Blog - How to make Money with Photography

I get asked about ways to earn money with photography quite regularly. And I think very often, this questions gets asked much too early. If you are just starting out with photography, don’t do it for money. Take photos because you like it, experiment, get better and build your portfolio.

Once you have mastered the technique, found your genre and started building a solid archive of photos, you can begin to think about ways to monetize your photography. And in the video below I share some ideas on how you can do it by creating different income streams.

But just creating income streams is not enough. Many of those input streams rely on traffic. For example, if nobody finds your Redbubble page, nobody will buy your prints. So the most important thing and the first step to earn money with photography is, in my opinion, to start building a solid online presence early on.

And by online presence I don’t mean relying on platforms like Instagram, Flickr or 500px too much. Those platforms operate outside your control and it’s not a good idea to base your whole business on those. They are surely parts of the puzzle and help you create traffic. But this traffic should ultimately go to your own homepage.

On your own homepage you have full control. You can decide how large you want to show your photos, you can place proper links to your shops, host tutorials, have a blog – you can present yourself and your photography exactly how you want to. There are many services that allow you to quickly setup a homepage. But if you are into web development and want to do this on your own, you might find my second Youtube Channel about software development helpful.

In addition to the different income streams I talk about in the video, which are mostly passive, you can also look for job offerings for photographers. The job search on Jooble, for example, offers quite a range of different jobs in this field and it’s worth checking.