The Ultimate Guide to Selling Your Photography

Ideas for how to diversify your photography business

First published:
August 2, 2022
Updated:
February 14, 2024

Ideas for how to diversify your photography business

First published:
August 2, 2022
Updated:
February 14, 2024

Having a photography store is a great place to start, but including several other outlets for your work will help you sustain & expand your business in the long run

Contents

- Make your images into products
- Offer additional services alongside your photos
- Sell your images in a range of products
- NFTs

Make your images into products


As well as selling prints and digital downloads of your images, you might also want to consider selling your photos as products, like mugs, t-shirts, jigsaws and giftware.

Selling your photography as products can open your business up to a completely new type of customer. To start with, do some research and see how your style and subject of photography gets used as the product (for example, landscape photography is typically popular as jigsaw puzzles). Naturally, not all images will look good on consumer products and merchandise, so it's worth testing which of your pictures look good and then curating a small set - you certainly don't want to be uploading your entire portfolio.


Implementing a wide-ranging product offering on your own website can be considerably complicated and expensive when starting. However, several print-on-demand sites, like Redbubble, offer products like t-shirts, mugs, jigsaw puzzles, keychains and so on; you can easily upload your photos to their platform and make them available to purchase as products.

But, don't forget - you should promote this area of your business just as much as the rest of your photography.

The range of products that you can easily print your images onto is remarkable, you can even sell t-shirts with your images! Photo by Matthias De Boeck

Offer additional services alongside your photos

Many photographers don't just sell their images; they also sell their knowledge. No matter where you're at with your photography or your skill level, someone somewhere else would benefit from your expertise and pay you for it too.

With this in mind, it's worth exploring offering services such as workshops and online classes in your area of photography. This is especially worthwhile once you've built up a dedicated audience and promoted them, as they could likely be customers for your expertise too.

Also, If you're enthusiastic about photo editing, you could sell presets. Suppose you're known for having a distinct style created in post-production, or your photo editing skills are one of the reasons your work is well-known. In that case, it's particularly worthwhile looking at, as you'll find that there will be other photographers out there looking to follow in your footsteps with your editing style. You can sell presets as downloadable files easily on sites like Etsy.

"Many photographers don't just sell their images; they also sell their knowledge."
Selling your edits in the form of presets to other photographers can be another lucrative revenue stream for your business

Get to know Presets:

See our beginner's guide to presets for a detailed overview of what they are, and how you can use them to your advantage.

NFTs

There has been an explosion in digital art over the last few years, and a lot of photographers are now selling their photos as NFTs (non-fungible tokens). This means you can sell digital versions of your pictures to collectors like someone buying an edition print of your work.

It’s important to remember that the collector isn’t buying the copyright of the photo but rather the rights to that photo to sell on if they wish to. Think of it in the same way as buying a painting. You can then sell that painting to someone else for a higher amount, but you can’t claim that you painted the picture.

The NFT space is growing rapidly, and there is potential to sell digital art for vast sums of money. But it is also very complicated with lots of ways in which you can have accounts hacked and your digital currency, or even your artwork, stolen. So, if you are considering getting into this space, we urge you to do lots of research and learn some of the basic security protocols.

Further reading:

See more advice on increasing the revenue potential for your photography with our tip-based guide from professional photographer Kav Dadfar.
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