You Can Make Money With Your Digital Camera

If you can take a decent photograph with your digital camera, you can make money online.

Follow these steps first and you’ll soon be on your way to supplementing your income and possibly
opening up a whole new career.

1. Study the manual that came with your camera and learn all of it’s functions and practice using each of them.

2. Purchase a book that teaches the basic principles of photography or get one from your local library. You may also find good tutorials online. Be sure you understand the “rule of thirds”, manual settings, macro, and lighting before you get started.

3. You will need a photo editing program. Some cameras come with them but they are usually limited in their abilities. Some of the more expensive ones do allow you a 30 day free trial to see how you like the program before purchasing. You can also do an online search for free photo editing software as there are 2 or 3 good free programs available.

Now you are ready to begin! Choose a subject that would look nice framed, reproduced on greeting cards, mugs, calendars, etc. Flowers, birds, animals, and scenic landscapes are popular subjects and can be cropped to fit a variety of formats. Be sure your photos are sharp and focused. Once you have a nice selection of photos to work with, you have two choices. You can pay to have them reproduced as prints, calendars, cards, and more or you can take advantage of some of the free online sites that will produce these products for you as you sell them. These sites charge a base amount for the product and you add the amount of profit you wish to make. When the product is sold, the customer pays an amount that is the total of the base price, your profit, and shipping. There are some very nice companies online with high quality products. Do an online search for these companies.

The really nice thing about these shops is how they produce the product, store the inventory, collect the money, and provide the shipping to the customer. They also do all the billing and your account files make it very easy for you to print out all your earnings when tax time rolls around. If all that isn’t enough, they offer tutorials and promotional suggestions to help you get started. They know if YOU make money; they make money too.

Preparing your photographs for these websites varies from site to site and product to product. You may have the perfect photo that needs no editing to the photograph itself but it may need to be cropped or resized to fit a template for a certain product. Some of the products that have been most successful for me are t-shirts, sweat shirts, mugs, cards (greeting, note and post sizes), small prints, tiles, and wooden boxes with tile inserts. There are many other products available as well and I must tell you I have not tried them all. Be creative and experiment. The nice thing is you have no financial investment and your success depends only on your willingness to do a little work in taking photos, preparing them to fit templates and time to upload and build your “FREE” site, provided by the company/companies that you select.

Promoting your site once you have set it up is very important. Having business cards with the web address of your products site is a great way to let friends, family, business associates, and random people you meet about your site. If you have friends with websites, ask if they would be willing to give you a link. Buy them a cup of coffee, it will be well worth it. Get as much publicity as possible as it does take a few months to really get going. Each of the sites listed below offers suggestions and advice on how to move your site up into the search engines. Good descriptions are essential! I can’t emphasize too much, how important it is to give a good description of the photo featured on your product of choice when you upload it. This description helps the search engines send people to your site if they are looking for products with waterfalls on them or perhaps moose.

Stock photography is another way to make money with your digital camera. Be sure to look for my article on the Ins and Outs of Stock Photography and remember, YOU can make money with your digital camera!