I have a lot of photos!!! How can I turn my photos into cash? Where can I sell my photos?Would people buy my photos? These were the questions I was asking myself in an attempt to earn money from home.

After I was made redundant in April 2016 I was not in a hurry to return to the work force! I have no qualifications & the only thing I considered myself good at was my photography (realising now that I am not as good as I thought I was!) and I wanted to see if I could earn an income from home.

I did a lot of research & discovered that there are websites for selling your own photos. You can use creative sites like Zazzle or CafePress to create your own wall art, clothes, mugs & other goods to sell using your images. However my new best friend was going to be the stock photo web site! Stock Photography is uploading your photos to a Stock Photo Agency and once approved they become available for customers to purchase earning you a small commission.  Now with all this web browsing I discovered there are a LOT of sites for submitting photos for sale.

The most popular of the these sites is Shutterstock. This is my first stock photo that I submitted to Shutterstock – not very exciting! However it did get me accepted as a contributor on the first attempt at submitting photos for stock use. How did I do it? By following these simple steps.

• Research – There is heaps of info out there, blogs, Youtube videos, forums. I read as much info as possible to gain the most knowledge I could. Shutterstock has it’s own Contributor Guide with lots of information and advice.

• Edit – before submitting my image I made sure it was perfect. I checked my image was sharp by zooming in to 100%, making sure there were no artefacts, dust marks, blemishes and noise.

• Submit – After joining Shutterstock I had to submit 10 images for approval. If all images were approved I would be accepted as a contributor. However I accidentally hit submit after I had only uploaded the one image!!!

So had I stuffed my chances of being accepted into Shutterstock? Having heard & read of so many being rejected on their first attempt I was 100% certain I was going to be rejected as I had only submitted the one image. To my surprise I was accepted and could now begin my journey as a Stock Photography contributor.