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Stock Photos Can be Profitable
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Stock Photography web sites are proliferating on the internet, but that does not mean you cannot make a niche for yourself and your product. Stock photographs are pictures that, for one reason or another, do not qualify as fine art but are better (usually) than the standard picture of the family home or dog-- though those can be stock photographs. What you are doing is very simple: you are supplying a potential user with photographs that can be used on a web site, a billboard, a magazine page or anywhere else by a business to help to advertise the product it is selling.
People who are using stock photographs are usually looking for a specific kind of photograph, so the trick is to get enough of a feel for the needs of customers out there and go from there. But actually you have to do a lot of intelligent dogwork before you end up guessing others' needs.
Your primary problem is building up a good, quality base of photographs that you can legally put on your web site and sell. Legally is an important word if you use photographs of people (other than yourself or members of your family, if they are willing!). You must find out what you can and cannot sell without a model's release; "model" in this case can be a person walking on the street. Moreover, just because a photograph is old does not mean that it is a legal picture to try to sell. Copyright law on pictures is tricky and not to be taken lightly. That beautiful girl from 1940 may still be alive and she may have rights; and even somebody grandmother from 1922 might be upset at your using her photograph for commercial purposes.
That said. just about any photograph that has been published is fair game for a stock photograph site. Look at the one's on line now and you will see that many items shown are fairly common and patently in the public domain. This is certainly true of royalshot.com. What makes royshot.com unique are those photographs that are unique to it. That's the kind of picture that will bring the viewer, that is the customer, to look are your site as opposed to anybody else's. What it important, then, is that you have on your site unique quality photographs that will attract people to your site to the exclusion of others.
It is essential that you have first class software both to scan photographs and put them up on line. This will cost you money: DON'T SKIMP. The best software you can find is an absolute necessity. Of course, you can use a pre-prepared site, but these are limiting and themselves cost too. The advantages are obvious, however, and you certainly should consider that as a possibility. Quality scanning is a very attractive part of a good web stock photo business. It's a good idea not to skimp on expense here too.
Pricing is always difficult. It is subjective, and you should visit other sites and see what their policies are. In the end, however, this is a decision you will have to make on your own.
Whether to allow photographs to be downloaded directly from your site or not is another significant decision you must make. Downloading does make your site vulnerable to hackers, a real consideration in this day and age when hacking is so common. You may want to see you photographs on CD only and use the mails for delivery-- a very safe and relilable way of getting the product into the customer's hands.
Start your photo stock business today! Need Photo Stock with Reseller Rights? Visit RoyalShot.com
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