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Monday, December 14, 2015

52 Ways To Monetize Your Photos

Got a hard drive full of pictures?

Wish you had a bank account full of cash?

If you’ve got good photos, you’ve got an opportunity to make some useful extra money.

Here are 52 ways to monetize your images. (And keep reading the Photopreneur blog for details on them…)

[update - our best selling book, 99 Ways To Make Money from Your Photos, based on this post, is available as a paperback on amazon]

1. Give business people Moo cards.
Turn your photos into mini-Moo cards and market them as unique intros for
business people who think they’re unique.

2. Become a paparazzi!
Snapped a celebrity doing a walkabout? Scoopt finds buyers for news
pictures… and a model eating is always news.

3. Put a mouse on an image
Zazzle is one site that lets you put a photo on a mousepad and sell it through
their store…

4. Create a photography book
…and Blurb makes it a breeze to publish your photos in a book and sell it to
admiring fans for a profit.

5. Create a specialized photography book
It’s nice to put your favorite images in a photography book; it’s nice money
when you put your kid’s school soccer team in a book and sell it to their
parents.

6. Give MySpace users unique pages
It’s hard to stand out on MySpace and other networking sites… unless you’ve
got some very special images. So contact networkers and offer them yours.

7. BritePic your pictures
BritePic lets you put a floating ad on your images when users mouse over –
you earn even if the pictures aren’t on your website.

8. Blog about your pictures… and get paid for it
Google’s AdSense program is giving many bloggers a handsome income. Put
your images on a blog, discuss them and earn from ads.

9. Find local distributors for your local images
Even simple pictures sell well when people recognize them. Get your local
images in local stores and you’ll make sales.

10. Create creative computer covers
Moo isn’t the only place that can turn photos into stickers. Other printers can
do the same thing, letting you turn photos into long shapes to cover dull PCs.

11. Give hosting companies exclusive libraries
Hosting companies give packages to clients that can include microstock deals.
Give them an exclusive library of images and they’ll have a unique offer for
their customers; you’ll have your own microstock customer base.

12. Create creative car window covers
When the weather is hot, cars get hotter. Print your photos on windscreen
covers and offer them to accessories stores.

13. Earn real income from real estate
Taken pictures of buildings? Take pictures of buildings with For Sale signs
and offer them to the sellers. If your photo is better than theirs, you’ll be
exchanging contracts.

14. Take a trip to a travel agents
Travelers want to know where they’re going so if you’ve been there and
photographed it, give travel agents a chance to show them. For a small fee, of
course.

15. Decorate cafes
Ask café owners to put your pictures on their walls. They get free art… you get
to show pictures with price tags.

16. Earn every day with calendars
Calendars are simple to make but tough to get into stores. So sell them online.

17. Build a membership base
Create a club and give members a photo a day with an explanation of how it
was shot. It will be like an email photography course… with tuition fees.

18. Put your pictures on microstock sites
Hey, everyone else is doing it — and some people are making six-figure sums
doing it!

19. Put your pictures in competitions
The ‘net is stuffed with photo contests these days. Some of them pay cash
prizes, others pay with a valuable reputation boost. Be a winner!

20. Go mobile
Ringtones are a huge market and ringtone companies also sell mobile phone
wallpapers. Ask them to sell yours.

21. Snapped a logo? Take it to the company
If there’s a logo in your picture, you’ve got just one possible buyer. So ask
them to buy it.

22. Put it on a t-shirt
Yes, we know it’s old-fashioned but it works! People do buy them…

23. Turn your photos into art works
You don’t need a gallery to create art works; you just need a canvas printer.
There are plenty of those around so put your picture on a stretcher and sell it
as art.

24. Turn your art into sketches
Photoshop lets you turn your images into sketches. So if you can’t draw, pack
your camera, a laptop and a portable printer and head to where the tourists are.
While the sketchers sketch, you can shoot and print.

25. Customize stationery
Fancy stationery comes with all sorts of flowery designs. Why shouldn’t they
come with your pictures? Find a printer, create notebooks and put them in
stores.

26. Put your pictures on programs
Software companies need all sorts of images… to decorate their disc covers, to
put on their boxes, to function as backgrounds. Check out who’s working on
what, shoot some stills and make your pitch.

27. Play with picture cards
Soldiers play with sexy playing cards but who says you have to be crude?
Take 52 themed pictures, print them on cards and take a bet on gamblers.

28. Take to student life
Students don’t have much money. Neither do their publications. But they do
have enough to pay freelance photographers with good pictures and they’re
open-minded enough to try someone new. And you don’t have to be a student
to do it.

29. Decorate model apartments
Property developers always create at least one apartment that looks lived in to
show prospective buyers. Why shouldn’t the developers put your pictures on
the wall?

30. Decorate furniture stores
It’s not just developers that need to create fake living spaces; furniture stores
do it too. Take a look at what’s on offer, create pictures that match the chairs…
and market them.

31. Put it in the bag
You can put anything on a handbag these days, even a $5,000 price tag. So
talk to a bag designer and build a winning team.

32. Cover school books
No, you’re not back at school… but plenty of kids are still there and every year
they have to cover their school books — usually in horrible colored paper. Take
trendy pictures, print them on thin paper and sell them to kids who want their
books to look cool.

33. Stretch your pictures to 42 inches
The price of flat-screen TVs has fallen faster than an anvil in a road-runner
cartoon. These days, almost everyone has one on their wall and most of them
are dark most of the time. But there’s no reason they should be. Some of them
can take uploaded pictures. Make a disk and make them yours.

34. Cover CDs
People are still burning CDs… and still storing in them in boring plastic
covers. Put pictures on circles and offer them to stores that sell blanks.

35. Cover flash cards
Of course, more people these days are using flash memory cards to hold their
information. They may be small but they’re big enough to hold a photo with
sticker. Especially if you print it small enough.

36. Create collectors’ packs
Shoot a series of themed images such as birds of California or hairstyles of the
rich and famous. Print them on cards and sell them in niche outlets in
restricted doses. It worked for baseball players…

37. Tell stories with your pictures
You don’t have to draw to create graphic novels. Call some pals, create some
poses and print them as story books.

38. Turn your pictures into wallpapers
Desktop wallpapers are still big business. Or at least, big enough to buy your
photos. So sell them and appear on computers across the nation.

39. Help campaigning groups
Local pressure groups need images for their campaigns and they’re the sort
that aren’t easy to find — beautiful pictures of the local woods, for example, or
the headquarters of a property developer. Snap and sell.

40. Become a local photojournalist
It’s not just pressure groups and student papers that are willing to take
freelanced images. Local newspapers often will too, especially the free ones.
Call their photo editors and make your pitch.

41. Change clothes…
Not yours, the clothes in your pictures. Shoot a series of people standing in the
same pose, shoot clothes to match, then team up with a programmer to let
people play around with them. Then sell the game to a site about fashion as
sticky content.

42. … and expressions.
There’s a good reason Mr. Potato Head is still around. He’s fun. So create an
electronic version by shooting portraits then ask your friendly programmer to
let players change noses. You get to share the game profits.

43. Sit on your best work
If you can put a picture on a t-shirt, you can also put it on a cushion cover. So
do.

44. Let buyers eat your pictures
IcingImages.com lets photographers print images on sheets of edible paper
and stick them on cakes. Could be a tasty deal for wedding photographers.

45. Market to Flickr book marketers
Book marketers are using Flickr to drum up publicity. They need good images.
You need sales. It’s a match made in a kitchen.

46. Sell to eBay auctioneers
Many of the items sold on eBay appear time and time again, often with poor
images. So shoot commonly sold products and sell the pictures to sellers.

47. Illustrate recipes
It’s not just Flickr book marketers who need food pictures. Recipe sites do too.
Cook up a storm and photograph the results. Then eat them and offer the
pictures to the people who made the meal possible.

48. Advertise on Craigslist
So simple. So overlooked. So why not be the first to advertising outstanding
prints on the world’s coolest classifieds?

49. Create coloring books
Take pictures of cats, dogs and bunnies, follow these neat Photoshop steps and
put together your very own coloring books.

50. Cover the Earth in your pictures
Well, Google Earth anyway. Some photographers have already put their aerial
images on Google Earth but why not turn all of your best travel photos into an
overlay… and sell them?

51. Take “after” photos
There are few things more appealing than vintage photographs… except
comparing them with how the place looks today. You can’t go back in time but
you can find the old places, shoot them today and sell them to vintage photo
sellers to complete their set.

52. Sell them as prints
Yes, we know it’s old fashioned but there’s still a market for pictures you can
hold and touch. And there are plenty of photo sites that let buyers order online

LURID

Born on the East Coast, raised on the tough streets of Philly, a Royal Spirit, learned early that life's experiences is the best teacher and, nothing comes to a sleeper but a dream. I have been helping people start their own businesses for over twenty years and revel in the challenge of helping others navigate through life's challenges, Spiritual, Mental, Physical. Developing a love and affection for people of all walks of life allow us to benefit from the vast richness of the collective body of spirit and knowledge. A ROYAL-SPIRIT with a passion to assist others to reach and, achieve their goals. The Secret Work will- expose you to important and critical information that, if applied will, truly empower and transform the life of those whom are ready to receive it. Remember Knowledge Is Power but, The proper use of Knowledge is Supreme!

This 23-Year-Old Built and Sold His Startup While in School - Here’s How He Did It

From the moment Dan Shipper stepped foot on the University of Pennsylvania’s campus, he knew he wanted to learn how to build a real software business with paying customers and steady revenue. He passed with flying colors last month when he both graduated from school and sold his company Firefly (the first company backed by Dorm Room Fund) toPegasystems for multiple millions.

Shipper’s success didn’t take anyone by surprise. Targeted early as a technology wunderkind, he was receiving multiple job offers by his sophomore year. He chose to stay in school, he says, because he wasn’t done learning. Now, having seen his first company through an exit, he has a degree and perspective on what makes a real difference for young companies and entrepreneurs.

What It Takes to Grow Your Startup 500% in Months

In this exclusive First Round Review interview, Shipper shares the three tactics that moved the needle the most for him and Firefly, and how beginning founders can get a head start on success.

Give Yourself Enough Time to Fail (or Succeed)

In its first 10 months, Firefly brought in $11,000 in revenue — total. While Shipper and his co-founder Justin Meltzer (pictured above, right) were sure the company solved a concrete problem — allowing two people to collaboratively browse the same webpage without any special software — sales weren’t promising. It would have been a valid decision to throw in the towel at that point, he says.

“Because you have very limited information, it's easy to grab onto the data you have and spin a story about it,” Shipper says. “Like when you have a conversation with someone who really loves your product, you walk away thinking about how this is going to be the biggest thing ever. On the flipside, you see negative information, and you hit the lowest low, wondering why you’re even trying. Even though events like that make you feel very strong emotions, in both cases, the actual prospects for your company haven’t changed very much.”

The human brain is not well equipped to handle uncertainty, so you anchor to whatever evidence seems solid. And if you happen to have the track record Firefly did 10 months in, you’d be hard pressed to forge on. But according to Shipper, “Knowing this is really helpful. Once you know where your brain is going to go, you can begin to see a way around things.”

The other piece is to focus on what you’re learning — not just the numbers themselves. “Instead of looking at who said what or how many customers are signing up, think about all the data you’re gathering,” he says. “So maybe you have this goal of getting 1,000 new customers a month, instead of looking at the past data thinking it’s impossible, think about what those bad months told you about customers, how you might do better, and how (or whether) what you’re building actually fits in to people’s lives and jobs.”

For Firefly, Shipper and Meltzer made a big push to learn everything they could about the customer support industry — which they decided was the primary audience for their product. The key was to look at the last 10 months, and determine whether they needed to shift course based on the results. In their case, they stayed on the same path while making only small modifications to their approach. This allowed them to close big deals that paid off in the long run.

“When you shift gears toward learning, you start thinking about whether what you’re doing really fits into the lives of the people who are buying your product,” he says. “It’s a good tool to help you manage your psychology because learning about your customers is much more immediate than something like monthly recurring revenue, which typically lags far behind.”

A lot of entrepreneurs cite relentlessness as a good quality to have. You want to be relentless about finding product market fit. You want to be relentless about building your product. There’s this idea that to succeed you can’t let up — you have to be driving hard toward your goal at all times. While Shipper agrees that this energy can be productive, it’s easy to be relentless about the wrong things.

“Being relentless is not enough,” he says. “It’s so easy to get trapped in these operant conditioning cycles where you have one good experience at a networking event, so you think you should go to every single one that’s similar even if that doesn’t directly serve the overall goals of your company.”

“You have to pair relentlessness with something else, and I think the best thing is being scrappy.”

As a tiny, bootstrapped company, Firefly had to make very deliberate decisions about what it could afford in terms of time and money. It had no choice but to be scrappy in its approach, which Shipper says helped him and the team execute against the right goals. “We set our sights on finding customers and trying to sell the product, and we didn’t think about anything else for a while,” he says. “The best way to know if someone is going to buy a product is to actually try to sell it to them.”

Acting scrappy also makes you humble, and humility is sometimes the best sales tactic early on.

“A lot of entrepreneurs — especially young entrepreneurs — enter markets without really knowing that much about them. When we started, we didn’t have a great sense of the customer service industry, but we were in a situation where we had to. You have to invest the time and energy in information gathering before you’re every going to have a good sales strategy.” Rather than try to gather information and then implement a sales strategy, in the early days Shipper and Meltzer used sales calls to actively collect data. “A lot of what we were doing was unsuccessfully pitching a lot of prospective customers and then humbly examining what had gone wrong so that we could do better next time.”

“Going out there and selling is the best way to get the information you need.”

A lot of startups don’t give themselves enough time and runway to fail, so they never do find that coveted product-market fit. As Shipper has observed, this outcome usually coincides with the belief that successful companies should see consistent, promising growth. But in his experience, startups go through long plateaus punctuated by a step change in growth. You have to wait for the step change.

“Induction doesn’t work with early stage startups. You can’t look at what’s happened in the past and project that you’ll be doing exactly the same amount of business in the future, or even along the same trajectory,” says Shipper. “Surface-level pattern recognition works very for many things, but it tends not to work well for startups. Simplistic pattern recognition says something like, ‘This company only made $1,000 in its first three months, therefore the team should pack up and go home.’ You have to understand why they only made $1,000 during those months to be able to say whether it’s because their business isn’t viable or for another reason. The psychology of running an early-stage company is difficult to manage partly because the emotional part of our brains uses surface-level pattern recognition to judge how we’re doing.”

In evolutionary biology, there’s a theory called punctuated equilibrium, the idea that species evolve almost imperceptibly for thousands if not millions of years, and then suddenly massive changes occur when there is a global catastrophe or the environment shifts radically. Suddenly, the rate of evolutionary change spikes.

The Brain Hacks Top Founders Use to Get the Job Done

“Especially when you’re at the very early stages, startups behave a lot like this. One day you’re at the beginning level, and then you jump to the next, either when you get funding or land a huge customer or a big news story comes out that directly relates to your product. Something happens and you're dealing with a different situation right away. The thing is, it’s usually very hard to predict when or if that will happen to you, so you have to keep working. You can’t predict the future from the past. For example, take a look at DuckDuckGo’s daily search queries graph, which is publicly available on their site. DDG was founded in 2008 as a search engine that doesn't track users' activity. The NSA scandal hit around July of 2013. Since that time, they’ve pretty much tripled the number of searches they were seeing per day.”

In the case of Firefly, Shipper and Meltzer had a bunch of game-changing deals in the hopper for quite some time, with no clear sense of whether any would close. “If you’re trying to sell to larger organizations, they have a lot of priorities, a lot of people involved. You basically have to wait for the stars to align to get a green light on your product. Deals require very, very long leads," Shipper says.

“We’d have a full pipeline, but then one company would say they were going to push the deal back a quarter, others would just drop off, sometimes without us knowing why. In most cases, it was clear that larger businesses were hesitant to work with a startup, so they’d want to see how long they could keep us around, and how consistent we’d be in our service. The only thing to do was stick around and try to get people aligned around using this new technology.” Eventually Firefly’s pipeline started to produce.

This isn’t to say that every startup should hang on to the very last straw. You simply don’t want to quit too early. “The best thing to do is nail down why things are not going well. Is it really clear that no one wants to buy what you’re selling because they don’t have the problems you’re trying to solve? Or is there evidence that your product could be useful eventually with enough feedback and traction?” You have to be brutally honest when you answer these questions, Shipper says. A lot of times things could improve if you only gave yourself more time and tried more things.

Sell from the Very Beginning

This Advice From IDEO's Nicole Kahn Will Transform the Way You Give Presentations

Traditionally, companies build a product they feel good about and then try to sell it. Firefly started selling before its product was fully baked, and it turned out to be one of the best decisions they made. “We did a lot of outbound sales, cold calls, cold emails, and it was so much better from a learning perspective than using something like AdWords to sell the product,” Shipper says. “So many people say that to test an idea you should just throw up a landing page and buy some AdWords and see who you attract. Unless you have a lot of experience with AdWords that’s a bad idea. There’s this gigantic learning curve to doing online marketing right, so most likely you’re just going to buy ads that no one ever clicks on, or you’ll get people coming to your page who immediately leave when they see nothing real, and then they’ll never get converted. You could have the wrong keywords, bad ad copy, who knows?”

The Firefly team had a very different approach in mind — one that ended up paying off in big ways.

“We had the beginnings of the technology, and we knew which market would probably find it the most helpful — that was it. Then we started figuring out how to get it out there.”

Shipper and Meltzer started pitching customers who already had live customer service chat widgets that would pop up on their sites to help current visitors. They figured that being able to share a browser screen would be even better for companies to provide a higher level of service. They made a big list of those companies and emailed them to see if they were interested in what Firefly could do.

“The other thing we did was look for people within companies who had customer support or customer service roles and made appointments to talk to them. The tendency in these conversations is to do 100% of the talking, because you want to tell them everything your product can do — but you actually want the reverse. You want them to spend all the time talking. What do they not understand? Where do they keep getting stuck as you walk them through the demo? What do they ask the most questions about? That’s how you use your product as a catalyst to get information about how it should work.”

Even though Firefly was still a work in progress at the time, Shipper and Meltzer were able to convert some of these early customers. They made it clear to the people they were talking to that they were specifically trying to improve their lives and jobs, and made them feel like they had a stake in the result.

“You figure out what your product is only after selling it.”

Of course the tactic of selling from the beginning only works if you’re prepared to immediately funnel the feedback you get into product development. Shipper and Meltzer made it a high priority to capture all of the data they gleaned from email replies and conversations to enter it into a feedback loop that yielded real, noticeable changes in how Firefly operated as software and a company.

When asked how they managed to evolve both their product and sales process at the same time with a tiny team, Shipper says that it was critical for everyone involved to both understand the business and be able to ship code. This might sound like trying to build your own herd of unicorns, but it vastly accelerated their ability to land customers and deliver something to them on time. “Not only could everyone involved understand what was going on, but it was just easier to keep everyone in the know and on the same schedule. We’d all focus on sales during business hours and then switch to programming at night.” At an early stage, this is feasible.

Notably, Shipper says, not all of the feedback they got through selling was about improving the product. A lot of what they learned improved their approach to sales too. “We had this initial idea of going to companies that used live chat customer service systems, but in doing so we realized how small most of them were. It occurred to us that we could sign up all of them individually and probably still not make that much. It was only after talking to them that we decided to go straight to the chat companies themselves that sell to the smaller businesses. They were bigger, making more money, looking for a competitive edge.” In their research, the Firefly team had discovered that the customer service chat sector was deeply fragmented, with upwards of 60 companies offering nearly identical products. In this environment, Firefly’s co-browsing capabilities would be a huge differentiator.

This was the break the company needed to reach a much broader audience. It also led them down the path toward their current API model, allowing anyone to include their code on their platform for whatever purpose they wanted — not strictly customer support. “You can build any kind of collaborative app with our software," Shipper says. "Financial advisors can co-browse with their clients on an online portfolio, for example, without having to use straight screen sharing. We got there by seeing how we could sell to one company that would sell to many others.”

Stay Small and Scrappy for as Long as Possible

“There are a lot of good things about not needing or even wanting to be a huge business immediately,” Shipper says. “You have time to really learn your industry and your customers, and how your product should change. It gives you time to concentrate on building the skills you’ll need to be successful instead of having your head in the clouds removed from the business on the ground.”

While small and scrappy can sound a lot like cash-strapped and vulnerable, Shipper argues that holding onto both can actually give you more control over your business. When you’re a small fish in a big pond, you’re immune to a lot of the problems larger and even mid-stage startups face (security issues, HR challenges, external pressure from a large pool of investors). “You end up having more flexibility to work on what you want on your own terms — and you can always reserve the option to go raise money or try to do something bigger.”

Shipper knows this on a personal level, having fielded some outrageous offers to drop out of school and join other companies. He steered Firefly the same way he steered his personal life — keeping things simple until he had all the information in hand and a clear idea of what he wanted.

“It’s hard to turn down a lot of money, but I kept asking myself and the team this big question: If we did bring in all this money, what did we actually need it for? Money wasn’t really our bottleneck. Our bottleneck was figuring out a really good marketing strategy, how we could efficiently close customers, stuff like that," he says. "I think a lot of people get stuck in this mindset that if they have more employees then they’ll have more man hours and will be able to do more. They forget that more employees means more time spent hiring and more baggage. Not to mention all the time you spend raising money to pay these people.”

Getting blinded by early millions and promises of rapid growth can actually make it harder to go fast, Shipper says. “If you’re at this early stage of discovery, where you’re doing your research and hammering out your strategy, you want a small team that doesn’t have the pressure that comes with taking a check. Once I understood that, I didn’t think about the money.”

One of the biggest problems early-stage startups that do take venture funding face is that they've sold a vision they can’t deliver on fast enough. “I think there’s a point for every startup where you have to decide if you want to go for it, and you think you can be huge, or whether you want to grow more slowly on your own. A lot of people think this point is the day you start building your product. My opinion is that it comes far down the line when you really know a lot more about your business.”

“Funding can make you do things that you never would if you didn't feel like you had to.”

“The prevailing wisdom is that you should raise more money than you think you need, and I agree that’s probably true,” Shipper says. “It’s just that it should only happen when you’re confident in the fact that more money will allow you to grow much faster — when you’ve already found your trajectory and you just need to accelerate it. This isn’t always the case.” Until you feel this confidence, you should be building with as little money as possible. “Honestly, most products that get huge amounts of early funding could be built for something like $50,000," he says.

Staving off large rounds can also give you more time to think about the type of backers and advisors you want to work with eventually. For Shipper, it gave him the space to cultivate relationships with people over email or through occasional dinners. He had the benefit of seeing who would maintain a longstanding interest in Firefly. “You want to look for people who will take the time themselves to really understand what’s going on not just in your business but in your industry. You want people who are in it for the long-term, and who are more interested in helping you succeed than in looking good.”

Incidentally, emphasizing this stay-small strategy also helped Firefly attract the right type of employees. “When you’re not raising any money and you’re building this thing on your own, you don’t oversell to people. I think this type of honesty resonates. Sure, there might be a chance that we’ll get big, but we’re not going to tell you that just so we can hire you or get you to work harder. You have to be here because you want to be, and you like the idea of being part of something self-sustaining, not just a big exit.”

All of this combined made Firefly an attractive acquisition target, Shipper says. By selling from the beginning and not being deterred by initial failure, their product gained so much momentum that customer support organizations were starting to demand co-browsing functionality.

“More importantly, I think we gave ourselves a lot of options to choose what we wanted,” he says. “You can’t sell a company unless there’s a buyer first, and I think we found the right kind of buyer by running the company the way we wanted to for so long.”