Add money in your bank account with your photos
How I earn first 10 euro from stock photography as a student
In the age of 20s student life become so hard if you have an empty pocket. You want to earn the same time you want to learn. What could be better than adding some extra money in your pocket just with your photography skills? Remember this is not about some unrealistic number of millions of euros or pounds. It is just about few extra bucks in your account.
As I told in my previous story how I won 200 dollars in a photo challenge back in 2013, that thing triggered me for more income through photography. I was running a local courier service those days but soon it was off from the market as some courier giants lead the market.
In 2015 I become serious about online income and I started to invest my time more into the internet to find ways for more income and stock photography was one of them. I go with Adobe Stock and upload some sets of daily life photos on Adobe for sale but even for 6 months, my dashboard was showing zero for earnings. I will share some of the screenshots of my Adobe Dashboard too.
Research
I understand that I made some mistakes so I am unable to sell my photos there and then I made some research for stock photography on points like — What to upload, what should be quality of content, and proper use of keywords.
Content Creation and Earning
I lookout for the market and prepare some unique self-portraits which were based on expressions of different intensive feelings of men. I upload a set of 20 photos and wait for one month and after one month, I got an email from Adobe Stock — “You made first sell on your Adobe Stock, your photo sold for 1.33 Euros”
WooHoo…….
I know 1.33-euro sound is nothing but believe me in online earning no matter what source you are using; all matter is first income. It gives you the confidence to continue and improving your skills. That’s what I think the key to success in this field. Following up the same thing for some time and you definitely will get good results.
Content creation is most important because it is content which you will use to earn money so if you are not productive than you cannot hope for income because you have nothing to sell. If you are working in a 9 to 5 job in a Software company or in a factory then you spend your time producing something there, you work for them and they pay you salary, same rule work here but here you are your own boss and employee you have to make a project like a boss and then need to complete it like employees.
Insights —
Keep yourself updated with your content insights. Insights tell you how your content is getting consumed by the public and what content is getting more consumed. You can make a w project based on the arch of previous content consuming. Suppose in the first try you upload 3 types of photos on your stock account.
1. Animals and wildlife
2. People and Lifestyle
3. Beauty Products
Now after 2 months you checked your insights which clearly tell you that people are buying Wildlife photos more than the other categories form your portfolio so you should invest more in wildlife to get more counts in download but same time you should spend some time to find an or in your other two categories about what issues stopping people to buy those images. May be your keywords and tags are not proper or you are missing details in quality.
Quality Check —
You ordered a keyboard from Amazon and after receiving, you start working with it but after a few days you found that “F10” key is not working and now you can’t return or replace it because replace period is over so you will go through warranty policy but as we all know it all headache. You received a faulty keyboard but you couldn’t know at the time because you did not check that key just after buy and the manufacturer also missed the quality check of the product.
Now if you missed that quality check in your photos then it will be an issue that will put your work in a low-quality category and people will not download it. Check the quality of your photos always before submitting them.
Key-words and Title –
Stock photo sites are full of tons of photos no matter which one you check all are full of photos so in this crowded competition how will you standoff and will put your photos at the top on rank because only good quality doesn’t matter you need to make sure that your work is searchable so people can find it and download it.
Two things will help you here –
1. Good quality
2. Search optimization through keywords
I told you about quality check already now its time to know about search optimization.
There are two things which are important to help get in search results: Title and Tags
Internet is full of things even if you will type something nonexisting words maybe you will end with some meaningful results or something random. For example you want to search a cat photo-
What will you type? — <Cat Photos>
Google will show you millions of photos.
You want a brown cat photo- <Brown cat photo>
Google shows millions of brown cat photos but here you narrowed the search with one condition that cat should be brown. You can narrow it more by adding more words which are called “keywords” in terms of the internet.
Remember you need to invest some time to research keywords according to your photos which you are going to sell on stock websites. You need to put a big attention to this because this will decide how many times your photos appear in search results when someone searches something related to it.
Note- Never use irrelevant tags in your photos.
For example, you post photos of cats and you are using dogs related tags then it will be a problem for you. People who want to buy photos of dogs they don’t want to see photos of cats in their search results.
Use wide and narrow tags properly.
Wide Tags- Common tags like pets, animals, birds, which can be used for vast categories. Pet can be used for cats, dogs, squirrels, or any other pet animal. Same as flowers can be used for all types of flowers.
Narrow Tags- Narrow tags are specific tags that define the uniqueness of a photo. Suppose you upload a photo of a dog who has black and brown stripes on his back and sitting over a car bonnet. In this photo, you can add this thing in title of your image — “a dog sitting over the car”, “Black and brown dog sitting over a car bonnet”
Narrow tags are less competitive and make your photo searchable for special requirements. If you use them wisely you can sell more photos.
Earnings-
Now come to the main point, — how much will you earn from this?
Here I want to clear one thing before I share more about this that this is not for becoming rich even many established stock photographers take it as a side income. Sometimes you got almost nothing for your photo and some time you get good.
In starting you need to wait and need to buildup your portfolio. Keep these things in mind if you want to earn fast.
· Upload sets of photos will similar but not exactly the same content using the same type of tags. This improves the number of your photos in search
· Upload photos related to current affairs. For example, at time of Christmas upload Christmas related photos
· Upload only good quality images, blurry, shaky, or non-focused images are not best for sale.
· Keep uploading don’t give up.
Hope you like this information. Follow me for more articles related to online income, technology, travel, and photography related stuff.