Expanding your photo’s potential

Selling photos on Microstock is basically selling to people who are most likely, web designers or marketing people who plan to use your photo for advertising or making a product. Other than uploading to as many microstock / macrostock agencies, what else is there?

Macrostock, high quality photos that sell at a starting 3 digit figure. Quality wise, an entry level type dslr camera may not be up to par to pass the submission requirements and your competition is at least shooting with a top model prosumer.

If the point of selling pictures is to make money and to do that you need a buyer, and these buyers are most likely going to make money off your photo. Why not take a stab at it yourself?

This is where print on demand services come in.  Cafepress is limiting on the free account you can only make 1 of each product, quite useless I think. To make more of any one product you have to upgrade your account and pay.  Then I found Zazzle (they are the biggest/fastest growing “print on demand” site. Probably because there aren’t any fees for using the services.

Anyways, as skeptical as I usually am, I’m trying it out, hey it’s free.

Originally, I had only planned on putting up photos for poster printing, as I like motivational posters. Then I saw all the other products that I could put my photos on…Hey it’s free! One can make as many of whatever as one wants.

The really cool thing about Zazzle is that you can sign up (for your free account) and sell someone else’s stuff for a 15% cut of the selling price. Sellers name their own royalty fees as a % of the base selling price. Payout threshold is $25 via paypal or cheque.

The big question is, can this make any money. That I can’t answer, I can however tell you that, I’ve uploaded a handful of photos, massed produced items using templates and had my first sale a few days ago. It wasn’t even a poster either! Comparing to my microstock sales, I didn’t get my first sale until 3 months after my first upload, this product sale came less than 3 weeks after my account creation.

Yup, my fingers AND toes are crossed !