How to sell your photos and get paid more than $500 a month?
These are my 5 best websites I sell my stock images on and trust me they can pay you more than $500 per month for the images which we upload on Instagram all you need is a smartphone
What is stock photography? Stock photography/photos are professional photos of popular/common places, landmarks, objects, nature or people which can be bought or sold in short, copyright free photos. For eg. when you want to buy an image you simply need to search on Google 'stock photos of families' or 'stock photos of food' or may be 'stock photos of old man' or just to be nasty, "weird stock photos", "funny stock photos" etc. What is Shutterstock? Shutterstock is a photography and videography website where users can purchase Images and Videos buy either paying for per image they buy or by purchasing a particular monthly plan. The cost for the images varies as per the plan and the license you want to purchase the image for. You can also contribute to shutterstock by adding your images and selling pictures for money. There are also many other selling pictures app you will find on play store and app store like 500px, Snapwire app, Foap, Eyeem, canva stock photos, etc.
For those who are visiting my blog for the first time, I would like to introduce myself as Mayur Pawar the writer of this blog. I am an advertising professional with experience in Digital Client Servicing for more than 4 years. I have recently started My Youtube channel. Please subscribe to support. In this blog, I share my experiences, updates, how-tos, etc. related to social media marketing, passive income ideas, Digital Marketing Tools, blogging tips and current trends are few them to be named. At the end of this article, you will get to know the best websites that pay the contributors for selling their images online.
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Become a Stock photographer and start selling your images now
My top 5 paying stock photography websites:
Shutterstock - Earn from $0.25 - $200 per image sold. Payment method (Paypal)
Getty Images/iStock - Earn 20% ($10-$500) royalty of every image sold. Payment method (Paypal)
Adobe Stock- Earn flat 33% ($5 -$300) of the amount paid by the customer for your image. Payment method (Paypal)
PicFair - Open your own online store for free. You can customize the amount you want to sell every image for. Payment method (Paypal)
Most Photos - Earn 50% - 60% of the amount every image is sold for. Payment method (Paypal)
Well, few say it is a waste of time wherein you invest long hours of clicking images, tagging them as per their genre and uploading them on various websites and the amount which you get paid for is peanuts. However, I have a different view of it. I have watched a lot of videos wherein people start uploading the images and then expect to start earning huge amount of money from the next day onward.
Well, any business or side income stream which we start takes time, consistency and efforts in order to start generating revenue. Also, in stock photography the content which you generate also matters. I have seen people from istock contributors, shutterstock top contributors who have 4000-5000 images on per website but the revenue which they earn is not more than $50-70 per month at the same time there are few contributors who only have about 500 images on each site and they earn $100-500 per month. I started as a stock photographer in the month of February 2019. I do not have a DSLR camera and started it with my Oneplus5T device.
If you ask me which are the best stock photo sites for photographers that pay the most I have listed 5 of my best ones. I started with Shutterstock as my primary portfolio and then added sites like Getty Images, Adobe Contributor, Picfair, Eyeem, Most Photos and, Canstock to further build up my portfolio with various other websites. Today I use my Oppo Reno 10x Zoom device to create all my images. Below I have listed a few details which you will need to get started with your journey to become a stock photographer on stock photo websites free.
Getty Images is my personal favorite when it comes to the right from uploading the images to earn money. They pay you depending on the contract you sign with them. If you sign up for an exclusive contract, you will be eligible for the commission of 20% of your videos/images that you sell. If you sign up for a non-exclusive contract you get the 15% of the commission for your images/videos. Unlike the other stock photography websites, Getty Images have a different payment update. They update the previous months' payments on your account on the 25th of every month. For eg - if you sold 10 images on Getty Images, you will be able to see the full stats and the amount you earned for the month of Jan on 25th Feb. Paypal is the payment method that you can use to get your amount credited in your account. Another question which might strike in your head is once you become a contributor, are Getty images free for you? No they are not if you want to purchase images you need a plan with them.
The biggest daddy of the stock photography websites is Shutterstock. When you submit to Shutterstock make sure you have edited your images perfectly. Because Shutterstock has an in-depth review system for the images which are uploaded and many of the times you will find them getting rejected for few reasons like, 'image is grainy' 'the main subject is not in focus' 'the images are overexposed or underexposed' etc... Shutterstock pays the contributors with a small share of 25 cents per image download with a tiered set of raises to 33 cents and 38 cents per download as you reach $500. $3000 and $10,000-lifetime earning milestones. However, it again varies based on what license is an image being purchased. For understanding in detail what shots sell best or what are the angles in which you can capture images, I would suggest to sign up for their newsletters. They also share sometimes free shutterstock photos.
Mostphotos is another site I would like to mention in my list, as I have it has been my 3rd largest paying passive income site consistently. 1 advantage you will get on Mostphotos is that on this website, your images aren't not been reviewed by the back end team. It is more likely that you are opening your online store which means you can upload any image you have captured of course keeping in mind that none of the terms and conditions of the website are violated and all the images are been clicked by yourself. That being said, this is one of the biggest paying websites with a commission of 50% on every sale.
Picfair is another online store where you can upload and sell your stock images, but, the best part here is that you can price your images as per your wish or created collections and sell them on a price you think your images are worth. I have nearly 1,200 images on Picfair and on an average basis, I sell 20-30 images on Picfair on a monthly basis.
Though Eyeem platforms' primary goal is not to sell or buy images, however, if you are lucky you might just hit the jackpot with just 1 sale of your image. While I was doing research on how much does Eyeem pays for a single sale, I happen to see a couple of videos where the seller has earned $350 for a single sale of the image that's right $350 for a single image sale. Now I am not saying that you will be able to earn a $1000 with just a couple of sales of your images but if you are looking for that big surprise I would recommend building your portfolio on this site as well. They also have an Eyeem app you can explore on.
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Best Marketing tools like SEMrush, Strikingly, Combin Instragram Optimisation, etc. at special discounts and limited-time offers for free. Everything you need to rank your brand higher on Google search engine. Try NowSo those were my top 5 stock photo websites through which I am able to earn a good amount of passive income while I am sleeping ;). Do let me know if you found the above article helpful. Please share your valuable feedback, it will just takes 30 secs. Or you can get in touch with me on Facebook or Twitter
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Till Then Keep Geeking ;)