Wednesday, June 3, 2009

7 Tips to Help You Make Money Selling Pictures

You can make a good living or a substantial second income by making money selling your pictures online. You don't have to be a professional photographer to do this either. There are many websites available that sell stock photos, and you can upload your pictures to any of these sites and as long as they are of a decent quality the sites will host and display them so buyers can download them. Every time somebody pays to download one of your pictures you receive a percentage of this payment.
The process is very simply, but the finer details are what you need to learn in order to be successful and start making consistent money by selling your pictures. You need to learn what type of pictures sell best, and what sites are best to host them on as they all differ considerably.
Here are a few tips that can help you get started in this lucrative business:
1. When taking a picture try taking several with slightly different settings, then you can choose the best one later. Most sites have very strict acceptance levels, so you want to ensure that the quality of the pictures you're sending in is high.
2. Always save your pictures in the highest resolution possible. Buyers usually have a choice of the size of picture they can download so you want the quality to remain at the highest levels throughout.
3. Be original. You need to find a niche that will work and sell, but you must try and take a picture that nobody else has taken before. It's no use replicating other pictures that are already on the site, this reduces your chances of getting paid drastically.
4. Pictures of people always sell well. But you must remember to seek legal permission from the subject before you post the picture, or this could be a legal mess for you to sort out later down the line.
5. Choosing the right keywords for your pictures when you upload them to a site is of paramount importance. If you use irrelevant keywords and tags, your picture will not come up when a buyer uses the sites search engine, so it will never be seen basically.
6. Be careful of trademark violations, don't take pictures of company logos or some military pictures. Again, you could find yourself in legal wrangles you could really do without.
7. Once you start to get quite a large portfolio of pictures online, then you should start to market them. Don't just let them sit there and wait for people to come and look, you get out there and tell people to come and look. Join forums, make a Blog and show some of your work on there, join social networking sites that have appropriate groups. Now is the time to really start selling your product.
These are just a few tips that will help you along the way. But before you start out and jump right into the deep end, study a quality training program that will give you a step by step guide on how to set your business up. If you want to make money selling pictures then start off on the right tracks and it will become a lot more profitable for you quicker than if you learned everything the hard way.
The Camera Dollar system is a training program made by a free lance photographer who makes a very good living using the same methods he will teach you. There are currently over 18,000 people worldwide who are making a full time income using the methods detailed in this system. by paul hooper

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