Are You Wondering How To Sell Pictures Online And Make Money? Read This!

Are you a selfie lover? Do you enjoy taking photos when you go for walks, visit a zoo or special moments? What if I told you that you can make money by selling every quality photo you snap.

I know it sounds crazy but I am telling you the truth. If you surf the internet on a daily basis, you would discover that there are free resources bearing millions of images & photos that can be downloaded for free but yet smart professional people would prefer to buy a photo rather than use a free one because of its numerous benefits. This is perfectly safe and totally legal.

The internet is full of uncountable blogs and websites, online businesses , advertising agencies, media etc. who are always on the search for high quality digital images to use as part of their content on their website or blog. They usually do not settle for free images; rather they purchase it from popular online photo websites.

The way to sell pictures online for money is quite easy too. You just need to simply

• Register as a seller on one of the many online photo websites
• Upload quality digital photographs that are attractive on this website.
• Fix (select a buying price) a price at which each photos will be sold. So that when someone purchases any of your photos, you get a good commission depending on the platform where you are selling the pictures.

Want to know the best part?

You need not be an expert photographer for you to sell photos to make cash. And it is not compulsory that you use an expensive camera to take photographs. If you got a flair for photography and you would love to be paid for what you love doing, then you can start the business of selling photos online and in the process earn some good commission.

How to sell pictures online for money?

I am pretty certain that by now you are so much interested on how to make money selling your digital photographs online or offline. Here are some easy and quick ways to do this.

Where can you sell photos?

You can easily sell your photos in many places but we’ve picked out the best places for you to sell your pictures.

ISTOCKPHOTO
IStockphoto began operations back in 2000. It was founded by a young man known as Bruce Livingstone. At first, image you download from iStockphoto was free but after the photo website became huge, they started charging buyers for each royalty free images downloaded.

They pay you a commission that ranges from 22% to 45%. Read more on how you can easily begin trading your pictures on their platform

STOCKXPERT
This is another leading photo stock website you need to try out. The platform controls a good number of international presences. Your commission are paid to you through Moneybookers or PayPal. You can visit Stockxpert for more details on registration, pricing and other details

FOTOLIA
I love Fotolia .

Why? Because they are a low-priced (as low as $0.75 per photo) stock photography site, that currently offers over 16 million images that can be used for advertising and publishing. Their images are usually taken amateur photographers and semi-pros photographers. At times you might be able to tell the difference and most time you just can’t because the images are of a similar quality. As a seller on Fotolia, you can earn from 30%-60% per image sale as revenue from their photo agency.

CRESTOCK
Crestock helps their clients discover the perfect image. It is no wonder their hold on micropayment royalty-free stock photography keeps growing. They make clients happy without charging much, so if you have a small budget and you need creative images for your projects-this is the place to go.
The reliability and speed of their upload system is top notch. You can also license your creative works on this platform as an illustrator or photographer. To confirm, you can check their commission table to learn how much money will be earned when you begin uploading your images HERE

DREAMSTIME
Dreamstime belongs to the class of “big boys” when it comes to stock photography. They provide their buyers with high resolution images with super good quality at very reasonable price.

Stats showed that at Jan. 2012, they have got over 4.5 million registered customers, 0.13 million contributing photographers & 13 million images online. With a whooping amount of unique visitors reaching over 11 million monthly, this online website occupies the third position in image licensing worldwide and stock photography audience. Find more ABOUT Dreamstime.

ALAMY
I consider this company best because when it comes to rewarding their photographers for their hard work, they come first(and I respect them for that). They pay as high as 60% commissions to the contributing photographers and they have paid more than $110 million till date. Why not take advantage of this? What are you waiting for? Head over to selling images and SEE HOW!

SHUTTERSTOCK
With Shutterstock, you can reach over 500,000 quality photo loving customers from 150 countries. They allow contributors to submit footage and photos. To learn how much you can earn, I advise you check their earnings schedule

123RF
123RF.com is a targeted subscriber and community-based website that also deals with royalty-free micro stock image library. This awesome website gives many designers, photographers, illustrators and designers an opportunity to showcase their designs, vectors, photographs, and illustrations to the world. This allows you to sell pictures online for money to an international audience. You can check them out using this LINK .

CORBIS
The Corbis Corporation is a company that is based in Seattle, Washington, which licenses the rights to footages, photographs and other visual media. It has in its collection a total of more than 500,000 video clips and over 100 million images.

They also offer a single online agreement that is unified for all new contributors with a very competitive royalty rates. They don’t charge any hidden fees or a “foreign office fee” thus providing a transparent yet simple royalty calculation for all online agreement holders.

To sell your image, you must choose one out of the three (3 options) to sell your images. You can choose between

• Exclusive,
• Co-Exclusive and
• Non-Exclusive representation rights.

You will most definitely make the highest cash if you go for exclusive rights but you can’t upload those images anywhere else. Before you select one, I recommend you read about their common FAQs on HERE .

GETTYIMAGES
Gettyimages is perhaps the most difficult to sign up for and operate quite differently from the mentioned stock photo agencies mentioned above. You will find it toughest to register amongst every site that allows you to submit your photos.

The reward is a lot better for good contributing photographers. Before signup, read more on their Getty Images contributor community .

Criteria to meet before you can sell pictures online for money

You should read up the online photo agency FAQs as soon as you land on their site. This provides you with an insight into things like photo quality requirement, terms, legal stuffs etc. Your upload will be totally rejected and your account may be banned if it does not follow their standard or breaks their Terms and Conditons.

I have taken my time to study some of this website and noticed that they almost follow the following patterns listed below:

• A good number of these sites accept any type of photos but others have restrictions to some specific topics.
• You must make sure that the aspect ratio of pictures you upload must be set to normal.
• JPEG is the general standard format. You may opt to use other formats like PNG, GIF etc. To sell pictures online for money , make sure that it strictly abides by rules.
• Make sure that your photos are in RGB color format
• You must use good camera of high quality (Some site provides you with the minimum specs of camera you can use too).
• The minimum size of photo is 1 MB to some while to others; it is 4 MB or more.
• Every photographs uploaded must look its best in terms of focus.

How much can you earn when you sell pictures online for money?

Varieties of factors will either influence your earnings positively or negatively. Primarily, 4 things affect the earnings you get when you sell photos for cash.

STOCK PHOTOGRAPHY SITE
Every image website does not pay the same commission. Some image agencies can pay as low as 20% of the selling amounts while some other site pay as high as 80% of the commission. The higher your commissions-the higher your earnings.

But there is a higher chance that you will bag in more sales on low commission sites as a beginner as compared to the one with higher commission because of high popularity.

NICHE OF YOUR PHOTOGRAPHY
There will be moments or times when some photos may be high in demand and low in some other times. The trick here is to discover and follow the trend before it becomes saturate. Make sure that the trend you follow has low competition & can sell high.

PROMOTION OF YOUR SELLER PAGE
Signing up, getting approval and uploading your photos is just not enough. You need to do aggressive promotion of your seller page so that more people can easily visit your store & buy your photos.

You can promote your services through the following processes:

• Ensure that you share your store page on social network sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, G+ Twitter, and Pinterest etc. at least once a week. Re-share again as you gain new followers.
• Read popular and new photography blogs & leave good quality comments with your seller’s page on website space. You can also run your own photo blog and add a sale page or hire me page.
• Be a guest poster on authoritative photography blogs.
• Try social bookmarking your profile page on BS like Reddit, Digg, and StumbleUpon etc.
• Join and become an active member in photography forums.

QUALITY OF PHOTOS

The fastest way to sell pictures online for money at high price is to make sure that it is of high quality. This is because high quality photos sell at a higher price. To achieve the highest quality, you should endeavour learning the art of photography. Knowledge of how to use Photoshop to add additional sharpness, effects or other finishing to your photos is an added bonus.