Tip #1 Selling Your Photos Online!

This article is part of an ongoing series in which you will learn about the basics of stock photography, the license types, what to submit and how to make money off stock photography.
I’ll also cover a few insider and marketing tips that will help you get accepted and simply create better stock photos.

Simply put, stock photography is a collection of photos that can be used for different purposes under strict or relatively flexible usage licenses. Stock photos include an ever expanding variety of subjects which publishers, advertising agencies or anyone can buy and use.

1. What is Stock Photography?
Stock photography simply works because the end user who needs photos can save time and money by not hiring a photographer. If photographers and their portfolio websites could be considered stores then stock photography websites are the supermarkets of images and illustrations.

It’s a win win situation for all parties involved. Stock photography agencies get to keep a percentage of every photo sold on their website, photographers get the remaining percentage and users get the desired photo.

2. Stock or Microstock?
There are two types of stock photography marketplaces, stock (also called macrostock) and microstock photography websites. Let’s look at the difference between these:

1. Stock photography websites are the traditional photography marketplaces where photo prices range from a few dollars and up to thousands of dollars.

2. Microstock agencies are "the new kids on the block" so to speak and in recent years microstock got a lot of coverage and popularity on the Internet, because photography equipment became cheaper and more professional, therefore more and more people could afford to take professional photos with consumer cameras (digital cameras). This article will focus on microstock photography to cover a larger audience of readers, from beginner to advanced photographers and designers who want to get their ‘hands dirty’ in stock photography.

Microstock was the answer for this niche market, where amateur and professional photos can be sold for a really low price, usually anywhere between 1 to 5 dollars. The idea behind microstock is that if the images are cheap enough, more people will buy as opposed to selling at a higher price to a more restricted number of customers (usually agencies with large budgets). The sellers of microstock photos are usually average users. The system allows not only professional photographers, but also beginners to create a portfolio and sell their photos.

You can make some money out of stock photography, but it’s very hard to make a complete living out of it, without the proper training. This is simply because your competition consists of literally tens of millions of other photos in the same marketplace. Let’s do the math, say your photos are sold at roughly $1 per image, and you’d need an average of $100,000 per year to get by, that means that you’d need to sell 100,000 photos per year. If your photos are sold at $1 to $5 dollars a piece, you will only earn a percentage of this, which usually translates to a few cents.

The rate of failed submissions is very high, because stock photo websites are saturated with millions of photos, you either need to submit photos of a completely new, groundbreaking theme or choose a very narrow niche market.

Stay tuned for more tips on how to sell your digital photos online.