Selling digital photos online does not require you to be a professional or have professional equipment. All you basically need is a good quality digital camera and internet access. Having the two of these will let you make a lot of money if you work hard enough. Your primary customers will be thousands of people that want pictures they can use over and over again and for specific projects. These can be graphic artists, web designers, companies, and editorial magazines.
Submitting to the websites
The first thing you will want to do is submit your stock photos to stock photo websites. These websites are free for you to submit the photos to but cost money for the customers to buy photos. You will be supplying the photos to the customers and thus earning money for every photo a customer downloads that is yours.
Many of these micro stock photo websites will give you the choice to set the price of your photo to whatever you want. Do not set it high and start off with the default price when you first start. When your photos are getting downloaded multiple times a day then you can start raising the price. The high demand will give you that power.
It is not hard to get started in the micro stock photo industry. Many new photographers start off in the business and try to earn money through stock photos. It's the ones that continue to work at it and develop their own style that live through and are successful.
When you take photos be sure to not have any trademarks or brands in your photos. If you happen to forget to remove clothing items with a brand try to get rid of it in an editing program. Do not upload your photo with trademarks because they won't be accepted.
There are many subjects that you can photograph for stock photos. You can take pictures of dogs, birds, cats, flowers, people, basically anything! Here's a major tip that will help you out. Do not try to cover everything. Stick with one category and specialize in it for a while. Build a stock photo collection of these photos. For example, take pictures of flowers only. Specialize and build a collection of many different flowers. Be sure to have plenty of coverage for each flower and different angles, lighting, and distances from the flower. Doing this will make you get better at taking flower pictures and also make you fill in many gaps that can be in flower stock photos.
Selling digital photos online is very easy and can be very rewarding. When you start out you probably won't make much money but as you continue adding more and more pictures that are getting better each time you can start making a serious amount of money.
