Selling photos online is one of the nicest ways of making money online, because you can combine both a passion for taking photographs, with making money from those photos. A true win/win situation.
So, how can you get going with selling photos online?
Well, one of the best ways of getting going is to first learn what it is that the market is buying in the way of photographs.
The best way to do this is to visit the different stock photo sites and have a look at the list of their best sellers. This is not always easy to find, but if you have a root around for a while then you will generally be able to find them. What this allows you to do is to find out what the market actually wants in the way of photographs, and then you will be in a much better position to deliver it to them when you sell photos that people actually want to use.
More than half of the battle in selling photos online is to be selling photos that people actually want to use. If you only take photographs of pieces of meat, and your market is a vegetarian conference, then you aren’t going to sell much! You need to start to figure out who your photographic market is if you are going to sell to them.
One little trick here is that even if the stock photo site that you are looking at does not list their photos by popularity (and many of them do, so watch out for those). You can nevertheless often tell simply by searching based on the number of downloads that a particular photo has. The more downloads it has, the more popular it is, and the more you should consider shooting some photos that are similar in style to the bestsellers.
You don’t want to try to re-invent the wheel when selling photos online. You should copy what is already selling (not literally, but stylistically). You don’t want to infringe on anyone else’s copyright, but in practice unless you are creating illustrations or photographing logos, then you are unlikely to run into problems.
As with anything else, including selling photos online, use your common sense.
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