How to sell photos
How I made 35K Selling Photos Online
now I'm not a professional photographer
but I've made $35,000 selling my photos
online in this video I'm gonna go
through exactly how I did it which sites
I've tried which ones worked which ones
didn't as well as which ones I think are
me the best sites in the coming year
let's get started hi I'm James I make a
living as a software developer but I
love traveling landscape photography for
the past seven years I've been selling
my photos online now I'm gonna be going
through the results that I've got
selling my photos online but your
results may differ depending the type of
photography you do I'd love to hear in
the comment section about whether you've
tried selling your photos online before
and what type of success you've had also
stick around to the end of this video
because I'm gonna go through which sites
I think are gonna be the best in the
coming year now I'm gonna jump on the
computer and show you some charts of
sales I've had over the past seven years
so I keep track of the revenue from each
website in Excel so what I'm gonna do is
I've just created five charts in Excel
where I can kind of walk you through how
I make money selling my photos online
I'm gonna start pretty high level and
I'll get into more detail at the end
I'll kind of go through how much money
I've made from each individual site so
this is how the thirty five thousand
dollars breaks out year over a year you
can see that when I started here my
first year I only made about a thousand
dollars and then it continued to
increase over the next four the first
four years until 2015 when I reached the
high of seven thousand dollars a year
and there's a bit of a decline that's
starting to rebound now in this chart
you can kind of see why it went up and
then went down the green shows my
revenue in the red shows how many photos
I posted each year so you can see my
first year I posted about a hundred
photos uploaded them to different sites
online and then my second year I was
very motivated I did over two hundred
and forty photos these are 240 fully
processed photos that I uploaded to
multiple sites
now in November of 2013 my wife and I
had our second child and the time that I
had to go traveling and take photos as
well as processed those photos went down
scene seen 2014 i only uploaded about a
hundred photos
now despite uploading less photos my
revenue kept going up in 2014 and even
in 2015 even though the amount of photos
that i posted went down now in 2016 we
had our third child and I just really
didn't have much time to travel and do
photography so 2016 in 2017 I really
didn't post many photos and that's why
you can see here that my revenue went
down for those years and over the past
year year and a half in 2018 I've
started to post a bit more and it
started to go back up so you can see
that once you upload your photos you can
keep getting ready from them even if
you're not posting regularly but it will
go down slightly year-over-year looking
at it a different way this way I've
shown the red line is the cumulative
photos so you can see how my photos grew
over time and right now I've got about
600 good photos posted across many sites
across the web now if you look at the
types of sites that I upload - you can
really break them into three main sites
okay
the first is direct stock so this is my
own website so I have a website
souvenir pixels calm I used to host it
on Squarespace I currently host it on
SmugMug and anybody can go on there and
buy photos directly from you photo
licenses so this is you know companies
will come on a lot of travel companies
travel magazines they'll see my photos
typically they'll see my photos on
social media and then on my social media
it links back to my website where they
can just go on and purchase licenses
also on my website you can purchase
prints so I sell prints on my website
now I also have uploaded my photos to a
lot of print-on-demand sites and I've
tried out a bunch of them but the only
one that I real
had great success with his fine art
America so most of my photos are on fire
in America and I've made you know some
money from those as well too you can see
here about 8% but the vast majority of
the money that I've made selling my
photos online has been from micro stock
sites so I've tried a lot of different
sites about 23 of them in total and that
really makes up the majority of my
revenue selling my photos online so
we're going to look at which sites in a
bit more detail you can kind of see in
this part
HR so this is kind of breaking out the
revenue from all the sites so you can
see by far this pink bar here is
Shutterstock and they are about by far
been the best site for me for selling my
photos online I had a very good run with
Shutterstock you know if you typed in
landscapes in starter stock I had a
photo on the main page if you typed in
Canada I'd multiple photos on the first
page so I did really well a year over a
year and month over month on
Shutterstock now over the past six
months the search algorithm the seem to
change a little bit and my sales have
gone down a little bit but I had a
pretty good run we're about three years
I was doing very well with them the
second one here is 500px now 500px was a
photo sharing community before they
started selling a stock and I was
involved in the community before it was
selling a stock so I had a lot of photos
that were highly ranked and when they
started selling for stop selling photos
for stock as well - I made quite a bit
of map money when they first started out
now there's been a lot of changes over
there at 500px they're purchased by
another company now all the sales are
through Getty and to be honest I don't
even post it anymore
there's been a lot of changes and I just
really don't appreciate the site as much
as I used to but you know for a period
of time they were a very good earner for
me as far as sites go down here number
three is photo do now photo dune has
really only earned me a lot of money in
the last couple of years the first
couple years it was very low and last
two years really it's been very high so
I see photo dune really going and
surpassing 500px probably this year
and then the fourth one here is Adobe
stock or Fotolia so Fotolia was a
independent stocks idea then Adobe
bought them and turned it into Adobe
stock so I had my portfolio on Fotolia I
did it fairly well there and now it's
been moved over to Adobe stock and when
it moved over to Adobe stop I saw a bit
of a dip in sales but now I'm starting
to see it pick up a bit more maybe
because I'm posting a bit more to Adobe
stock as well too now there's some other
smaller ones here one thing to note is
this little sliver up here this is it's
about four hundred dollars and that's 13
sites so I tried a lot of sites I often
what I'll do is when I hear about a new
site I'd upload like 200 photos to that
site and see what happens and a lot of
time nothing happened right which one of
the reasons I'm making this video right
because I spent a lot of time uploading
and you know trying to find these sites
uploading those sites and really didn't
get that much out of it you know 13
sites you know 400 dollars over six
years it's not a lot so you know if I
were starting at again I would probably
really just focus on the main sites that
you see here and really not even worry
about the smaller ones until you know
they seem to be big enough to you get
some momentum because there are a lot of
stock sites out there but I just don't
think you can make a lot of money on all
of them you really need to have your
photos on the big ones to start out with
now I hope that didn't come across as
bragging but I had no idea when I
started selling my photos online that I
would make thirty five thousand dollars
from them really my goal of doing this
was so that I could buy you know more
cameras and lenses without taking it in
my family budget and I achieved that I'm
pretty happy with it now there was a
point when I considered trying to you
know maybe go full-time as a stock
photographer but at the time what was
selling primarily was business and
images so what I realized was that to be
able to be a full-time stock
photographer I would need to go and get
models and kind of pose them in
different business situations taking
hundreds of photos a day and uploading
them and that really didn't appeal to me
if you take a look at my portfolio and
I'll link to them put some links down in
the description I really like taking
travel on landscape photography I think
what I realized
it would be a very difficult to make a
full-time salary and support my family
on stock photography I was only gonna do
a travel on landscape the other thing is
is that I enjoy my day job I enjoy
software development I enjoy working
with my clients so I kind of feel like
even if I did photography as a full-time
job I would probably just become like a
software developer it would become my
hobby and I still code in my part-time
right so I decided to stick with
software development as my main living
and you know photography is my hobby now
you may have different goals and
hopefully you know this video is still
useful the status light showed even
though I kind of really only work on a
part-time now the start of the video I
mentioned that you know I would at the
end I would talk about which sites I see
being the best in the upcoming year now
about five months ago I tried uploading
some of my photos to free stock sites
now if you are familiar with these free
stock sites their sites like pixels
pixabay UPS flash is another one where
you can upload your photos and then
anybody can use them for free commercial
purposes for free so there's stock sites
but you don't get paid but the thing is
when someone downloads them the sites
encourage that person to give you a
donation for the photo so I just did as
a trial uploaded 100 of my photos 100 of
my oldest photos that weren't really
making me money on any of the stock
sites anyways and in the past 3 months
I've made about $60 in donations
now listen that's not a lot of money but
$60 is more than I made from a lot of
the lower sites that I have out there
and as my sales go down on shutterstock
I plan on taking more of my you know
older images and uploading these to
these sites and I think they could be a
fairly decent size you know revenue
source for this year so that's something
that you may want to look into as well
again I haven't made a lot of money off
in the past but in something that I'm
going to be trying more in the future
you can let me know in the comments what
you think about these free stock sites
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have you up
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