A quick update to an earlier post on DepositPhotos. As a reminder, they pay you to upload your files at 2c per photo up to $100, they pay for placing a banner on the site (see the one on just below and on the right), they pay a small percentage if someone signs up as a result of clicking on the banner, and finally, my photos have started selling as well – only $3 in February, but it is a new site. Well worth investigating if you are starting up in Stock Photography, and please use this link to register as a photo contributor (or buyer)!!
As a general reminder, using the links/banners on the right if you find this site useful and you want to follow in my footsteps helps me a lot! Thanks!
I’ve now passed the 500 on-line files in several stock sites, and am looking for ways of building up the sales of the files. My most profitable sites so far are Shutterstock, iStockPhoto and Dreamstime (please use the links if you are planning to follow in my footsteps as I get some referral income!!). DepositPhotos (see link on right) is interesting because they pay you to upload files, but has not been a great seller so far.
To try to market these photos to a wider audience, I recently created a Flickr account and uploaded small versions of my photos into that account. The idea is that a stock buyer can see the images, and then go to the stock site to actually buy a reasonably sized version. Hard to tell if it has worked yet, although I have sold at least one file that was checked out on Flickr and then purchased from Dreamstime, so maybe it works! If I can pin down some more evidence I will update the posting.
I’ve been a little slow on getting new products onto Zazzle since the first flush of enthusiasm, but it was always in my mind to use it to show off my best photographs in calendars – these appear to be highly professional designs, and should be attractive to the right audience. My first calendar is one with my best Kauai shots, and within a day of putting it on-line, I was awarded their Best Product Award – a great pat on the back as a newcomer in this field. I’ve pasted in a link to the calendar below – feel free to check it out! All I need to do now is sell one of these fine products!
I came across a forum discussing the benefits of posting items for sale on Zazzle. Basically, the idea is to load images and create products such as mouse mats, T-shirts, cups and other products illustrated by your pictures. I’ve opened a store and tried to create one product – a baby’s T-shirt with a lovely image of a bengal kitten – and we will see how it goes. It costs nothing to join or post products – you get a commission when the item is purchased.
Some time ago, I started uploading images onto a web site called PrintBusinessCards.com for use as backgrounds on business cards. The start up process is a little involved as you need to get the right format of TIFF image, but it is actually quite amusing going through your stock of photographs and thinking of what would make an interesting business card. Sometimes it is the strangest designs! I’ve continued doing this from time to time, and currently have 55 templates on the site. I’ve made $35 so far – not great, but the cards just sit there being picked up from time to time, and so it was worth the effort bearing in mind the fun I had in trying to be artistic. You can see my business card artist page via the link!
November has been a great month for stock photography – a total of $367 in sales. This was helped by $75 in video sales, and also a new site – DepositPhotos – which is paying stock photographers $0.02 per picture to upload, up to a maximum payout of $100. It will be interesting to see if it attracts buyers, but it is a relatively easy way to make $100!
I also spent a lot of time over the Thanksgiving Holidays at perfecting my use of indoor flash to create isolated images. I’ll add a blog entry when I get some time on how exactly I did this, but you can see some examples below in my latest photos on Shutterstock. If you decide to follow me in this hobby, please use my referral links which are in the headings of this article on Making Money from Stock Photography.
I mentioned, a few posts ago, that Jacqui was building a business making jewelry – with a focus on delicately encasing semi-precious stones with sterling silver wire. Her work is now for sale on an Etsy store and we maintained the Backyard theme by naming it BackyardArtisan.com! It is interesting to learn how best to make use of these stores – the search engine seems to favor newly entered items, and they are also displayed for a time on the landing page of the site. We found that the items got more page views in the few days after they were added for sale, and that slowly drops away over time. We made the mistake of entering all the items at once when the store was first set up, but now we add one item a week to maintain some status in the search process. The current plan is to try to get some traction on the site before Christmas.
The activity – which has since evolved to creating ornate and intricate bracelets – has led to an interesting opportunity though. Jacqui has been invited to become a teacher of wire-wrap jewelry at a local craft store. We will see how that develops.
A couple of weeks ago, I started work on displaying and offering my best photographs for sale using a web site created using a Smugmug Pro Account. That site, www.BackyardImage.com, is now 90% complete and I must admit that configuring the site does allow a lot of flexibility – certainly much more flexible that I was able to do with my own web site designs. I have the menu structure in place, have the basic design of each gallery straight, and have sorted out the pricing structure. Although the site is reasonably easy to use, each step did take a bit of research to get the right look for the website. I have tried both the available printers from SmugMug, and got good results from both. The site allows you to intercept a print order and create a properly sharpened and finished photograph to send to the printer, which is a great time saver – you can create images that look good on the web site and only work on those that actually sell to create a final, ready to print, image.
I want to do more on the site, but for now, it is public and available. All I now need to solve is how to get people to find it and buy some prints!
I mentioned in an earlier post – Creating an online photography website – that I have created a web site using Lightroom Galleries – a very clever use of the web gallery templates provided in Lightroom. This looks pretty smart, but two things are making me consider a change – one is that even if I enable the shopping cart, accepting credit cards is going to be complicated, and then I still have to organize all the printing and sizing of the prints assuming someone finds the site. It is pretty hard to make a personal web site appear near the top of a Google search!
Having looked at the alternatives – mainly Zenfolio, Photoshelter and Smugmug, I decided to go with Smugmug. A couple of things seemed to be important in that decision – I read some posts about people having been discovered through searches on their site and have sold prints that way, and then I found a 50% off coupon that I could use against a Pro package. The Pro package allows you to configure and customize the site to make it unique, and also allows you to sell prints at a profit.
I had printed a 20×30 inch photograph of Yosemite Valley seen over the Merced River and displayed it on the wall at work – a colleague on a visit to the office saw it and was interested in prints of this and other Yosemite photographs and that was enough to make me want to solve the problem! The new web site isn’t finished by any means, but it is on-line with Smugmug under the Backyard Image Fine-Art Photography label!
August has been a slow month for stock photography sales – I guess too many people on vacation! However, the stock videos I uploaded are going well. On Pond5, I sold 3 videos this month – for earnings of $75. I need to sell a lot of photos to get that amount of income, and the effort involved in uploading the videos is reasonable. I now have 30 video clips in my portfolio at Pond5. The other site I have uploaded to has not been just as successful – just $12.00 in August. Click here to see my stock video files at Shutterstock.
