Being able to make money doing something you love is always a blessing. Most people don’t know how to monetize their passions. If you have the business sense to come up with an executable plan to make a livable income from your passion, you will be way ahead of your peers.

If you love photography, you can make a significant amount of money selling your professional photos. Needless to say, you will need to treat photography as business to have any chance of making good money from it. You can’t treat it as a hobby.

Being a Professional Photographer

If you want to succeed as a professional photographer, you will have to learn how to sell. Knowing how to take great pictures is not good enough.

You will have to put your feelings about your passion aside and gauge the potential to make money from the projects based on the facts as they are not as you wish them to be. If the area of photography you are interested in does not have enough demand, you should look at other opportunities.

There are a number of photography niches that have been proven to have consistent demand. Some of them are travel, news events, celebrity sightings and drama, politics, sports, and fashion.

Positioning yourself as one of the go-to people when an outlet wants photos in any of the popular niches will give you a consistent stream of income. You want to master one area and build a name for yourself in that niche.

Selling Photos

Ultimately, if you are ever going to make money as a photographer, you need to understand that you are in the business of selling photos and not the business of taking photos. Millions of people take great photos every day. Just a miniscule number are able to make money from their effort.

There are several paths you can take to get your photos in the hands of buyers. Some of the effective strategies you can use include:

Listing Your Photos on Stock Sites

Stock sites are like the Amazon of professional photos. They act as an intermediary between photographers and buyers. They will take a cut off every sale you make on their sites.

To consistently make sales on stock sites, you need to understand how users find photos on the site. Most of them use keyword tagging and categories to serve photos to users. Make sure that you tag your photos with the keywords your target audience is likely to use to search for your photos.

Some of the popular stock photo sites where you can list your work include iStockPhoto, Shutterstock, 123RF, Deposit Photos, 500 Prime, and Adobe Stock.

Build Relationships with Outlets

Magazines, websites, and newspapers are always looking for photos to accompany their articles. If you can build relationships with various journalists who write about the area you take photos in, you will always have a market for your work.

For instance, if you always have professional photos of your home sports teams’ matches, you can contact the journalists who write about these sporting events and offer to license your photos to the publications they write for.

Set up Your Own Site

As a creative, you should always have a platform where you can showcase your work however you see fit. Having your own site should always be a priority.

To make your work easier to find, learn how SEO works. Further, if you cover news worthy events, you should mark up your site for news so Google can display your new articles under ‘News’. Make it clear to anyone browsing the site that the images on your site can be bought and used as royalty free pictures.