I’d bet you’d be surprised to know that all you need to make some extra money is a digital camera. These days I don’t know anyone who doesn’t own a digital camera, especially here in Australia.
There are many sites out there that will acchihealth.com pay you money to submit photos to them. The money ranges from $US0.10 for an “acceptable” quality photo right up to $US2.00 for a premium quality photo. But wait, there’s more! Most sites will also pay you a royalty every time someone downloads your photo for their use, so there can be an ongoing trailing commission paid to you for each photo – this is generally about $US0.20. If your photo is a popular one then you can make a reasonable amount of money especially if you have a number of quality photos listed that are being downloaded.
This might not sound like much but if you do some simple math, it does add up. If you have at least 20 good photos that are premium quality and that are popular, you should be averaging about 50 downloads a week. This adds up to $US10 (50 x $0.20) per photo per week. So 20 photos are making you $US200 per week! This can be pretty good especially if you upload more than that. There are some photographers who have uploaded literally hundreds of photos to a site. And, most sites will let you upload the same photos to a number of sites so you could be getting much more than this!
You don’t need any special equipment either, just a decent digital camera, and by decent I just mean one that does at least 3.2Megapixel images. These days you can’t really purchase a camera thats less than 5-6Megapixels so you should be fine. You don’t need an SLR camera either – any compact digital camera will do the job.
There’s a few secrets to know if you want to make sure you are getting the most reward for your efforts – its not merely a case of just going out & taking whatever photos you like. Sure, you will make money doing this but the amount of trailing commissions could be limited as not as many people may want to use your photos. The key is to find out which photos are the most popular – by this I mean which keywords and key phrases gets searched the most & then go out & take photos related to this. Its also a good idea to see what photos are already loaded at the site to see if you can, at the very least, do similar or better yet find a way to make yours better or different. I have found that some of the most popular topics revolve around business and computers, because people who are creating their company websites want quality photos about business and computers that they can use. I’m sure you will be able to find other niches as well that may be popular.