You are a young photographer and would like to earn some money with your pictures. As always, the Internet is a great resource to earn money, no matter what you’re selling.

If you are an amateur thing are pretty easy, you have to get your photos on a stock photography website. Here you create a photographer account and start upload your pictures, which may or may not be approved.

Currently I don’t know any stock photography website that doesn’t check what you’re posting. Now let’s see the ups and downs of selling your photos on the web.

First, you must understand that you won’t lose your copyright of the uploaded photos (unless you want that. Some websites have this option, and the reward is bigger, of course).

The amount of money you get from a photo depends on several factors: number of downloads, size (the bigger the better), what rights you grant the buyer, uniqueness (if it’s only posted on one site you earn extra).

There are several websites, you only have to search for "stock photography" on Google and pick one of the names from the first page. Now I’m going to make a list of the ones I’ve used, when I got a thing for photography, three years ago:

www.shutterstock.com
www.dreamstime.com
www.bigstockphoto.com
www.canstockphoto.com
www.istockphoto.com

To make it easy to estimate how much money you can get bear in mind that I’ve uploaded around 50 approved photos to each of those sites and I’ve got around 300 $ in the first two years. That doesn’t seem too much but if you upload ten times more pictures you get more.

There are also more things you can do, like promoting your work on your blog, or embedded on those stock websites or you can do an assignment, which is basically making photos on a given theme, which always pays better.

If you are a professional user you can always try to get approved on Corbis, but you might be already making money.

You can learn more about selling stock photos from this book: Digital Stock Photography: How to Shoot and Sell