 Do you take beautiful photos? Would you like to make money from those photos? In this video I'm going to show you 12 different sites that I've made money on from my photos that aren't microstock. What do you mean? I thought you could fix that in post. Alright, well whatever. Let's get started. Hi, my name is James Wheeler. I'm a landscape and travel photographer and for over 10 years I've been posting my photos online to a number of different sites. Now, some of these sites work, some of them didn't. I'm going to save you the time from going to the ones that didn't and I'm going to show you the 12 sites that I've made money from and let you know how much I've made from each of those sites. Now none of these sites I'm going to go over are microstock. I do post my photos to microstock sites and I'm going to be creating another video on which of those sites are the best. So if you're interested in that, make sure you go down and click the subscribe button and click the notified bell so you get notified when that video is posted. Now there's, I'm going to go through 12 different sites but you can really group these sites into four different groups. The first group is the big social sites. So these are sites that have a lot of users. They're not just for photographers. These sites I'm talking about Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, those types of sites. Now, although you can't sell your photos directly on their sites there are ways to make money from posting your photos to the sites which I'm going to go through. Next to the photography community sites. The four main sites that I've used are Flickr, 500px, Mug Mug and Viewbug. After that the print on demand sites. Now these are sites where you can upload your photos but then you can use the site to sell prints and they'll actually print it and send it directly to the customers. The two sites that I've had some success with for those are Fine Art America and Redbubble. The last site isn't one that you would think and they're the free stock photography sites. The ones that I've had success on with those are Pexels and Pixabay. And last, at the end of the video I'm going to go through a 13th site which is a bonus site and on this site I've made $320 over three days but then never made another cent afterwards and I'll talk about that at the end of the video. Let's get into the social media sites now. The first site I'm going to go over is one that you've heard of and it's Facebook. I probably made about $1,000 on Facebook primarily selling prints so people will go to my Facebook page they'll like my Facebook page and then they'll follow me and they'll go through and eventually purchase prints. So $1,000 isn't a lot. I haven't spent any money on Facebook ads though. So one of the things to know about Facebook is a number of years ago it was much easier to get an organic following on your photography. These days Facebook has changed and really to do well on Facebook these days I find that you really need to pay for ads. So I don't have to spend any time on Facebook ads there's lots of other YouTube videos that I'm sure you can find on those but that's just one thing to note about Facebook because I don't really focus it on America because I don't really have a budget for Facebook ads. Alright, the next site is Instagram. Now I don't make a lot of money off Instagram but I had to include it in this list and if I didn't everybody would ask, well what about Instagram? I think you can be very successful on Instagram as a social influencer so really growing a large following with your photography and then basically going to different brands and getting them to pay you to put on posts. But that's not the kind of business that I do. I primarily sell my photos as stock and prints so I haven't really invested the time to grow my following on Instagram. However, that is something you could do. However one of the reasons that I haven't done that is I kind of see that in the future Facebook may change the algorithm so that you have to pay to reach your followers very similar to the way they did on Facebook a number of years ago. So I would caution people around that but I think Instagram is a great platform. I do use it, I do, you know, put hashtags on my photos, I do view it and I really do enjoy the platform but I just don't find that I make a lot of money of it as of right now. Now the next site that I want to go over is Pinterest. It's just very similar. I haven't really invested a lot of time. I did play with it a while back when it first came out and I don't, but I don't post there regularly. However, that being said, what I've found is that people have gone to other sites and they've pinned my photos specifically Fine Art America, they've got a Pinterest link there as well as on Flickr, there's a way you can share to Pinterest. And what I see when I look at my stats on Fine Art America or I look at them on Flickr, I find that I get a lot of traffic coming in from Pinterest. So what's happened is people have gone in, pinned my photos on Pinterest, they often pinned them on boards, I've gone and looked and they pinned them on boards that are like places I want to visit or dream photography locations and they create these boards and then people follow those boards and they re-pin them. And it's actually worked out quite well for me especially for Fine Art America. There's a couple of photos that have gone kind of viral on Pinterest and they link back to my Fine Art America photos, I've found that they've made a lot of more Fine Art America sales than the other ones and I think that's true of people finding them through Pinterest. Same with Flickr, people have posted a lot of my photos to Flickr, then they then come back to my Flickr and from my Flickr it's easy for them to then come to my website where they can buy stock photos. So I don't make them directly but I figure I have made a couple hundred dollars indirectly from my photos being shared on Pinterest. My website is Twitter. Now, Twitter isn't a very great place to post your photos and you don't see a lot of photographers posting their photos on Twitter but I have found this a good spot to get stock sales for your photos. The reason is you can post let's say a landscape photo of a particular location and then if you tag it with that location by tag I say put a hashtag for that location. What you'll find is a lot of small businesses will be following that hashtag and then they'll go in and they're just reading so they'll go in they'll see your beautiful photo of their location maybe they're a hotel in that location they'll see it and they'll retweet it to their followers. Great, that gets you more exposure but doesn't make you any money. But what I've noticed is that the places that retweet your photos will then often buy those photos later on. So if you think about a small business like someone who's running marketing for a hotel or running marketing for a restaurant in a tourist location, right? It's probably the same person that's going to be on my website as it is who's managing the Twitter account. So they go and they repost your photos they like your photos they get some likes on their tweets, great. But then when they're redoing their website they think oh I like that photo let me go and find that photographer and buy a license for it. So I do find that people retreat my photos end up then coming to my website and buying licenses for those same photos which is why I say tours are pretty good medium. Now if I go back and look at my stats on Twitter basically people coming back from Twitter to buy stock photos but it could be more than that you know because they could go through and type it in and I wouldn't know that it came through that route. But I find that it is a good a good medium to get people to come back to you buy stock from your sale from your website. Alright now I'm going to get into the social community sites. Now I'm going to start with Flickr. Flickr was the first site that I started uploading my photos to. Now that was almost 10 years ago back then the microstock sites weren't that good. So a lot of people would go to Flickr if they wanted to buy stock photos and they would search for photos on Flickr find those and they contact you through Flickr. That's actually how I got into stock photography and selling my photos to stock because people would go and you know they kept asking me on Flickr to buy licenses to my photos so I thought well maybe I should upload them to the microstock sites. Maybe I should set up a website so they could just go there and directly buy them because it was hard for me to receive money and that's kind of how I started making money for my photos was all through Flickr. Now Flickr got bought up by Yahoo and kind of changed the platform and things changed. So about 5 years ago I stopped making as much money off Flickr and I really even stopped using it that much. Recently got bought by Smugbuck and I do find myself using it more. They haven't made a lot of changes yet but the changes they have made I think are good and because I think Smugbuck is a good company and they're going to keep moving in a good direction so I am kind of trying to get back into Flickr. Looking back at my stats I think I've made about $2,000 off stock sales that I can attribute to Flickr over the past 10 years so it's not a small amount. That being said most of that came more than 5 years ago so most of that money came earlier on when Flickr was not owned by Yahoo but that being said it's still a good platform and I have made some decent money directing people back to my website and selling stock photos to them. The next photo community site is 500px Now 500px I've actually made $3,700 Now I said that I'm not going to go into micro stock sites and where 500px is today it kind of is a micro stock site now but it didn't always be so I'm still including it in this list. When I started using 500px it's because I didn't like the changes they had on Flickr and 500px was a much better place to show your photography so I was uploading photos there even before they were sold as stock and when they first started, 500px first started selling photos as stock so you could sell your photos as stock through 500px it wasn't micro stock if you look at some of my sales here when they first started doing it it was like $175 and they were taking I think 50% so they were selling from $350 and I was getting $175 and that was very lucrative for a while but then things changed again and they announced a partnership with Getty and they also got bought out by a Chinese company really the Chinese version of Getty and the prices started to go down so if you look at my sales now although there are some higher ones like in the $50 range a lot of them are in the dollar or in the sense so today in 2019 yes 500px is more like a micro stock site but it wasn't always that way which is why I kind of included it in this list the next social community site is Smugmug now right now I use Smugmug to run my website which is suynurepixels.com so I've only been running on Smugmug since the summer I used to run it off of Squarespace but I found it was just way too difficult to manage the uploading of the photos and the pricing of the photos just took too long on Squarespace and it's really easy to do on Smugmug so I moved my entire website and now all my stock photos sales that aren't on the micro stock sites or other sites all my sales go through Smugmug and I have a URL for that suynurepixels.com and so what I do is all of my social sites like Twitter, Flickr, Facebook if anybody ever wants to buy a stock photo or a print from me I just direct them to Smugmug and they purchase it from there and Smugmug handles all the payment through Smugmug so that's how I'm managing my website again I haven't been using it for very long so I've only made about $300 I think as of right now but I will plan to make more money as I keep using it because everything does funnel back there so all of my stock sales that I do direct to the consumers happen through Smugmug now alright the last social community site that I'm going to go over is Viewbug Now what Viewbug is is I submit my photos and then you submit them to contests now there's something you can submit for free or you have to get a membership where you can submit to all of them now the way that I make money on this is I won a contest once so I submitted my photos to a number of different contests and one of those contests I was the winner and I won this little portable screen I'll cut over to a video of it now so you can see what it looks like on Amazon I got that screen I tried it a bit I didn't really use it because I never really found there's a time where I have a laptop and I need a second screen most of the time I'm working my photos I'm doing at home on my PC like here behind me where I've already got two screens so I eventually sold that and I sold it and I made 80 bucks off Craigslist so again not a lot of money but Viewbug is a fun spot I don't post there as much as I used to I just don't have the time to post there and I don't have the time to post there so that's the last community site that I've actually made a bit of money from alright the next group of sites is the print on demand site so what these sites are is you can upload your photos but then someone can go and buy your photo on something on something that they've printed on so they can buy like a wall print or a t-shirt with it on basically so people will basically go on these sites and buy your photos printed on things now there's two primary sites that I've made a bit of money on for this the first one is Fine Art America so before I started selling my prints on Smugmug I sold them on five of Fine Art America and for a number of years that's where I sent people to buy prints of my photos so if I look here I made over that time about $2,500 on five Fine Art America so that's basically people come to my website looking for liking my photos wanting to buy a print and then I send them to Fine Art America they'd buy that print and then Fine Art America sends them the print and then sends me the profit from it the great thing about this site is you can go through and you can set your prices, you can decide how much you want to make and then they just obviously take a cut of it when they print it out but you don't have to manage anything it's much easier than printing out your own photos that was my primary one again I don't really use it as much anymore because I'm using Smugmug but I sold my photos up there and I still make a sale every once in a while one thing to note about Fine Art America and really both of these print on demand sites is that you can't really expect to just upload your photo and start making money yeah you might make some sales one off but more than likely you're going to need to send traffic to those sites either from your social media posts link back send people to your Fine Art America sites or from your website what I used to do send to Fine Art America but that's how you're going to make some a couple thousand dollars to Fine Art America I think that's what you have to do as opposed to just uploading your photos the other one that I tried was Redbubble so before I used Fine Art America I used Redbubble and what Redbubble is is a similar site they have more a longer list of things you can buy so like Fine Art America really focuses on prints and kind of artwork now they have throw pills and other things they're kind of adding a lot more iPhone cases adding more things over time but they still kind of focus on prints and I typically use them more for prints whereas Redbubble has a lot of different things they have t-shirts and just all kind of caps and all kinds of things in addition to prints they do both have both the reason that I used Redbubble is back a while back like five years ago I decided to put out a calendar and there was no easy way to do a calendar on Fine Art America so what I did was I did it on Redbubble so I went and I created I got 12 photos put together a calendar and I promoted that calendar through my social media and then I sold calendar prints so that's what I use Redbubble for because of that I have some photos up there and so every once in a while someone will go and find my photo through the search or something and they'll buy something and the other day I actually forgot I had photos up there and then someone bought a throw pillow of one of the beaches that I shot and Redbubble sent me like 10 bucks from it or something so it is good once you set these up as I said I don't have all my photos on there so I probably have only made about $70 I think when I looked it up that's all I made from Redbubble and that was mainly from the calendar sales and then small sales after that alright the last group of sites is the free stock photography sites what they are is you can basically upload your photos to these sites and anybody can use them for free for commercial purposes so these sites are getting very popular if you go into the search engines you're going to see them pop up if people search for stock photography now and because of that they get a lot of views so the first one that I have uploaded to you is Pexels and I've made about $110 on Pexels so far I haven't been doing this for a while I really started uploading a lot of my older photos more just a couple months ago so it's pretty new so $110 in a couple months actually isn't that bad for starting out a new site one of the crazy things I see about this site is I don't know how they calculate their stats but if you look at Pexels I've got like 48 million views on my photos and that's over a very short period of time if I look at my Flickr account that I've had for a very long time I've only got 4 million views so how are they getting so many views I don't know exactly how they're calculating it out but they do show you very very big stats and if you look here I'm just trying to look I've got like 300,000 downloads so these sites they are very popular and they are getting a lot of people are going to them and a lot of views now what you'll see is when you go and download a photo they will encourage you or give you the option to click on a button and donate now a very small percentage of people donate money but because such so many people see them that small percentage adds up and again for Pexels it's about $110 for me so I do plan on uploading more of my photos to these sites probably photos that are older like my new ones I'll probably keep on the new stock sites but I'm thinking about going back and looking at photos that haven't been selling on the other stock sites just kind of sitting around and not making any money from them elsewhere and putting them on these free stock sites just to kind of give them new life and to share them because they're not really getting any use if nobody's buying them on the other stock sites so the first one that I've seen some success with is Pexels the second one is Pixabay now Pixabay I've made about $70 I haven't uploaded as many photos there I haven't been as active but again it's still not nothing and if you look there there's a lot of views on Pixabay as well too so between these two sites it's almost $200 most of that over the past three months not bad I think if I uploaded more photos got a couple hundred up there then I probably would be able to start making a bit of a regular income although it would be small but comparable to some of the other small microstock sites that I also have my photos on and probably even better than a lot of the microstock sites that I have my photos on other than the big ones that make me the most of my money again I'll be doing another video on microstock sites in particular if you want to hear more about that you'll get notified when it's released alright and that's the 12 sites that I promised in the title of the video but there is a 13th site that I want to talk through okay and it's called JVSU now what this is is a joint venture software and what happened was about a year and a half ago somebody contacted me and said you know I've got this massive mailing list of small businesses what I'd like to do is take your collection of stock photos and basically sell them at a discounted rate sell all the photos at a discounted rate to my mailing list and it'll be a limited time offer we'll only do it over 3 days and if someone wants to buy it they can buy it over 3 days they'll be able to download all of your photos and you know you keep half I keep half so that was the deal and then he did all the work all I had to do was provide the full files to the photos he basically set up the landing page set up the software set up the mailing list everything he did all the work I provided the photos and he sent it out and then what happened over those 3 days when it was on sale I made about $320 okay so if you think about it from the point of oh my god you gave away all your photos photos you lost money well those people probably had never heard of me and probably would have never purchased any of my photos anyways right like I don't know who exactly was on his mailing list but it was a limited time offer and over those 3 days when it was on sale I made $320 and then after that never made it again so it was a nice kind of short-term bump you know what I mean that's like a lens an extra lens that I didn't think I was going to get before he contacted me I did use it to buy I think I bought a 50 millimeter lens with it so that's the last site that you can make money on if you can find someone who has a mailing list you could set up a joint venture with them to sell your stock photos online and that's it thanks so much for watching now I would love to hear in the comments below if there's other sites that you've made money from that are not microstock because it takes a lot of time to upload all these sites and there's so many of them out there I have not had a chance to try them all so I would love to hear about those that's actually how I heard about pixabay and pexels someone posted on a blog post that I had and let me know about them and let me know that they were making more money from pexels and pixabay than they were from shutterstock I tried them out and I had some success with them so I would love to hear about any successes you've had also if you're interested in this type of video make sure you subscribe and hit the notification button lastly it takes a lot of time to upload your photos and if you upload photos regularly kind of like I do trying to manage that with all these sites is very difficult so I've created a video that shows my workflow for uploading the sites and I'll put a link to it up around here lastly if you'd like to know how much money I've made over year over year that's kind of coming out with my photography I've created a video on that as well and I'll put a link down here best of luck selling your photos online