If you, like most other hobby photographers would like to have other people sell and resell your images on autopilot while you collect the money, this is the most exciting blog post you’ll ever read.
Listen carefully:
About 50,000 to 100,000 images are sold every day and the photos are used for magazines, books, websites, reports, brochures and many other purposes.
Stock photography is often used by graphic designers to create advertisements, websites, brochures for promotions but there are many other uses as well. Sometimes stock photography is used in magazine or newspaper articles, or by tourist centers.
These are just a few examples of ways stock photos might be used.
Publishers used to hire photographers or use in-house photographers to take all the photos they needed but most publishers can’t afford to hire photographers any longer so nowadays they mostly buy photos from stock agencies.
Thousands of stock agencies are now eager to market, sell and resell photos, taken by photographers exactly like you (I have a list of nearly 2,000 in my private directory).
Here’s how it works:
- You take photos
- You upload your photos to one or more picture libraries
- The picture library market your photos.
- A photo editor finds your photo and buys it.
- You get a commission of the sales price.
- Then the agency continues to market and resell the same photo for you as long as you wish.
Do you see the power of this?
You take photos, which happens to be your hobby right?
Then the stock agency do all the grunt-work to market and sell the photos for you and finally you collect the money.
I don’t know about you, but collecting money is also something I gladly do, any time, any day. Especially if the money is generated from my hobby.
Stock photography really is as close as passive income you can get. It’s a one time effort from your side, and then someone else do all the marketing and sales for you. Many photos can sell 30 years later so it’s a great extra source of income after you retired.
It’s free of charge to join a stock agency and they won’t charge you a penny unless they sell one of your photos so it’s financially risk free from your side.
Stock photography can easily be combined with other work if you’re not ready to go full time yet (I always recommend you try it out part time before you quit you day job).
To be continued tomorrow.
