The Secret of Selling Your Photos Online: the Ultimate Step-by-step Guide to Creating a Passive Income from Your Pictures

By Michael Borgers

When I watched people taking pictures with cameras, mobile phones, or tablets—and nowadays drones or cameras mounted on bikes and even their head—I always wondered, who is going to look at all these images? Them? Their friends? Their family? Aren’t we all afraid when the phone rings and a friend invites us over for the “ultimate slideshow of their last beach vacation”? This really made me wonder why I take pictures at all. I store them on a hard disk and almost never look at them again. But just before I wanted to sell all my camera gear, I read a blog post about selling pictures online and I thought, “Hey, let’s give it a try. Put my images to good use and make some money on the side!”
It has been an amazing journey since that day. At first I made a lot of mistakes. So many of my friends have asked me how and why I got into this business that I decided to write this step-by-step guide to help you do the same and open your own creative online business. This book will show you all the required steps, pitfalls, tools and techniques to get started right away and save your precious images from being forgotten.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Borgers
• Release date: Nov 4, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370088225

Michael Borgers

Michael Borgers was born in Bocholt, Germany where he grew up and lived an extremely happy childhood until he moved to cologne where he worked for Hewlett Packard for 15 years. In 2009 he decided to move to China where he lived and worked in the IT business for many years. In 2015 he decided to start his own creative business by selling his photos online, creating a blog and writing ebooks. He has never been that happy before.

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The Secret of Selling Your Photos Online

Michael Borgers

Copyright © 2016 Michael Borgers

All rights reserved.

Distributed by Smashwords

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Ebook formatting by www.ebooklaunch.com

I dedicate this book to my father who created wonderful photos of my childhood with memories I will never forget.

Table of Contents

CHAPTER ONE: Microstock - What It’s All About

CHAPTER TWO: Getting started

CHAPTER THREE: Optimising your workflow

CHAPTER FOUR: Optimizing your images

CHAPTER FIVE: Other types of media

CHAPTER SIX: Taking it to the next level

CHAPTER SEVEN: Tools and techniques to improve your workflow

CHAPTER EIGHT: Further rejection reasons

CHAPTER NINE: Other agencies

CHAPTER TEN: Promoting your work

CHAPTER ELEVEN: Where to go from here

CHAPTER ONE

Microstock - What It’s All About

Introduction

When I watched people taking pictures with cameras, mobile phones, or tablets—and nowadays drones or cameras mounted on bikes and even their head—I always wondered, who is going to look at all these images? Them? Their friends? Their family? Aren’t we all afraid when the phone rings and a friend invites us over for the ultimate slideshow of their last beach vacation? This really made me wonder why I take pictures at all. I store them on a hard disk and almost never look at them again. But just before I wanted to sell all my camera gear, I read a blog post about selling pictures online and I thought, Hey, let’s give it a try. Put my images to good use and make some money on the side!

It has been an amazing journey since that day. At first I made a lot of mistakes. So many of my friends have asked me how and why I got into this business that I decided to write this step-by-step guide to help you do the same and open your own creative online business. This book will show you all the required steps, pitfalls, tools and techniques to get started right away and save your precious images from being forgotten.

What exactly are microstock agencies?

Simply put, microstock agencies provide professionals and amateurs with the ability to present their pictures, videos or illustrations to a brought audience for sale. You need to create the images, describe them and upload them, and the agency handles the shop, sales and advertising for you. Unfortunately, they keep between 50 and 80 percent of the sales for themselves. These rates have changed and gotten higher over time, and that’s why you should pay attention to the next chapter, What you need to know before you get started (or maybe better: Should you get started at all?) because if you do not keep on uploading and create a portfolio, you will not be able to make a good amount of money on the side. But no worries… I always tell myself, a picture a day keeps the employer away :-)

Even if you have never heard of microstock agencies before, you have seen pictures from most of them already in some magazine or website. If you just Google anything I bet the first three images are always some paid content from one of these websites—just try it. The largest of them has more than 80 million pictures online. How can you compete with these pictures, you might think… Well, like in every business, quality rules.

Start your journey today… and even if it doesn't make you a millionaire, it certainly will improve your photography skills and the way you look at the world.

What you need to know before you get started

If you are thinking about getting into stock photography, making use of all the valuable pictures you’ve collected over time and maybe earning some money on the side, you should consider the following three questions:

1.Do you have the passion?

Maybe you are as optimistic as I was (optimistic here means naive in a friendly way) thinking that finally you can make good use of the thousands of pictures on your hard disk and earn some nice cash on the side. This was what I thought when I started after taking a Udemy course on how to make money with your pictures. Well, if you are not a professional photographer and are just taking casual shots with your camera in automatic mode, this is not as easy as many of the websites and courses out there suggest. But hey, that’s not really a surprise, is it? Stock photography is not a quick money-making business; it's hard work and requires passion.

First of all, if you’ve never followed the basic rules of composition and light, and have no understanding of shooting techniques, you might be surprised how few of the photos you have are useful for sale. I very quickly needed to realize that all the precious stuff on my hard disk was pretty much only nice for the family (and in some cases, not even that).

This was mainly because:

a) There were people in the photos (it’s difficult to sell these without written approval—a so-called model release).

b) Composition issues - If you never took a photography course or read a book about the topic, you are prone to basic errors that get your images rejected.

c) Technical issues - If you take pictures of friends and family or a landscape and they are a little blurry or the light is not perfect, it’s still a nice snapshot for your album. You seldom print them out or view them at 100 percent so they’re good enough for personal use.

So here I was, full of energy but I had little to start with. At this point I needed to decide: Do I love taking pictures so much that I’m willing to start from nearly nothing?

2.Do you have the time?

As with any other business, if you want to be successful, you simply need the time. If you have a day job and a family, you might have little spare time to go out shooting (except if you want to sell pictures of friends and your family!). This does not mean it is impossible, but it will considerably slow you down before you have a respectable portfolio that fills your wallet now and then. Basically, this means once you’ve solved the passion question, you should carry a (good!) camera with you at all times. You have probably heard the saying, The best camera is the one you have with you.

But how much time do you need? If you want to move ahead quickly, you have to invest a couple of hours every day. (This is not only taking pictures, but also processing and uploading them.) So make sure your family is OK with that, and include them in the process, as going out shooting is quite interesting for anyone.

3.Do you have the means?

I once heard somebody saying, Anybody can take great shots with whatever means he or she has—even a cellphone. Well, though many people may think this is true, I pretty much disagree when it comes to selling pictures. There is just too much competition with high-quality equipment out there to allow you to make a decent income with iPhone pictures (though some stock agencies