Are You Walking Around With A Ready-Made Income Stream In Your Pocket?
Our latest passive income opportunity, will likely appeal to creative types.
Stock photography is a little labour intensive to begin with, but get it right and you can eventually make money without working. You don’t necessarily need to be an expert photographer, though it certainly helps. You don’t need to have the most expensive of gear, either. For the most part, you just need to be creative and smart about tagging. If you are already a good Instagrammer, you’re on the right path.
TL;DR
- Free – little to no cost to begin licensing your photography
- iPhone – all you need is a mobile phone such as an iPhone or Samsung with a camera
- Passive Income – if successful it can provide a true and long term passive income
- Enjoyable – if you enjoy taking photos or making videos, it is a great way to turn a hobby into an income stream
- Competitive – it can be a competitive market but if you choose your niche wisely you can still stand out
- High Effort – it can involve quite a bit of work to get started but anything worth doing usually does
How Do I Make A Passive Income Streams With Photography and other Digital Assets?
Think about everywhere you see images used to liven up what would otherwise be a bland block of text. You don’t have to look far – just scroll up to the top of this email! Do you think that we took that photo ourselves? Do you think we made ourselves a nice cup of tea, bought a plate of colourful macaroons and a blackboard and then spent all that time painstakingly drawing out that fancy font? Of course not – it’s stock photography.
Crack open a magazine or click on almost any website and you’ll see the same thing. Magazines can contain anything from 32 to 212 pages or more and, while some of those pages will feature photos specifically taken to illustrate an article, the chances are extremely good that the overwhelming majority are stock, including some elements of the adverts.
What exactly is stock photography? Put simply, it is a photo is not taken for a specific purpose. It’s one that may have been taken long before, and is therefore already ‘in stock’, but which adequately meets current needs. Its use removes the need to have a staff photographer or hire one for each of the dozens of images that a magazine will use each issue, making the overall cost of illustrating significantly lower.
Generally, stock photography is sold through a digital asset distributor. Much like a supermarket, this distributor will have a huge stock of basic but essential products, with a vast array of choices in an equally vast selection of themes and styles. Also much like a supermarket, customers can buy these products and the producers get paid for supplying them without needing to spend time and money on stacking the shelves themselves.
These distributors don’t only sell photos, either. There are stock sites that sell music, sound effects, website templates, graphics, fonts, videos and more. Sites like Envato sell them all, making them a one-stop shop for stock. Photography is certainly the easiest to get into, but the return is lower than some of the other products. Inevitably, the more time and effort you invest, the better your profits will be.
Unlike produce in the supermarket, a stock photo doesn’t pass its sell-by date. It can remain on the shelf for as long as the distributor remains open. It isn’t the photo that is being sold, but a license to use it in a specific way, meaning that the same image can be sold again and again and again to different customers. A single photo could be sold hundreds and hundreds of times, each time generating income for the photographer for no additional effort. Get the right portfolio and you could earn enough to live on each month without doing any additional work.
How To Get Started With Stock Photography
As we said at the start, you don’t need to be an expert photographer with top-of-the-range hardware to be a stock photographer, though it may increase your odds of success. In theory, you can get started with just a smartphone and a bit of imagination.
The greatest challenge in getting started with stock photography is knowing exactly what to shoot. Have a look at a selection of magazines and websites and see what kind of images they use. Remember, you’re not looking for shots of specific products or people. The images you want to replicate are those that are simply there to fill space on a page and add a splash of colour to a block of text – the incidental and illustrative images.
In some cases, this can be staggeringly banal stuff. Successful photographers make their living on images of a coffee cup against a white background, an office chair on a white background, a leather wallet packed with notes on a white background and so on. These should be as generic as possible since photos showing logos and trademarks can’t be shown.
More adventurous photographers work with people, but this adds a layer of complexity because you need to have a signed model release to upload these images. Templates for these are found among the resources made available to stock site contributors. However, once again, banal images that illustrate a common action or emotion in a very simple way can make regular sales. A couple of businesspeople shaking hands, a loving couple hugging or just a happy person showing a thumbs up can all make money.
Of course, with social distancing, getting models will obviously not be an option right now. Sure, you could work with your immediate family, but you don’t have to jump in at the deep end with stock photography.
Think of all the holiday snaps you’ve got stored up in hard drives, gathering whatever the digital equivalent of dust is – those images could be making you money. Use this free time at home to sift through your old photos and pick out those that show striking landscapes, landmarks and the atmosphere of a particular destination. Think of all the publications that could use those images: travel magazines, in-flight magazines, travel brochures, tourist information websites and travel blogs may all potentially be interested in becoming your customers.
Think about the current needs, too. COVID-19 and self-isolation has firmly grabbed the headlines, with thousands of news and feature articles being pumped out daily around the world, all of which need at least one image to illustrate them. What photos could you be taking that might be sought after? Stockpiles of dry food and toilet paper? Your home office? People looking longingly out of the window at the outside world?
Another option is to use a keyword tool such as SEMRush, which we have mentioned previously. A rough rule of thumb is anything with 1,000 searches or more a month is a good niche to consider.
Whatever you choose to shoot, be aware that stock sites all have guidelines and basic requirements. Many have a vetting process and, until you get an idea of the sort of shots the site does and does not accept, you will likely get a lot of pictures rejected for one reason or another.
As a general guide, you should ensure that your images:
- Are in focus
- Are properly lit
- Contain no logos or trademarks
- Contain no people, unless you have the proper model release
- Are of a high resolution, with a big file size
- Were actually taken by you
- Do not to use super popular and common topics (like flowers) for your first few uploads
The hard work starts once you’ve uploading the files. You are about to launch your stock images into a marketplace where thousands of new images are added every day, if not every hour. Stock sites use tagging systems similar to Instagram to help people find the photo that best suits their needs, so you need to get creative with how you classify your image. Think about every feeling and situation it could possibly illustrate and add multiple synonyms for each one to increase your chances of a sale.
For example, the more descriptive you can be with each image the better the chance of you being discovered in the market place.
Use more descriptive words first – it might look like this if your photo was a cat
Fat ginger cat jumping, ginger cat jumping, cat jumping, cats, cat, animal
If your image also invokes an emotion, such as happy or team building, then be sure to include that as well.
Lastly, the more images you can upload the better and it will only increase your chances of being discovered and earning passive income.
Things to Consider When Looking To License Digital Assets
Stock photography is far from a guaranteed success in terms of generating a steady passive income. There are plenty of highly skilled and experienced photographers who upload dozens of photos every day to multiple stock websites and still make mere pennies out of all of their time and hard work. On the other hand, there are some who got the right photo or video and tagged it just right and now never need to upload new content. It’s not exactly pot luck since there is a large degree of skill and creativity involved, but the odds of runaway success within a short timeframe are extremely low.
One of the major obstacles to success is the huge amount of competition in the field. Take the coffee cup example given above: a search for “coffee cup” on Envato provided 25,177 photos and 4,318 videos at time of writing. As you can see, you will have more chance of success shooting video (which requires more expensive hardware and software to do successfully), but you will still need to do something special to stand out. If you try going for niche subjects, you will certainly have fewer competitors, but you will also have fewer customers.
In the early stage of your stock photography work, you may find that the process becomes a time sink. You need to generate ideas, take the photo, edit it, upload it, caption and tag it – it all takes time and the slightest error at any step may result in the photo being rejected or it being accepted and just never making a sale, rendering all of that time effectively wasted. The chances of a poor return on time invested are sadly quite high, especially for inexperienced photographers.
First open an account a stock photography platform, such as Envato, is to focus on your most unique photos that you have. If you upload something common like flowers or a cat, it is likely to get rejected as they have enough of those types of photos. However, once approved, you can upload anything that you like – the hard part is getting approved in the first place.
– Why Envato?
There are a couple of reasons why I prefer Envato over some of the other traditional stock photograph marketplaces.
Firstly, they are a complete digital design marketplace meaning you have more platforms to sell on while also being able to sell all digital assets at the same time; from stock photography, to videography, from digital graphics, to website themes and everything in between.
Secondly, there revenue share model is much fairer and more economically viable for producers as they share 50% of all net subscription revenues with producers (or Authors as they call them). If you’re work becomes popular, you are likely to get a much higher cut per download than some of the other sites, which can be as low as 25 cents a photo.
>>> Envato – leading marketplace for sharing and selling digital creative assets including photography
How Much Does It Cost To Get Started To Get Started With Stock Photograhpy?
It effectively costs nothing to get started with stock photography, so long as you have at least a smartphone. The cameras built into them are now of such a high quality that it’s entirely possible to sell the images and videos they take. Smartphones also come with photo editing software which is adequate for the basic touch-ups your work may require.
Joining stock sites as a contributor is free.
If you want to up your game, you may want to invest in more advanced gear, potentially including prosumer-level cameras, lenses, tripods, lights and more. These add a considerable cost, but are not essential for getting started. Making a passive income out of stock photography does cost time, however – potentially a lot of it.
“A friend of mine, who previously practiced as a lawyer, gave up his career seven years ago to work full time on his photography and videography. He now earns a consistent high four, to low five figure monthly passive income from his work.
He personally specialises in time-lapse videos and, as an example, one of his videos has been picked up by news organisations, travel websites and all the way through to a digital agency for their background design.
He does use specialist equipment for a number of his videos but some of his highest earning photos were taken with an iPhone”
Learn more about Stock Photography and Licensing Digital Assets
If you are interested in learning more about Self Publishing or start your Self Publishing Career you may find these links useful:
Envato – leading marketplace for sharing and selling digital creative assets including photography
Stock Photo Websites – a long list of stock photo sites to consider licensing your work
SEMRush – use this to identify potential niches to target
Phone Photography Tricks – amaze your friends (and earn money) with these mobile phone photography tricks