Creative Ways to Make Money at Home as a Videographer

 

Get creative with these 5 top tips on making money at home as a videographer. Whether you shoot weddings, stock, or commercial – there are still ways to make money at home.

With creatives at a global level losing work due to the COVID-19 pandemic, nobody would criticize you for feeling anxious about what the future holds. Making money at home as a videographer, producer, or editor is still possible. It just takes some creative consideration.

Filmmaking by nature is collaborative, and being locked down, either by yourself or with family, is the exact opposite of traditional collaborative work. As a videographer stuck at home, I’m sharing a few tips on how you can make money at home with your video skills. Let’s take a look at a few clever ways to keep that creativity flowing, while still earning a paycheck in your creative field.

Make Money at Home: Stock Video 

If you’re a self-shooter or at least have filmmaking equipment at home, you’re already one step closer to earning income until the storm passes, and that is with stock video. If your reply to that is: “But I’m at home, what do I film here?” you just answered the question.

Popular content shifts throughout the year and often reflects the happenings of the time. For example, a family opening presents around the tree is going to sell better in the lead up to the festive season. As such, brands and companies are going to seek content that reflects the current timeframe. And for a lot of us, that’s staying at home, working from home, homeschooling, and self-isolating.

If there was ever a creative brief that a solo filmmaker could efficiently work from, it’s that. Check out the Shot List for the latest ideas to shoot.

Uploading archive footage to stock

However, while that touches upon creating content that reflects the current situation, you can still get creative and sift through your hard drives to find additional footage to submit.

I’m always guilty of veering outside of the structured shoot to obtain some B-roll of pastel-colored skies or animals grazing in the evening light. Often, I know this material is never going anywhere outside of Instagram, and I’m only shooting the content because it looks beautiful. However, in hindsight, I’ve also just captured perfect footage to submit for stock.  

So, brew some coffee, dust off the old hard drives, and see if you have any clips that can make you money.

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Source: Shutterstock.com

How Much Do You Make Selling Stock Photos?

As a photographer interested in getting started selling stock photography on Dreamstime.com, you may have many questions at first, most often focused on the earnings side of this opportunity. One question on people’s minds is how much can you make per image sale? Do stock agencies provide a steady income stream? Will stock photography earnings overcome the status of just a side income? Can you make passive income from selling photos?

For starters, let's understand the role of a stock agency, so we can put all these questions and answers into a context. A stock photo agency has to create a balance between what stock photographers expect from image sales, the buyers' demands in terms of content quality and the realities of the market. Photographers will always expect to be paid more for their hard work, buyers will always seek to pay less per photo, and the market will always regulate itself depending on the competition that exists, at any given moment, both between stock photographers but also between buyers.

Selling stock photography is as much a numbers game, as it is a quality and innovation play. Any stock photo, on any subject, has some alternatives: sometimes in the same portfolio of a photographer, other times in other portfolios of the same agency, and sometimes on other stock photography websites.

When certain stock images become popular, they may create a snowball effect, leading to even more success for the same image or for the others in the same portfolio. That's because, usually, internal and external search engines are striving to provide the best search results for their users, so they will have to keep a balance between both new and popular photos. So, if you're thinking of developing a strategy for your content, you should keep in mind that there's a correlation between how many photos online you have, how different are they from each other, how often you upload on stock photography websites and how big are the buyers' demands for your images.

Quality should always come first, but diversity and quantity are equally important for a successful stock photography income.

Getting back to revenues, there are a number of factors involved in calculating a stock photographer potential income that makes it difficult to give a quick answer. It may be a good idea instead to start by understanding what factors go into the equation:

1. Per image sale

The stock photography industry is by its nature transactional. Stock photographers and digital artists create images that are place online for potential buyers to browse and select. So the amount you make through the stock photo sites will depend on the number of images you sell and the vehicle the buyer chooses to use to make their purchase.

Dreamstime.com offers two options for buying stock images - subscription plans and credit plans. They also use a Level ranking on images based on the number of times that file has been downloaded – this rewards popular content of stock photographers with higher payout levels while giving new content a competitive chance.

Subscription payouts are determined strictly on whether the contributor is exclusive to Dreamstime.com or not or if the image is exclusive or not.

While image downloads will make up the majority of your income, there are other ways to maximize your potential stock photography earnings as well.

2. Additional formats

Depending on the image type, you have the opportunity to upload additional formats. These could be the vector files for illustrations, clipping masks for isolated objects or the camera raw file.

These formats sell for higher credit values or can generate an additional subscription sale on those images. In any way, the earnings per image and number of sales may increase by simply making these additional formats available, along your stock images.

3. Extended license

When uploading images, be sure to take a look at the Extended License options available. Enabling licenses for Unlimited Seats (U-EL), Print (P-EL) or Web (W-EL) usage translate into larger net sales. You can view of modify the rights on all you images at any time by using the Manage Licenses option in the My Files section of your Dashboard.

Two other options that can add significant passive income are the Sell the Right (SR-EL) and Time Limited Exclusivity (SR-EL 1 and SR-EL 3). As the name implies, these options transfer the right to the image to a third person in perpetuity or for a specified time period (one or three years) so the decision to offer these options should be taken while weighing the consequences.

4. Increase your Sales

Maximizing your sales potential is the best way to control how much you make on Dreamstime.com. The only way a buyer has to find your images in search results is through the quality of metadata you include with each photo. Taking the time to carefully consider the appropriate Title – Description – Keywords information associated with your image will pay dividends in their sales potential.

While it is true that having more images online will also increase your revenue potential, as specified earlier in the article, it is important to prioritize quality over quantity. Lots of mediocre, irrelevant images will not be as rewarding as fewer high quality, in-demand assets. Spend time researching which images sell best, what type of stock photos are chosen for the monthly assignments or in the Editors Choice section to help you plan your photo shooting time better.

So, while an easy answer on exactly how much you stand to make being a stock photographer at Dreamstime.com is not that simple, you probably understand better now the factors that go into it.

Long story short, if you're thinking of being a stock photographer as a day job, and earning from stock photos online as main activity rather than just passive income, you can definitely do it, with the right strategy. Many photographers are doing it already. Also, if you're fine with being an amateur photographer and just making a sale every now and then, it won't hurt to adjust your workflow and strategy to make the most of it and sell your photos more often.

Source: Dreamstime.com

Learn to Make Money with Your Phone Photography

 

Discover the tricks behind using your photography skills to make money with your phone, no matter where you go in the world.

Nowadays, there’s an opportunity for people around the world to make money anywhere they go. The answer is in the phone in your pocket that you carry with you. There are more opportunities than ever before to make money with your phone. At Shutterstock, we’ve developed our mobile apps for iOS and Android with that thought in mind. We want to make it as easy as possible for you to earn money on the go.

So you want to know how to make money with your phone?

When you’re creating content, you should be getting paid. There are tons of different ways that creatives can go about this. What’s more, every place you go is a potential opportunity to earn money. As phone technology gets better and better, phone cameras continue to enhance as well. Several have the power to take better photographs than many DSLRs out there.

That’s why we’re sharing a few tips on how to make money with your phone when you’re on-the-go. Whether you are a photographer or videographer who already takes photographs on your phone, or are simply interested in starting to make money with your phone, use these tips to start monetizing your mobile shots.

4 Key Tips on Making Money with Your Phone

Tip #1: Download the Shutterstock Contributor App

We know how quickly those memories on phones can fill up. That’s why we offer an on-the-go solution for uploading your images to Shutterstock. Shutterstock Contributors can use our app for iOS or app for Android to upload images from anywhere there’s phone signal. Never miss an opportunity to upload new content.

Life gets busy. So, you may forget about all the incredible images you have on your phone by the time you get home to your laptop. Instead, take images on the go and upload directly to the app. You’ll never walk by a beautiful tree without taking a snap again.

Not a contributor yet? Click here to sign up

Tip #2: Get model and property releases on your phone

Download our model and property releases in advance, so you never miss an opportunity to shoot. Getting started on making money with your phone starts with making sure all logistics are in place. If you have your model and property releases handy, anything has the potential to become a photoshoot. Whether it’s a surprise meet-up with a friend for coffee that turns out to be a gorgeous shoot opportunity, or an epic sunset you don’t want to miss, don’t let moments pass you by.

For a great how-to on model and property releases, click here.

Tip #3: Before you go somewhere new, check out the Shot List

If you’re getting ready to travel somewhere, or experiencing a new place you’ve never been before, consider checking out the Shot List before planning your trip. The Shot List is a data-driven resource on what customers on Shutterstock are searching for (and purchasing). This is the ultimate resource for finding out what you should be shooting next.

Don’t miss the chance to capture something that you may have access to. That something can put you a step ahead of the rest and earn you money.

Tip #4: Optimize your workflow (and editing)

Use your phone’s favorites or albums settings to save and organize your phone images into groups for you to upload. By doing this, you set the images that you love apart from your regular phone images. This will make it a lot easier to upload when you’re ready and on wifi.

Editing on your phone can be easy, too. Just ensure that the platform that you use allows you to export in high-resolution quality. Apps such as Snapseed or Adobe’s Photoshop app allow you to export without sacrificing the quality of your image.

We hope these tips on how to make money with your phone help you monetize your creative workflow. Every place, every story, is the opportunity to create something new. It’s something that a customer may not have seen before. Use the handiest device you have on you, your phone, to capture and sell moments that tell stories. Never let an opportunity pass you by again. We can’t wait to see what you shoot, upload, and earn money with next.

Source: Shuttertsock.com