How I Make Money While I Sleep

Originally posted at The3dStudio.com here...

Make Money While You Sleep!

Sounds like a late-night infomercial or crazy email subject line doesn't’t it? But it’s true! You can make money while you sleep by selling stock photos! Even better, you can do it easily from The3dStudio.com! It really works. I know because I sell my stock photos right here.

Below is Part 1 of a multi-part blog post to appear over the next few days regarding tips and tricks for shooting and selling Stock Photography.

If you’re interested in making money and would like to get started here are some helpful tips I’ve learned along the way.

The Gear

You’re going to need a decent camera. No, it does not have to be the newest release or the most expensive or even the most high-tech camera on the market, but you will be better off in the long run purchasing as much camera as you can comfortably afford right now. A compact point and shoot may get you by in some circumstances and they have come a long way, but a DSLR-type camera will probably be your best bet. Of course only you can decide which camera will ultimately be the best buy for you (and with any luck you already own it!). To sum up my point, while your cell phone’s built-in camera is fun for taking snapshots of your friends it is not going to get you taken seriously in stock photo sales.

Editing Your Photos

Take a good, hard look at the quality, coloring and composition of your photos before you upload them for sale. If you have a photo of a landscape and the picture is crooked, this is all people will see. They might never take a look at anything else you have to offer beyond your crooked landscape. Take a few extra minutes to edit and/or improve your photos in photo editing software such as Photoshop or something similar and make your photo straight – at the very least. This can actually be done quite easily. If you need to figure out how to make a particular edit, try Googling what you want to do and the name of the photo editing software you are using. You can usually find detailed instructions pretty easily.

You can find many books at the bookstore and library regarding good photo composition. Read at least a few of them to get an idea of how a photo is best composed. Be familiar with “the rule of thirds” and keep in mind where your eye is drawn to when composing your shots. Make sure your not accidentally cropping out an important part of the photo. A little awareness at the time the photo is taken can save you a lot of time in the long run.

Is the color of your photo all that it should be? You want the images in your stock photos to really POP. You want to grab a buyer’s attention and draw their eye to YOUR photo. You are competing with many other photographers – do your best to make your photos stand out (but at the same time avoid over-processing your photos into unnatural colors). Play around with any photo editing software you may have available to you and see what you can do to enhance the look of your photos. You’ll find it becomes quite addicting and satisfying to “make it better”. There are very few photos taken that could not be helped in some way with photo editing software.

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to post them here and I'll try my best to answer them in an upcoming blog post.

Coming next... The Search is ON - Keywords and why they're so important.