Extra cash for selling your photos online

As mentioned in the previous post, I bought a very nice SLR-like digital camera - the Canon S10. See its review on Cnet here.

R3000 (or two thirds) of the R4500 I spent on the camera came from May's total earnings off the internet. I have been planning on getting a new digital camera for some time now. The extra cash came in very handy at the right moment!

The plan is to get a proper Canon SLR at some stage, but in the meantime I am experimenting with photography and trying out some free courses available online. Check out the Morguefile for an excellent free photography course divided into 10 very helpful lessons. They start off with the basics and go through everything you will probably need to know about photography.

It is strange how things work out sometimes. Buying my new camera mostly with money I got for free, got me into thinking if I could possibly make some money with my new hobby, photography, on the net. I Googled for a bit and came across a blog post of some lady making around $3000 per month selling her photographs on various sites of which Fotolia seems to be her biggest cash cow. I must add that she has over 1200 photos uploaded to her profile.

Fotolia basically pay you whenever someone downloads your photo and they take a small commission on every sale. The service is totally free. There are many of these sites out there but I decided to just check out Fotolia for now. There is a banner on the right-hand side on this blog that will take you trhough to their site if you are interested. I am not going to try and explain how they work in full.

I am not expecting any money at all from Fotolia, but it would be an indication to me as to how good or bad a photographer I am. So far I have uploaded 15 of (what I think are) my best photos to Fotolia and 5 of them have already being declined. I am yet to find out if the remaining 10 will be good enough. And yes, so far it seems that I am a crappy photographer (according to their standards), haha. Being strict on the quality of photos they choose is a good thing. People get paid for good photos. If you read some of their reader's comments in forums, you will see that some of them uplaod up to 200 photos per day. Hence the strict quality control. You've probably seen the crap some people (read: your friends) load onto their Facebook profiles and albums - please don't tell them about Fotolia.

There are many more sites like Fotolia out there. If you manage to be successful with any of them, I'd like to hear about it. If you come across something else that really works great, I'd like to hear about it too.

Happy snapping!

I crossed the R3000 mark this month with online revenue!

- before we go on just a quick note. I received a total amount of just over R3000 commission in total this month from all the affiliate programs I joined. I have not reached my long term average goal of R3k per month yet, I still need to get to the short-term goal of R1500 average per month...

Right, so it possible to make some bucks on the internet and every other month one does get a nice total when all the nice payments fall within the same month.

Let's have a look at the money I made on interwebs this month:

Mantality R1542.09
Kalahari R1205.96
Traffic Synergy R268.80
Rhytm Records R69.83

Total for June 2009: R3086.68

Not kak at all hey? I used the bucks to help pay towards a new Canon S10 camera of around R4500. Very naughty of me, seeing that in these economic times I should be putting more bucks towards my bond. Sheesh! I will start behaving beetter next month.

I am still aiming for an average of around R1500 per month by the end of the year. Check back at the end of June to find out if I am still on track to achieve this goal.

I have also decided to go for a new template for this blog for various reasons. One of them being the new affiliate programs I am following and old ones I gave to boot. The new template will have all sorts of bells and whistles attached to it - adouble feature really: It makes for better reading or viewing and it will also illustrate some plugins and features I have discovered aling the way that for instance imporves adsense etc.

Check back later this week for the new features.