How To Make Easy Money With Digital Photography

Making money with digital photography is easy if you go by three simple steps:

1. Shoot photos that are easy to take; stick to landscapes and cityscapes.
2. Put them in a format that people would actually want to buy.
3. Advertise locally.

The best example I can give of this is a local town calendar. All you need is a digital camera, 12 good photos and about 35 dollars to spend on a local circular advertisement.

Here’s how it’s done:

Shoot photos that are easy to take, landscape and cityscapes

Landscapes are anything to do with nature, such as open fields, state parks, and so on.

Cityscapes are anything to do with in-town stuff, such as a photo of an intersection with cars going thru it, buildings, and so on.

Both shots require a wide far-back field of view. And this is one of the easiest shots to take even with the crappiest of digital cameras.

You have seen these shots before. In many local restaurants there are usually pictures on the wall showing in-town photos. They are simple shots, including the cityscape intersection shot mentioned above.

Take your camera out during the daytime over the weekend and chances are in just a few hours you’ll have all the photos you need to put your calendar together easily.

A format that people would actually want to buy

When most people think about making money with photos, thoughts of having photo galleries, being featured in magazines and the like come to mind. While that’s all well and good it takes a ton of effort to get there.

The calendar is much, much easier and is in a format people would readily want to buy. And it’s stupidly easy to put together.

You can use the internet to literally do all the work for you. Get a PayPal account, then sign up for Lulu, Zazzle or CafePress (your choice), upload your photos, create your calendar (it’s all in the web site with no software required), set your price and that’s that.

Advertise locally

You need to let people know your calendar exists and is for sale. The easiest way to do this is to use the local circular you get in your postal mail for free every week. Take out a ¼-page ad and use that to promote your product that way.

Bear in mind local circular advertising rates are far cheaper compared to regular newspapers. On average it will cost somewhere around $35 to $50. Remember to include one of your photos (even if scrunched and “degraded” to black-and-white) in the ad.

The link to your finished product will unfortunately be long, but don’t worry there’s a way around that. Just use TinyURL and opt to use a “custom alias”. Use something short and memorable. Chances are it will be available. Use that URL in your ad.

Doing it this way is the cheapest and requires no money spent for a domain or web hosting.

Will you make a ba-zillion dollars selling this way?

Obviously not, but it’s a stupidly easy way to make some quick money. And furthermore you get your name out there as a photographer. Who knows? Some might like it so much they may want to hire you for other photography events.

I want to make clear that you do not have to be a master photographer to do this. The shots I mentioned above are simple to take, the product is easy to put together and it can be advertised easily in an attractive package people would actually want to buy.

The most possible money you could lose is if absolutely nobody bought your calendar (which is unlikely). So all you would lose is the cash spent on the ¼-page ad. That’s the worst-case scenario, which in all honesty isn’t that bad. Chances are you will at absolute bare minimum get back what you put into it.