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From Hobby to Hustle: Turn Your Photos into Cash

                                                   

1. Introduction

There's a popular piece of advice that says, "Do what you love and the money will follow," and it's one that couldn't be more true when it comes to turning a hobby into a side hustle. Making money doing what you love is perhaps one of the most satisfying ways to pad your income, and if your hobby involves photography, there may be a way to earn a little extra cash without having to go pro or make a significant investment. The truth is, there has never been a better time to be a photographer. The explosive demand for visual content means that there are more opportunities to make money than ever before, and thanks to the global reach of the internet, it's never been easier to get started. Do you have a robust collection of quality images? If so, you may be sitting on a goldmine. The stock photography business is still very much in demand, and there are countless numbers of individuals and businesses looking to buy digital images for personal, editorial, and commercial use. With the right amount of skill and a bit of business sense, photography can be a lucrative career or side job. This article aims to point you in the right direction if you're looking to sell your photographs and turn a passion for photography into a bit of extra cash.

1.1. The power of turning your hobby into a side hustle

Are not likely to spring off the page and grab you by the throat. This subject is one of those things that yields no immediate satisfaction. When you take your very first steps down the long path of web development, you will likely be so bad that you will not even want to show anyone the results of your labors. This is quite a discouraging prospect for someone so used to excelling at most everything they try. But very little compares to the feeling of making a significant change to one's life, and your first baby steps into web development may be just that. If photography is a current hobby of yours, then the odds are likely that in a few years time it will be a strongly defining characteristic of who you are. Once you have a means to call yourself a photographer, no matter how inadequate, you will find that web development is the easiest way to get your foot in the door of your newfound trade. Someone who takes others' photos for money is far more likely to find himself working on a flashy new website for a hotdog stand than a cash-strapped CS major. And more often than not, the photographer offered to do the site for free just so he could have creative control. Now you may be wondering, why would I waste my time doing a website for a hotdog stand when I can try and get an internship at XYZ Inc to further my coding career. The answer is simple. Web development projects don't get much more laid back and fun than a website for a hotdog stand, and internships at XYZ Inc are a dime a dozen. Your web development skills will be most enjoyable and you will learn the most when working on projects for yourself or your friends, and you will always be able to differentiate yourself from your competition with your hobbyist trade that initiated it all.

1.2. The potential of selling photos online

Online shopping rose 20 percent in 2013, hitting 1.5 trillion. E-commerce is expected to grow 13 percent annually. People are shopping online more and more. This means the demand for digital content will increase. Good news for photographers who aim to sell photos online. More and more small businesses have turned to stock photography as of late. The implications of "content marketing" mean that businesses are on the look for great images to help establish their brand. High quality stock images consistently will always have a place for the right price. Though competition has gotten stiffer, there are more opportunities than ever to turn those photos into a revenue stream. On the photographer end, contributors to stock sites can earn anywhere from 20 to 50 percent of the sale price. This is really worthwhile for a photo that takes 20 minutes to shoot and edit, and you can continue to earn a passive income as the months and years go by. While I won't go into the specific details, photography services can also be sold through many methods. Licensing can be a very profitable way to sell photos online. Getty Images has a content licensing platform (work with video too) that offers some very nice potential revenue for contributors. Virtual galleries market places and web directories to photography services are some ways for photographers to get their services to customers requiring photography art. This article still doesn't account for the potential earnings on photo prints and photo products. Buyers of photography services are often more willing to spend more on a photographer who has high quality work. This makes photo services an opportunity to gain a regular customer, or at least a potential repeat customer. High quality photography usually equates to passion, and for passion there is almost always potential to turn your photo into a cash. Real estate photography - There is a predictable stream of higher income housing on the market and Realtors who want to sell said housing. Do you know how many photos are needed of one house? Now you have a reliable and predictable way to turn your photography a cash cow.

1.3. Benefits of starting with no experience

First and foremost, starting with no experience in photography has its benefits. Most experienced photographers will tell you that it's easier to start as a beginner now than it was in the past. Today's digital photography—and this is speaking very generally—offers an increased level of convenience and far less of a learning curve to operate at a basic level than film photography. Because the barrier to entry is low, the prices are also quite affordable which means it's easy to start on the right foot and take the highly versatile approach of learning photography as a hobby in its own right. With film cameras you are essentially committing to the costs of processing and printing and its techniques can be quite hard to master without formal learning. Digital cameras offer a wealth of scene modes and auto settings which require very little understanding of the user. This makes it a lot easier for a complete beginner to pick up and start taking decent photos right off the bat and slowly transition into learning manual settings and advanced techniques. This added to the ability of learning through trial and error without incurring incremental costs makes photography a very low risk hobby. Turning back somewhat to the issue of versatility—there are many ways to shoot any given subject in photography, digital image files allow for non-destructive post processing and editing which gives amateur photographers plenty of scope for experimentation as the original image is never lost. A powerfully appealing aspect for most beginners is the potential to make money with a hobby, regardless of skills or experience...and what could be easier than selling something you already do in your free time? Photography's digital revolution has brought about price drops in the equipment required to shoot photos and an increase in the quality of said equipment. This means that budding photographers are able to emulate the quality of the pictures they see in magazines and on the internet right from the get go. In the highly monetizable age of the internet this translates to a very real potential of making money by selling stock and microstock photos, entering photography contests and the holy grail of obtainable success that is having paid freelance work for a client. Despite the difficulty of breaking into the professional wedding, portraiture or event photography markets, these amateurs may even find some low key success in offering their services in these areas.

2. Getting Started: Selling Photos Online

When it comes to selling photos on your own website, things are much more complicated. You will have to research into Search Engine Optimization, or "SEO" as we call it in the web industry. SEO is the process of tweaking and optimizing a website in order to rank highly in search results from search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. A higher ranking in search results means more traffic to your website and more potential customers. In order to sell photos, you must optimize your site for keywords that people who need stock photos will be searching for. You must also tag your photos with these keywords so that they can be indexed into image search results.

II. Microstock sites, personal hosting sites, and free stock photo sites all have different techniques in regards to getting photos in to begin selling. For microstock sites, it is known that you can upload just about anything and you'll get at least a few sales. They don't have to be shots of a certain subject with certain colors and lighting, etc. So long as they're decent-looking photos and have no intellectual property issues, there is a good chance that they will sell. This is also true with free stock photo sites.

Lastly, there are free stock photo sites like RGB stock and Stock.xchng. The majority of these do not pay contributors, but Stockxpert is one which does.

Your own personal website will be the most profitable place to sell photos online depending on its SEO and keywording. For those not wanting to pay for a web host, Photostockplus and Smugmug seem to be among the better photo hosting sites.

I. We all have to start somewhere, and when it comes to selling photos, most beginners will most likely want to know which are the best selling photos online sites. After all, you can't sell something if there is no place to sell it. There are a few good microstock sites such as Dreamstime, Fotolia, iStockphoto, and Shutterstock which generally have more sales due to the amount of clients who use them. It may be harder to get into these though.

A. Finding the best platforms for beginners

2.1. Finding the best platforms for beginners

Subsequent, recall the time you're willing to position into selling. Positive websites offers cash boosters. Those can encompass assignments that you entire for extra pay, or increased charges from snap shots which are sold solely via the website. This in the main relates to inventory images websites, and might be a awesome manner to get additional earnings if you are willing to do additional work. Other cash progressions are available thru revenue increases. Many Dreamstime tiers start at 50% with an opportunity to move to 60%, or through referrals in which you can acquire as much as 10% fee for referred members' sales.

Selling photos online is a lucrative approach to monetize your hobby. It is because it costs nothing to take photos, so any earnings you make from them is typically pure profit. There are numerous online platforms to promote your photos, and each has its very own different payout structure. The first element to do is research, and comply with the money. Identify your earnings desires and find the site in an effort to compensate you excellent in step with your desires. Some websites pay as much as 70% fee on every sale, but others typically handiest provide 30%. It may be easy to routinely assume the 70% is prime, but in case you generally tend to sell cheap pictures, it could now not be the first-class option.

2.2. Understanding what type of photos sell best online

Based on my experience, I would always recommend that anyone new to selling their photos online start by selling stock photography. The reason for this is that stock photography is in high demand and is used by many different companies, websites, and even smaller companies. The great thing about stock photography is that once your photo is uploaded, it can be sold many times, meaning that you have a greater chance of it making you more money in the long run as opposed to a one-off payment of a photo shoot. Also, stock photography does not always require a model and property release, and this makes it easier to upload and sell your photos. You can take photos of pretty much anything, and if you consider yourself a talented landscape photographer, then you will still be able to make money from your photos. Another profitable route to take is photography in the self-improvement industry. Although this industry is smaller and your photos will generally sell at a lower price, there is not as much competition, and so it can be a lot easier for someone starting off to make sales. Photos in this industry include fitness, healthy living, lifestyle, and business photos. The great thing about taking photos in this industry is that they can also be used as stock photography. This route can also turn into freelance photography work for small companies.

2.3. Pricing strategies for maximizing your earnings

Once you have been selling your photos for a few months and have managed to make say 10-20 sales on an image then it is time to consider raising the price. You have established that the image has market value and has also satisfied those who intended to return to the site and buy the print later, after deciding that they liked the image. These 20 sales may have come over the space of say a year but by still having the image available you will keep up continued sales. With an idea of ongoing customers you should not make a large price increase as you may scare these people off. Around $5 increase should suffice so for the same size print you would now be asking $20-25.

Realistically, when starting off you need to be making frequent sales to get a feel for what the market really wants. As a guideline, an image from a newbie photographer who is selling prints for the first time should be made available as 4x6 or 5x7 for around $8-$15. This price is quite likely to trigger impulse buys from people who have an appreciation for the subject and is a price which really is not too much to ask.

There is no point selling yourself short by trying to sell 8x10 prints for $30. You may have seen other people doing this but the legitimacy of buying internet prints for much money is questionable. A buyer may have looked at your photo and thought "that's nice" but in reality probably has little intention of buying the print. This is due to a combination of lack of experience in the sale of photography and also because you were asking too much for the print.

2.4. Utilizing free tools for editing photos to sell

Adobe offers a variety of tools that can come in handy for the aspiring photo seller. Their Photoshop format images are the standard for quality photos and images on the web. Because of this, many high-quality expensive stock photos have been edited and stored as Photoshop files, then uploaded to be sold but later forgotten about by their respective authors. This can create a demand for quality edited photos in Photoshop format to be used as graphic design resources. Adobe provides a program called Adobe Camera Raw that has the capability to edit many types of image files and has an easy-to-use batch processing feature. This is a useful tool for editing photos and manipulating image settings to achieve a high-quality result. Since it is difficult to obtain, there is a lack of free ACR presets available on the web. Creating your own custom presets and using them to apply edits to multiple images in a batch can greatly increase the speed and efficiency at which you are able to process photos for resale.

There are a variety of free editing tools out there that can help clean up and improve the appearance of both digital and scanned images. These tools can be used for simple touch-ups as well as adding effects and the like to photos. Bear in mind that a little goes a long way with these programs. It is easy to overdo it, and special effects can quickly make a photo look dated. The key to editing photos for resale is simply to clean up the photo a bit without changing it so much that it loses an authentic appearance. With trial and error, you should be able to determine what photos sell better with edits and which are best left as is and use that information to help prioritize your workflow.

3. Marketing Your Photos Online

As a photographer, you may find that marketing your photos online can be quite challenging. There are thousands of forums, websites, and blogs dedicated to photography, many of which you may already be a member of, so it can be quite discouraging if your photos do not receive the attention that they deserve. However, it's important not to get disheartened; attracting attention to your photos simply requires a different approach to the one you may already be using. The following are some tips and techniques for effective online marketing; these methods can help increase the exposure of your photos and even result in opportunities to sell your work. When marketing your photos online, especially with the intention of selling them, it is important to pay special attention to the tags and keywords that you assign to your images. These labels are how your photos will be located in a search query, so you must carefully research the most popular tags on the photo sharing platform that they will be posted to and select the ones most relevant to your image. It is a good idea to use a mix of more general and more specific tags. General tags will place your image in a larger pool, while more specific tags will increase the chance of your image ranking high in a search result, increasing its visibility.

3.1. Tips and techniques for effective online marketing

There are some key tips and techniques for effective online image marketing. Set yourself apart. People buy photos for a powerful impact on them – whether it be a memory, inspiration, or to complete a message. Your photos need to be the ones that stand out, ones that are different from the rest and are powerful. So if you can, avoid it. Your own photography website is a world where you have full creative control with how your images are shown. Utilizing a free website is going to put you in a pool of other photographers who have made no effort to stand out. What's more, it can make you look unprofessional as a hobbyist. This leads me actually to my next point. A lot of people are attracted to images that have a good story behind them. If you have captivating stories to go with your photos, consider blogging. Blogging is an excellent way for SEO as fresh content is loved by search engines, and it's the perfect way to fully explain a photo and to capture a reader. In this way, blogging can sometimes lead to a sale of a photo.

3.2. Building a strong photography portfolio to attract buyers

With the sale of cameras comes the sale of photos. Every year, photography technology is making it easier for amateurs to take a great shot. The casual 'snap shooter' can take a photo of something great, but does not have the means or the knowledge to set up and display his/her work. Amateur photographers often take good photos, so as a professional photographer, it is vital that you can put together a strong collection of shots. The difference between a pro and an amateur may simply be having a strong portfolio of work. If a photographer doesn't have a strong portfolio, there is a chance that their future potential customer can skip them and go for the amateur who can offer them a cut rate while producing a similar quality image. An easy way to avoid this situation and market photography with a strong collection of work is to target clients or agencies working in specific industries. If you have an interest in sports, advertise sports photos to sports companies, sports magazines, junior sport clubs, and colleges. With a targeted market, it is much easier to secure potential customers.

Compared to the photography industry 20 years ago, the business of photography in today's world is almost entirely different. 20 years ago, a successful photographer was one who received regular commissions from reputable print publications or a steady flow of commercial work from corporate organizations. These days, a good number of professional photographers work in other key industries and use photography as a means to make extra income. To ensure a successful career in an industry with increasing competition, it is important for a photographer to adapt to the changing industry. One of the key changes that photographers are forced to adapt to is the evolution of technology. With photography technology advancing so rapidly, it is difficult to keep up with the latest gear. Consequently, we see more and more professional photographers selling their equipment to keep up with the latest and greatest.

3.3. Leveraging social media for exposure and sales

3. Create a contest or promotion: People love free stuff and you can generate a lot of interest in your brand with a contest. Make the prize relevant to your target market to gain followers who are more likely to become customers. One promotion can also result in multiple sales as your contestants share your product with friends to increase their chance of winning.

2. Use high-quality media to inspire: Social media website advertising is far cheaper than traditional online advertising methods, but an attractive image and caption can still be effective. You can use the ad to target specific users based on interests or those who have visited your website.

1. Attract your target market: Advertising to your target market is more cost-effective and will have higher conversion. Use tools like Facebook Insights on your target market to see what their interests are and tailor your updates to suit.

Techniques that are effective with book marketing may also work well for photos marketed online. Full-time stock photographer Josh Dunlop agreed to share some of what he has learned using social media tools to drive sales of specific photos as well as to raise awareness of his portfolio and brand. He came up with five factors that seem to be effective for driving actual sales from social media.

3.4. Collaborating with influencers and bloggers

Unlike approaching companies, offering money isn't always the best way to get an influencer or blogger on board. Remember that they receive these offers daily and may be more enticed by the idea of receiving free products from you or even having one of your pieces greatly discounted. It might also be better to hold off on offering payment until you're more established; however, this depends greatly on the individual you're speaking to. At the end of the day, build a good relationship with them, and they may come on board out of pure goodwill. Once things are in place and they're ready to help promote your work, you need to give them all the resources required to do so. This may include photographs, a brief description about your work, or discount codes to pass on to their followers.

To allow for successful collaboration with an influencer or blogger, it's necessary to select a person with a large following who features a similar style or subject matter to your own photos. The next step is to personally reach out to them. Often, larger influencers and bloggers will receive hundreds of emails and direct messages weekly from companies asking to collaborate. It's important to be persistent until you receive a response. Approaching people in real life can also be an effective strategy; for example, if you're a travel photographer and you happen to meet a travel blogger on one of your trips, this could potentially lead to a collaboration.

4. Growing Your Photography Business

The key to direct and indirect online marketing is search engine optimization. In layman's terms, you want to ensure that when a potential client types in a search term such as "wedding photographer" into a search engine, your website comes up as close to the top of the results as possible. This is a massive topic in itself, but the essentials are having good keyword density on your website, creating quality relevant content, and backlinking (procuring other websites to link to your site).

Arguably, the most effective way to grow your photography business is to maximize your online presence. Too many photographers focus solely on traditional marketing methods and neglect the online market. Web-based advertising is more cost-effective than traditional methods and is potentially viewed by hundreds of thousands of people. It is all thanks to the wonder and mystery that is Google that a person in need of a photographer can access your website with a single search from anywhere in the world. A visually creative industry such as photography can be very effectively marketed using social media services and other web 2.0 applications. Creating a blog and being an active poster in online forums can have a massive effect on your business if you do it with a marketing mindset (remote linking URLs with keyword anchor texts). It's important to remember that people who seek your website do so because they are considering paying for your services.

4.1 Expanding your online presence and reach

At this stage, you have already begun making some money from your photography and are likely hoping to scale your earnings into something more significant. Growing a business can be tough, and the transition from amateur to professional has its own challenges, whether photography is your sole income or a strategic sideline to a regular job. If you are currently employed, it can be an excellent idea to begin working your photography business in your off time.

4.1. Expanding your online presence and reach

Expanding online presence In order to grow your photography business, you will need a major online presence. Through the internet, there are a variety of ways consumers can learn about you such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Social media in today's world is a big part of everyone's life. It's how we keep in touch with friends, share new experiences, and get the latest news. Regardless of the individual platforms, the utilization of social networking is a cheap and easy avenue for marketing. If you already have a personal Facebook, converting it into a fan page is a simple transition. You can invite all of your friends to like the page and it can be used to link to your business. Another way to market your business is sharing your stories and experiences with a blog. There are many popular websites for creating a free blog, including wordpress.com and blogger.com. Blogging is a powerful tool for increasing traffic to your website. It will also give your business a more personable feel and allow your clients to get to know you a little better. In addition, it can improve your SEO (search engine optimization) and your blog stories may come up when people are searching for related content on Google. This will be covered later, but having good SEO is crucial in driving organic traffic to your website. Don't forget to enable comments on your blog, so that you can communicate with your audience. Lastly, setting up a portfolio on Deviantart or Flickr are good ways to share your work and try to get discovered. This may not bring in clients instantly, but it can expose your work to a large community of people. If you do good work, there is a chance that your photos may make the front page and draw loads of traffic to your page.

4.2. Diversifying your income streams in the photography industry

This mind mapping process will take some time to develop and will evolve as your career does. It is a great way to set some short and long-term goals to diversify your income.

Starting with your present situation in the center of a plain piece of paper, create cloud bubbles in which you write down all the narrative possibilities that come to mind. From each of these bubbles, create offshoots with more ideas. Continue this exercise on a few separate occasions, giving yourself time in between to allow for new ideas to emerge.

Thinking how to represent your clients and skills to find out profit in your career? How about diversifying income streams through pursuing a variety of opportunities in the photography industry? There are countless ways to interpret this, and the best way for it to make sense with your personal situation is to build a mind map.

4.3. Scaling up your operations for increased profitability

The author discusses automating more and more of his printing processing by building a print fulfillment API that directly links his website to his printing company's API. This automation takes time to set up, but eventually the author can leave the printing process entirely and rely solely on automated photo sales for the printing to be done and posted to the customer. He spends no time taking orders, creating prints, packaging, and posting. This is the epitome of a scalable income source from automated marketing and sales. When weighed up against manually printing and posting sales, he has gone from an hour's input per sale to minutes, and the process will continue to be more profitable as efficiency and volume sales increase. Building the API was not a cheap process, but it was built over time as revenue allowed, and it is an example of investing to scale up an operation to increase profitability in the future. An alternative form of automation is outsourcing low-level tasks such as website maintenance to a virtual assistant, to free up more time to concentrate on high-level and higher income-generating tasks. This relates back to productivity from chapter 3 as freeing up more time can lead to spending more time on increasing profitable income sources.

The most effective way to increase profitability in business is to scale up your operations. Scaling up is not a simple process, it can be complex and stressful but the end results will lead to increased profitability. Hence, it is essential to explore how to effectively scale up operations and make it work. There are three main methods which this author outlines that can be used to effectively increase profitability: automation, increased selling price.