Editors of top photography blog reveal their best money-making tips in 340-page book now available on Amazon.

New York, New York (PRWEB) June 9, 2009 — Photopreneur, the photography Web site (http://blogs.photopreneur.com) offering information and resources to help photographers make the leap from artist to entrepreneur, has released its first book, “99 Ways To Make Money From Your Photos.” The 340-page softcover book is available on Amazon and by visiting the Photopreneur site at http://blogs.photopreneur.com/99-ways-to-make-money-from-your-photos.

Packed with insider tips, practical strategies, and case studies, “99 Ways To Make Money From Your Photos” shares 99 creative ways to make images that generate cash. Each chapter reveals what to shoot, how to break in, and where to go to generate sales. Readers will learn how to sell stock, approach galleries, host their own exhibitions, earn money with Flickr, shoot for social networking sites, create and market photo products, form joint ventures, upsell their event photography and much, much more.

From beginners to enthusiasts and from hobbyists to professionals, “99 Ways To Make Money From Your Photos” (http://blogs.photopreneur.com/99-ways-to-make-money-from-your-photos) can help anyone turn their passion for photography into a reliable source of income.

Leading executives, entrepreneurs and photographers praise the book:

Oleg Tscheltzoff, co-founder and president, Fotolia –

“An excellent guide to both novice and experienced photographers. Whether you’ve just invested in your first digital camera or you’ve got an image library spanning years, this book will give you a step-by-step resource for capitalizing on your images.”

Jeff Beaver, co-founder, Zazzle.com –

“‘99 Ways To Make Money From Your Photos’ is a great resource for any photographer serious about turning their passion for photography into real money.”

Andreas Reinhold, engineer and freelance car photographer –

“A great guide for those who want to start earning money with their photos. Several of the shown ways to earn money with photography (http://blogs.photopreneur.com) work for me and some of the given hints were new and proved to be successful. This guide is so comprehensive that any photographer should be able to find a good starting point to get his business going.”

Authored by the editors of Photopreneur and published by New Media Entertainment, Ltd., “99 Ways To Make Money From Your Photos” has a list price of $34.95.

Note to media and bloggers: Please contact Cathy Baradell if you are interested in a review copy of “99 Ways To Make Money From Your Photos.”

About Photopreneur

Photopreneur is one of the Web’s top photography sites (http://blogs.photopreneur.com/about-the-photo-community), featuring stories, interviews and expert marketing advice. Its editors bring together decades of experience at the highest levels of professional photography. The Photopreneur team combines rigorous research, marketing creativity and a deep understanding of the photography business to help photographers - professional, enthusiast and occasional - earn income from their images. Photopreneur is owned by New York City-based New Media Entertainment, Ltd (http://www.nme.net/). Check out Photopreneur at http://blogs.photopreneur.com.

We are all looking for the holy grail to help our work get noticed, so I thought I’d put together a list of ideas that might help you  bring your company to the next level. You may not be the next Chris Buck or Terry Richardson, but you’ll being doing what 95% of the other people are not doing. 

First, you need to sharpen your game. There is no better advertising than that of having stunning work that rocks the socks off of a potential client. When learning to photograph, we all go through a growth period to define who we are as a photographer. After shooting tens of thousands of photos, you’ll soon find out what works for you and what doesn’t. This is the early stages of developing a style that will start to define you as a photographer. The photos that you get excited about, will probably be the ones that start to define the little niche you are trying to build. So this is probably the first and most important thing you need to do decide, who you are and what you will shoot?

Develop a Web Presence

You have to have a website or images hosted somewhere that people can find them. Even if you use Flickr.com or some other free site, you need to get your work out there to prove your abilities.

If you are going to build a site on your own, there are a number of great options, probably the best being Wordpress with tons of plugins and both free and premium themes available. Wordpress is easy to optimize for Search Engine Optimization with plugins like the All in One SEO pack and the Google XML Sitemap Generator.

Of course you’ll need hosting for your site. Do not use a free hosting service, they are terrible and loaded with ads that just detract from a professional image. Also be wary of using shared hosting that may have thousands of other sites clogging up the datapath to your site. At one point Pixebian was on a shared hosting site with over 4,500 other websites sharing the same IP address . Look at this chart below from our crawl stats for the site, before we moved to Westhost.com. This is the time in milliseconds that it took for Google to crawl Pixebian.com. Now you know why we went to a reliable hosting company. As of this writing, we have not been crawled since we changed hosting, so I hope the slow speeds did not impact our SEO effort. 

Once you have your hosting service, then you need to decide on design options. From my personal experience, forget the fancy flash intros and music. You can still use flash as I do on TerryDivyak.com, but keep it to a minimum. Editors and clients only have so much time to browse your site and if it’s slow or kludgy, then they move onto the next photographer. A well designed, easily navigable website with a short easy to remember domain name will keep viewers  focused.

Continue Reading

This is a must read for all freelancers and pro’s alike. Tony Luna has put together a four part series titled “Lifecycle of a Freelance Photography Job“. Hey lays everything out from marketing, to working with clients to billing.  A couple of the key points: “Your portfolio must be more than a box filled with pretty pictures. It must convey how you uniquely see the world and what you have chosen—out of a universe of options—to affix the rectangle of your viewfinder to and catch a moment in time.” “Most people want to be everything to everybody but you stand a greater chance of being noticed if you sell your services to a segment that needs what you love to shoot” “Very importantly, you will have to commit to creating marketing campaigns that will reinforce your unique viewpoint and your development as an artist.”

One of my favorite websites for ideas on building a website is digitalpoint.com. They have a fantastic forum and there are a ton of really smart webmasters and it’s full of ideas on how to build your web presence. One of the things that struck me awhile ago, when I was reading the forum, was how everyone wants to game the system to drive traffic to clicks, pay content, affiliate marketing links etc. How many times have you done a search for a particular product and end up going down the rabbit hole of crappy websites?

Yesterday I started looking for a hosting company for another project I am working on. Shared hosting works, but sometimes servers can be driven to their knees if too many sites are being hosted. So I searched for independent reviews on webhosting. I must have spent an hour or so searching, before I found what I thought was an unbiased, legitimate review on different hosting companies. Most sites I hit were affiliate type sites that wanted to drive you to whoever was paying the biggest commission. Ultimately I found a company, Westhost.com (No this is not an affiliate link), that seems to have their act together. For $10 a month and your own IP address, you can have a very fast site with every option you will need. I’m thinking of moving this and my other site, Terrydivyak.com to them as well as this one.

Ok, getting back to Digitalpoint, I ran across this post and felt that he was right on. I know Google is the 800 lb gorilla, but if someone could come up with a search engine that got rid of 80% of the websites that seemed designed to send you to other websites, they could make a ton of money. Below is a snippet from the post.

So what are your thoughts?

“I’m writing this and it’s almost three in the morning, so please bare with me if this doesn’t make any sense, it’s just something I feel that if I don’t get out of my system now, it won’t be in my mind when I get up later today.

Yet people seem to think that if they continue to buy links, their site will become more valuable. What’s the point of buying and selling links with these sites if they’re worthless aswell? It’s not like any of these sites are getting hits to begin with anyway. The acne treatment site I saw was ranked #1 and only had less than 70 sites linking to them. Guess what? They were all health related sites and directories. What is the point, really?!”