Welcome to day 67 of debt freedom plan (no news yesterday so didn’t write)
I can no officially call myself a professional photographer. Yup, it’s true.
Yesterday I sold a photo online with an online stock photo agency. The payout: 25 cents
About a year back, I was hot into photography and selling stock photos was the way to go I thought with making money online. I mean, how easy can it be right? Take some photos of your mouse, your keyboard, your toaster, your friends on the beach and you’re rich right?
Well…not exactly. It takes a lot of dedication, hard work and skill to pull off a decent full time income from selling stock photos. What I found was the the shooting part was the easiest. You then had to sort/archive/tag each and every photo, upload it to a stock agency, wait a week or more, only to find out that the photo has been rejected for any number of reasons. As a test, I uploaded 56 photos to this one agency, waited a week and at the end of the day’s efforts only 3 different photos were accepted for possible sale.
Oh, one other thing: it took me a year to make the sale. I uploaded that photo on Jan 13/2009 and it sold almost a year to the day. I’ve made .25 this year selling photos. I suppose that if you dedicate years and years to shooting stick photos you can make a good income and some do. If you end up with a popular photo and it sells over and over again the incremental income could be huge I suppose.
The photo I took was nothing special either, but was accepted and sold. It was of a hydro tower with some clouds in the background. I was on a walk with my camera and was bored, so took a photo. I never in a million years thought I would actually sell it.
I doubt I will actually see that .25 as I’m sure there’s a minimum payout with the stock photo company too. Most companies won’t send you a cheque until you’ve got _$100 or so of earnings. So, I guess I should say I’ve made some corporation .25 richer with my efforts.
Debt Freedom News
On the news front, I have setup and registered 89 domain names at .79 each ( a great deal) and am now getting down to the hard work of creating the sites. These are small mini sites with about five articles all written by yours truly about specific niches or products. For an example: http://www.getoutofdebtfast.com might be one with five articles on how to get out of debt: make more money, sell your stuff on ebay, etc, etc.
This is early days so the trick at this point in the game is just to get the sites made and hope to see about 20 visitors per day from each. That’s 2000 visitors per day and I think with a bit of tweaking I can get $50 to $100 per day out of these. If nothing else, this will allow me to test some niches and see what’s popular and what’s not. remember: I’ve seen a visit to this site due to the search term I’m woth stupid. And, I know why: When I started this blog I had stupid purchase as one category and term I used a lot, so the search engines – having no othe r relevant sites for that search term, chose to display this one. Stupid is, as stupid does. : )
So that’s the plan. I’ve got a year to make my $87 or so I’ve spent on domain names back. I hope to write later this spring that these sites are averaging .50 per day. Doesn’t sound like a lot right? But if you multiply that by 100, that’s fifty bucks/day. 1000 is $500/day and NO day job I could ever get could pay that and this little project might with a LOT of typing and effort and hard work.
Income wise, this site has made very little money so far and I doubt it will ever and I’m OK with that. I did have a few good days with commissions though from some other stuff I’m doing and I’m starting to get traffic and sales again from my digital camera deals site and sold a $150 camera yesterday. That’s about a $7 income that I made in my sleep and it’s a start.
I just realized I’ve made 28x more money yesterday writing about digital photography and cameras, than actually taking photos and selling them. 
The longer I live, the more I realize that one should never say never. 20 years ago when I was in photo school I never thought I’d make any income writing and spend most of my days stuck behind a screen and using a computer mouse. I thought I’d be out there shooting, changing the world. I only tolerated the writing part and in hindsight, now that the internet is largely text-based and the keyboard is the most profitable tool of this past decade. Search engines and and the internet have changed everybody’s lives in so many different ways.
I’ve got a whole bunch of stuff to sell on ebay still and big whack of connectors and cables to go but I’ve yet to find the time, or moreso – the inclination. it’s tedious job listing every little item, photographing it, and packing it up to sell. It’s not one of my most favorite things to do but i must keep at it for a number of reasons, mainly it’s the most profitable of my little projects right now. I’ve really fallen off the wagon with this. I’m going to try and get more stuff listed tomorrow I think.
Another realization: I’ve probably made the MOST money with my camera selling my stuff on eBay. 2 years of college, and the only time I end up shooting is to take pictures of my stuff to sell on ebay. Mind you they’re well lit ebay photos and I think I can credit a few higher bids to the better photos.
So at 1005 words, I’ll end this and wish all seven or so of my readers a great weekend. Have fun and enjoy.
More Bad News