How to Make Money With Your Travel Photos

These days, making money with your travel photos is easier than ever. Traveling and taking beautiful photos is expensive, time-consuming work, so why not monetize it? Gone are the days when you have to lobby publications to promote your work — we’re in an era where making money from your photography is as easy as spending a half-hour on your computer.

I’ve been using Fine Art America to sell my travel photos online for years, and I find their platform not only easy to use but profitable too! Plus, you don’t have to be a professional photographer to get started.

Here are my six steps to start making money with your travel photos!

How to Make Money With Your Travel Photos

Get Quality Equipment

While I’m 100% a believer that you don’t need professional, high-end equipment to capture excellent travel photos, there are some technical specs that will take your photography to the next level. A quality camera and lenses will remove noise, enhance low-light situations, give you even sharpness, and allow you to produce an array of photo styles.

Meanwhile, a tripod, flash, intervalometer, and camera cover will enhance your creativity and flexibility as well.

I also recommend learning a thing or two about the post-production side of things. If you can learn to properly edit your photos, then you’ll be miles ahead of the pack when it comes time to actually selling photos online.

Produce Images & Practice Often

Now that you have your equipment, it’s time to take a ton of travel photos! I’m of the mind that there’s really no downside to taking as many photos when you’re traveling as possible, as you’re more likely to get the money shot when you’re continuously snapping.

And when you’re not traveling? Explore your backyard and take photos from home! Your hometown is a travel destination for more people than it isn’t, so get out there and see what you find.

Upload Your Images to Fine Art America

With plenty of quality travel photos under your belt, it’s time to upload them to Fine Art America. Fine Art America is a website that will host your travel photos for people to purchase. On the site, you can sell awesome wall art, stationery, apparel, tech, home decor, and so much more.

What I love about Fine Art America’s interface is that they are primarily set up for selling art, they have no sign-up fees, they have tons of product choices, they have fulfillment centers all over the world, and they take care of the whole selling process.

Choose What Products to Offer

So, on that note, the next step is to choose what products to offer. When choosing products, consider your brand, your photos, and the functionality of the items. Personally, I’ve listed plenty of my travel photos as wall art, as I feel this best represents me as a travel blogger and photographer.

When you choose to sell your art through Fine Art America, you’ll essentially be creating a print-on-demand portfolio of art that people can purchase. There is an approval process, as the website is dedicated to only hosting quality art, but you can upload your first 25 photos for free before any cost is associated.

From there, if you’re sticking with wall art, there are even more options to choose from. Personally, I sell canvas prints, framed prints, art prints, posters, metal prints, acrylic prints, wood prints, and greeting cards.

When people go to purchase your art, if applicable to what they’re buying, they can customize the size, frame, mat, and paper.

Set Your Prices

When setting prices for your work, it’s important to remember that Fine Art America sets the base price for the products, and then you choose the markup on top of that price. Whatever you set as the markup is what you’ll earn from sales.

You can choose whatever you’d like as your markup, but the sweet spot is high enough that you feel your work is being valued, yet low enough to be accessible to buyers.

Promote Your Work

And now, it’s time to promote your work! Fine Art America has a handy embed feature that lets you put links to your art on your website, but I also recommend doing some promo and marketing around the items as well. Tell your friends, let your social media followers know, and hey, even write an article or two about it!

That said, people can also search for your photos within the Fine Art America interface itself, so make sure to tag your photos appropriately on their website.

I recommend writing down a list of tags that could be associated with your photo, and then niching it down from there. With this search function, your photos will be up against hundreds, if not thousands, of others, so being as niche as possible will help you get discovered.