Where And How To Sell Amateur Photos Online

May 13, 2021 $ by Tonza Borden $ 3 Comments

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Learn How To Sell And Re-Sell Your Gallery Photos Online!

Do you know that you can sell amateur photos online that you take with your cellphone camera that’s wasting storage in your gallery?

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Learn How To Sell And Re-Sell Your Gallery Photos Online!

The ability to make money online as a photographer, like a YouTuber or an Instagrammer, is all about harnessing the creativity at the heart of your work and applying it to the monetization of your talents.

It can seem hard to make it when anyone with the newest iPhone can call themselves a photographer and everyone is using some sort of free photo editing software.

But success for most creators who turn to entrepreneurship comes down to three things:

Finding your niche
Building an audience
Creating several streams of passive income

This guide will explore some of the things you should know about selling photos online, with resources and business ideas to help you make your photography-based business a reality.

Best Places To Sell Amateur Photos Online

To start, here are 18 best places to sell or license images and photos online:

Licensing is one of the most popular ways to “sell” your photos online to brands, publishers, or anyone who might have an interest in using your photos for their own purposes.

And that’s the key here.

You need to work backward and think about how your photos can be used by a brand or publisher.

Two Essential Steps To Sell Amateur Photos Online

Now that you know where to sell photos online, let’s talk about how to achieve success for your photography business.

1. Define Your Niche

Every successful photographer has a consistent style or theme that runs through their work. Whether your thing is travel, fashion, cityscapes, nature, food, etc., consistency is key.

People follow other people online to see more of whatever it is that interested them in the first place. People unfollow other people when those expectations aren’t met.

Finding your niche if you want to sell pictures online is typically something you feel your way into as you see which styles and photos resonate with your audience.

But you can also evaluate the demand for certain topics using keyword research to analyze the search volume for terms related to your photographs.

Keywords Everywhere is a browser extension that shows you the search volume right below your Google search, making it easy to find and experiment with in-demand subjects and angles to see what you can cater to with your photographs.

As a suggestion, anything above 1,000 average monthly searches is significant volume to consider capitalizing on.

Photographers, just like bloggers, YouTubers, and artists of any kind, should also invest in building their audiences, because that’s ultimately what helps them build their photography business and sell photos online.

Whether you’re freelancing or selling photography online as prints, you’ll need to build and leverage your network to expand your reach and credibility.

Visual social platforms with built-in audiences like Instagram and Tumblr can help you reach a wide audience.

But there are also photo-sharing sites that can connect you with other photographers, help you can build a following and, depending on the platform, sell licenses to use your digital photos (more on that later).

Linking your various accounts makes it easier to manage your photo-sharing across several platforms, which is good for visibility of your photographs—especially important when you’re trying to figure out how to sell your photography. On Instagram, for example, you can go to Options > Settings > Linked Accounts to connect Tumblr, Facebook, and more to publish in more than one place with a single post.

IFTTT is a free tool that can help you create other useful integrations between apps that don’t usually integrate, like Instagram and Dropbox.

On Instagram, you can also use Hashtagify to discover relevant, active hashtags for increasing the visibility of your photographs on the platform and get more likes, comments, and engagement.

2. Integrate eCommerce Into Your Portfolio

Most photographers have a main portfolio site to showcase their work to potential clients.

But by adding ecommerce to your site, including the ability to accept payments from PayPal or Shop Pay, you can open several more doors to monetization, like selling courses, physical products, and services.

You can build your portfolio or store on Shopify, install the relevant apps to customize it to your needs and monetization strategies, and start sharing and selling your photography in different forms, like social media, ads, or even offline through Shopify POS.

Check out some of the Art and Photography themes, or choose a free theme to start (you can always switch later).

You might also want to consider adding more functionality by installing Shopify apps like Digital Downloads (free), an Instagram gallery, and more.

There are a lot of reasons your own ecommerce site can be the best place to sell photos online, many of which we’ll explore below.

Check out some of the Art and Photography themes, or choose a free theme to start (you can always switch later). You might also want to consider adding more functionality by installing Shopify apps like Digital Downloads (free), an Instagram gallery, and more.

There are a lot of reasons your own ecommerce site can be the best place to sell photos online, many of which we’ll explore below.

How To Sell Prints, Products, And Photo Books

It’s not just brands and publishers who might want your work. Your fans might too.

There are plenty of things to make and sell that your fans can potentially own, whether it’s as a simple framed print or a pillow. Luckily, selling your own physical products is a lot simpler than you think.

There are many sites and tools where you can upload your photographs and sell your pictures as photo prints on paper or physical products, such as mugs, t-shirts, and calendars.

Fotomoto
CafePress
Fine Art America
Instaproofs (pulls in photos from your Instagram feed)

You can work with a local photo lab that ships prints or use a print-on-demand service like Printful to dropship a wide range of products (prints, phone cases, pillows, and more) featuring your photos.

Be sure to order samples first to ensure the quality of the products match the quality of your photos.

Free Course: Build a Print-on-Demand Business

Learn how to easily create and sell your own custom-branded products. Ecommerce expert Adrian Morrison shares his framework for launching a successful print-on-demand shop in our free video course.

Curated from Shopify.com

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