best place to sell your stock photos? Below are the best stock photo marketplaces online.
1. Shutterstock.
You can count on Shutterstock as the top largest high quality image search engine, this is what makes it very awesome to sell and buy in this marketplace. By selling in here, you can earn up to 33% of the sales made, also refer your customer with referral earning 20% of their first purchase.
2. Adobe Stock & Fotolia.
Since Fotolia was now a part of Adobe Stock, you can expect to earn 33% of each sale made in both of this marketplace.
3. iStock.
If you upload to only this website, you can earn up to 45% of the image sales, but if you choose to upload into different marketplace, you can earn 15% at best of the image sales.
4. Dreamstime.
As a photographer upload here, you can expect to earn 25 to 50% of the sales images. But if you upload exclusive (only upload here) image, then you earn extra 10% of the sales made.
5. Pond5.
This marketplace is pretty cool, you can upload image at minimum of 2 megapixel only. So as an earnings of photographer, you can expect to earn 50% per single download. Moreover, earning of 5% for each sale of referred photographer by you, also 5% from each purchase of referred customers, for 1 year only that makes the earning quite lucrative here as well.
6. 123RF.
Your earnings in this platform can rank as higher as 60% when you are photographer ranked highest, but for starter can also get as much as 30% for image sales made. Just upload more photos and your commission will be higher.
7. Alamy.
This website marketplace also pays pretty fairly, you get half of royalty from every sales made. However, you need to use image of megapixels and that are shot with DSLR or mirror-less. Uploaded image may sometime a bit strict where they reject over-editing image, over sharpness, bad exposure and so on rules here.
Is Selling Photos A Safe and Sustainable Passive Income?
Indeed it is very sustainable, but may lose interest in photos that are older. However, most photos that are not trendy related will most likely not get outdated. Reason being that is because for photos that are environments, foods, workers, socializing, traveling, are very much needed genre that tones of customer searching and buying for due to the relation with what their business project required for. Checkout how Hunter Bliss Photography do it in below.
Do not get distracted if you get low sells in your images.
As mentioned this is your favorite hobbies, so don't rant about how much you cannot earn from. There is always a reason that your earning is low, and that relates back to how you really schedule or organize the work of your images uploaded.
The most target photos or images are often related to be turned into commercial usage. The buyers of your images will place the image of yours in their books, website, advertisement and much more commercialize ways they needed for. So ensure you know how you should capture your image so that they are more likely to buy your photos.
What type of stock photos do your customer really want?
As you had known who our customer is, you can pretty easy target them by taking photos that fits their website's niche contents. Let's say a dog website, you can take tones of dog pictures anywhere depending on different dog types, actions, unique stuff that your dog can do, and much more. Let's say fitness website, they may need fat and slim images of person's stomach, diet foods and drinks, exercising model, weighing their weight, measuring their tummy and so on. These are some small ideas you can figure out, just know that you photo should avoid capturing images of brands in anything.
What photos to avoid taking as stock photo?
You must aware the photos that you take must not contain any of these, since they can be troublesome to dealt with and may often rejected.
- People's face capture at public, but you can get your model to sign model release so that you can sell the image.
- Products that have branding on it.
- Buildings or architectures that have branding on it.
Legitimate Stock Photo Seller.
Which One Is The Best Stock Photo Selling Marketplace.
The best stock photo selling marketplace mostly recommended with tones of seller for images and buyers are of-course the Shutterstock. You do not want to miss selling in this website, since there are tones of visitors who are always returning to this marketplace, especially bloggers and digital marketer departments. Furthermore stock footage is also something that you must look into at the same time when you are taking photography.
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