Make Money Creating Stock Photography

Build a library of whatever your creative ass can muster and live off the royalties like a fat prince (well kind of).

From photos to icons to melodies, go nuts. 

Admittedly, this is for the creatives amongst us, but hey, you can always outsource this stuff to an amateur photographer or musician looking to make a few bucks.

My big advice for this though; build up a library that is very tailored / specific.

For example, I would think about building up a library of stock photos for bloggers who write about making money online, aka Internet marketing, since it’s so hard to easily and quickly find high quality photos for topics in this area.  I’d also come up with some sort of innovative pricing scheme and I’d price low!

This tailoring to a certain audience makes your value proposition clear, makes marketing a helluva lot easier and well, SEO just got a whole lot simpler.

You have 2 distinct routes to go down here when it comes to the actual marketing and selling part; either create your own site and SEO accordingly, or just setup an account (one account only, since you get paid more for being exclusive with one company) with one of the major stock websites, eg iStockPhoto, Graphic River, Code Canyon, Theme Forest etc, and get them to take care of all the complicated stuff, as well as marketing since users use their search engines to find photos.

You could also do both, ie have your own site as a marketing site, which then pushes people to iStockPhoto for example to do the purchasing.

PS having heard from a few people doing good money in this industry (particularly icon designers), the market is getting a lot more competitive every day and a lot more subject to daily deals where bundles are sold at deep discount – and thus conditioning people to pay a lot less than they should – and well, I think we’ll end up looking at a landscape similar to the App Store, ie it all becomes a bit of a lottery!

PPS That said, I think I’ll be trying out iStockPhoto, by taking a ton of photos around my city over a few days (of well known buildings, parks, attractions, tourist sites, restaurants etc etc) and then sending them to our VA to upload to iStockPhoto each with keyword tags.  Who knows!

Hopefully I come up with a better niche to do a blitz photo hunt for, or better yet, get someone else overseas to go nuts taking photos of specific, high interest things that bloggers or businesses would want to use on their website.