How to Sell Photos Online: 7 Ways to Make Money With Photography

How to Sell Photos Online 7 Ways to Make Money With Photography

If you're looking for a way to fund that next camera lens an extra gear, then you should be selling your photos online. It's a realistic way to fund your passion with very little effort.

So in today's blog post, I'm going to teach you how to sell your photos online and start getting paid for your passion.

1. Sell your photography via direct stock

Direct stock is a term that refers to selling your photography on your own website. You can create a site on Shopify with templates that are actually for photography, and you can go with a plan for as inexpensive as 29 US dollars a month.

Shopify also offers apps that are specifically made for photographers. So Photo Lock for example, is an antitheft image protection app and Creative Hub is an app that specializes in printing fine art pieces for photographers that are meticulous about print quality.

On your own website, consider selling licenses to your photos. So if you specialize in travel landscape photography, for example, you could sell photo licenses to travel magazines and vacation companies.

You can also sell physical goods on your site. This would include selling prints and putting your photos onto merch. To do this, you can easily download a Shopify app called Printiful and in just a few clicks, you can sell your photography on virtually everything, from mugs to books and t-shirts.

To sell photos directly to a buyer, you're going to need to spend some time marketing your business. I would recommend that you post the photos that you're selling on social media and direct people to your website from there. You can use hashtags to get accounts with larger audiences to repost your images, or you can have your friends and family post your photos on their own Instagram, and that's going to help expand your reach.

If you're at a phase where you're ready to start putting paid dollars behind your business, consider running Facebook ads. Facebook ads are a powerful tool that can help grow your business exponentially.

2. Sell your photography as prints

In addition to having your own website, you can be a merchant on popular print on demand sites. Print on demand sites take care of all the details. You don't have to worry about production, shipping or selling. All you do is upload your work and get paid.

Print on demand sites are a double-edged sword though, because those kinds of sites have tons of traffic, but they also have tons of competition amongst merchants.

With society6 for example, you can put your artwork on virtually anything. You can make your photos available and duvets, shower curtains, face masks, and even tapestries.

Society6 can be competitive though, so also try Fine Art America to find success. If you have pretty artsy photos, this would be a good platform for you. They have canvas prints, framed prints and even acrylic prints.

And the nice thing about Fine Art America is that they let you determine the cost, on top of their base cost. So if the base price for a framed print is $50 and you choose to price it at $75, Fine Art America takes home $50 and you get the $25.

Don't just stop at those two, though. The more print on demand sites your photography is available on, the better chance you have of selling.

3. Microstock

Microstocks will likely be the route that gets you the most money. So what's a microstock company?

A microstock photography company is a company that sources their images online and they do so from a wider range of photographers. This is nice because traditional agencies will only work with select artists, but microstocks have a willingness to accept images from amateurs and hobbyists. Another thing to note about Microstock sites is that they're selling their images at a very low cost. This can be anywhere from 20 cents to $10 for royalty free images.

So which Microstock sites are the best?

Here's my list. Shutterstock, 500px, Depositphotos, PhotoDune, and Adobe Stock

And Alamy is another great platform, since it has one of the highest commission rates for each photo sold at 50%. They'll determine the price of your photo once you upload it and they're not exclusive, which means you don't have to give them exclusive rights to your photos.

With stock sites, you have to strategize and play with the search algorithm. What I mean by that is if you're able to get your photo on the first page for a specific search term, like Paris, you're going to see sales for that photo rise.

To get found for a specific search terms, make sure you're tagging your photos with relevant terms that not only describe what's in the picture, but also get inside of the head of the person that's searching.

So if I'm selling a photo of Niagara falls and I'm targeting travel agencies, I might include words like vacation, travel or Canadian tourism as image tags, in addition to the more descriptive tags like Niagara or waterfall. It will be harder and more competitive to rank for common subject matter.

4. Sell your photos for free on stock sites

Free stock sites make photos available for free to anyone who's looking. Whether it's for personal or commercial purpose, anyone can download these. However, they do encourage people to make donations. This is not going to be a massive money earner, but if you do have photos that aren't selling well on other sites, upload those here.

Though, you can only expect to make a couple hundred bucks using this method, it's at least better than having those photos sit on a hard drive somewhere and not making any money at all. Check out Pexels, Unsplash and Pixabay.

5. Sell your photos on apps.

Some apps have competitions for a specific type of photo, where the winner that is selected gets a cash prize. Competitions are a ton of fun and you get these design challenges that push you in new directions, and there's excitement that builds up. But this is definitely more of an entertainment exercise rather than a way to make consistent money.

In addition to competitions, some apps also have the option to sell your photos as stock directly on the app, just how I mentioned before. So check out Snapwire and Shutterstock for these.

I'm going to challenge you to start today. Upload at least one image to a print on demand site, like Society6 or a Shopify app, like Printify, right after you're done reading this blog post. But make sure that you're leaving this window open so that once you're done, you can drop a link to your photos so that we can all check out your work.