Do you have a camera and a good eye for photography? If so, you could have the potential to build a thriving and rewarding online business. Getting started is easy, and doesn't require the startup investment you might expect when you choose the right tools and services to power your venture. The key to success it controlling where and how your products are sold. If you're ready to sell photos, don't let your work get lost in the shuffle on a massive microstock image site. Launch your own web store, keep more of your profits and help your work stand out from the crowd.
Sell Photos with Greater Freedom
When you work with a microstock site, you'll collect a small portion of the proceeds each time a subscriber chooses one of your photos for ad copy, blog posts or any other type of content. When you sell photos through your own store, you keep all your earnings and can choose to reinvest them as you see fit. If you choose to take advantage of marketing tools, like affiliate networks, you'll collect the entire sales price minus the cost of a small commission. You set your own prices, and make your own decisions, but you also have the opportunity to begin building a brand. The name of your business becomes more recognizable with each sale, but it's not something most buyers are likely to notice at all if they purchase your content from a microstock site. With the freedom to make your own decisions, you get to stay in the driver's seat throughout your career.
Building Your Product Catalog
There are a number of reasons why your photos might be rejected by a microstock site. The site you choose may have too many photos with the same subject matter, for instance. When you own and operate your own web store, you're free to sell any and all images you choose without concerns about rejection. This gives you the chance to act as your own quality control while realizing your own vision, giving you the freedom to explore more creative composition than might be acceptable to a massive microstock clearinghouse. The ability to build a strong product catalog keeps your customers coming back for more, while giving you absolute freedom over your own content.
Assignment:
Take some time to look through your existing collection of photos you've taken, and choose the most impressive. Which images do you think your customer base would buy, and why? Brainstorm the best ways to market each image you'd sell in your own store, and decide who your target audience would be for each image.