Backstory: A few days ago, I did a deep exploration of stock photography companies by exploring their compensation structure, content requirements, and others’ reviews (see here). Afterwards, I felt like I had a pretty decent grasp of the process, so I thought I would start digging through some photos that I could possibly submit and give it a shot.
Submission Process
Deciding on images: I narrowed down my potential list of photos to about twenty images and then carefully looked over the quality (full description from Shutterstock here):
Images were at least 1200 x 3000 pixels
In JPEG format
Editing: Next, I needed make some basic minor corrections, like white balance and adjusting highlights and shadows. Because I’m not an expert in photography and because this is just a side gig, I decided that it doesn’t make financial sense for me to pay for Adobe Lightroom, although I would love an excuse to purchase the software–Readers: Adobe is not paying me for advertising. Adobe: if you want to pay me to advertise, I’m willing to discuss the terms ^_^. Instead, I went with Rawtherapee, which is free. There are others out there, but I felt that this was the closest to Lightroom and there were some pretty thorough tutorials on how to use the software to inspect and edit my photos (YouTube tutorials: 1, 2). After editing my photos and inspecting them, I narrowed my selection down to 10 potential submissions.
Selecting Photos to submit: My decision process was driven by image quality (e.g., chromatic aberration; lens flare) and whether or not I could imagine an application for the photos. It’s helpful to ask yourself, “Who would use this photo and where and why?” Truthfully, the latter exercise filled me with a lot of doubt because I think it’s probably stronger to have photos with models acting out a concept like “success” or “using technology.” I got over it though because really, this is something I can keep in mind in the future when I’m taking more photos. Right now, it’s more about learning how to edit my photos and figuring out how to navigate the submission portal.
Submission Guidelines: After deciding which photos I was going to submit, I reviewed the guidelines and signed up with Shutterstock as a contributor. If you’re interested in signing up, I hope you consider showing some love and using my referral link–Full Disclosure: I would earn $0.04 for every image that someone downloads from Shutterstock, which is not taken from your earnings, for the first two years after you sign up (more details here).
Signing up and submitting for review: Signing up was simple. You provide an email and password; update your profile information; update your tax information; and then upload your photos. You have to tag your photos with keywords and provide a description of the photos after you’ve uploaded them. Shutterstock will make some keyword suggestions for you based on your image. I also found it helpful to look through a thesaurus for related words and to look through similar pictures and see how they tagged their photos. Next, you can submit. You should get an email confirming that you’ve uploaded photos and they will be reviewed shortly. I read around on the web that this could take a couple of days but mine were reviewed and approved within less than 24 hours! Impressively fast!
One thing you may experience is not knowing what to do next once you’re approved. Your photos won’t immediately appear in your portfolio, so if you’re like me, you may wonder if that means you have to re-upload those photos because that was just a review process and now you’re free to set up your portfolio. DON’T DO THAT. Digging through their forum, I saw that others had similar questions and were advised to wait. It may take another few days for the photos that were approved to show up in your portfolio. Again, this took less than a day for me.
Rejections: I did have one photo that was rejected:
he message said that it was rejected because I didn’t submit a model release form. I’m still a little puzzled by this because I thought that this image fits with their description of “silhouette of a unrecognized person.” It looks like I can resubmit it though with a model release form pretty easily. They even provide templates that you can use.
Your Portfolio: After reviewing reasons for rejections, if any, you can upload more photos for review and start sharing your portfolio. Here’s a screen shot of my portfolio so far:
Yay!
Conclusion
All in all, the process was super easy and way faster than I thought! I’m also pretty excited that basically all of my photos were approved–minus the one because of the model release form, but at least it wasn’t rejected on technical aspects! Now, I have to wait and see if anyone actually buys one of my photos. I should probably learn more about search rankings on Shutterstock in the meantime. I’ll share any updates and what I learn in a future post. I’ll also likely try submitting to other sites so that I can compare the process and hopefully my earnings. I’ll share details about that too.
Side hustles. It’s mentioned a lot in the media, but how realistic is it to take on a side hustle? Not to mention, if you look up side hustles on Google, it seems like it’s an easy way to get exploited or scammed (see screen capture of the first page of my Google search below). At best, it’s a good way for web businesses to profit through click bait–note: maybe I should start a website about side hustles as a side hustle? I’m going to briefly cover some of the most common side hustle suggestions and my initial impressions after doing some preliminary research. I’ll narrow down which ideas seem the most attractive/realistic for me and then do a deeper dive in future posts.
After sifting through some of these websites, here are common ideas for side hustles:
Driving for Uber or Lyft or delivery for companies like Amazon, Uber Eats, Door Dash, or Postmates
Answering surveys (e.g., Mturk; Survey Junkie)
Being a virtual assistant
Blogging; Affiliated marketing; Email marketing
Teaching English or tutoring; Teach/Sell on online course or make video tutorials on YouTube
Renting out a spare room on Airbnb
Freelancing on sites like Fiverr or TaskRabbit
Get a part-time job
Write an eBook
Sell things on sites like Etsy, Ebay, Amazon, or Craigslist
Delivery & Driving: I hate driving and admittedly, I’m not great at it either. So the less I drive, the better, for everyone’s sake. Anecdotaly, I’m pretty sure it’s possible to make a decent amount of money by driving for one of these services though. A close friend of mine does food delivery, full-time, and they love that they can control their hours and they have no problems paying their bills each month. I, on the other hand, would need to factor in the potential cost of higher than average car damage and a therapist to help me get through my rage fits in traffic. If it’s something you’re interested in, I recommend reviewing recent reports on the average earnings of drivers in your area. Business Insider, for example, just published a recent article summarizing a JP Morgan report about the average earnings of drivers in cities where Uber and Lyft drivers make the most (click the image to go to the article):
Delivering for companies like Amazon (through Amazon Flex) pay a flat rate of $18-25 per hour, which can make the compensation more consistent than food delivery.
Surveys: I’m pretty skeptical of the ability to make money from these survey apps. For example, compensation on Mturk is really low:
Screen capture of postings on Mturk
Most of the surveys pay less (way) than $0.50 but they can take anywhere from 5-10 min to over an hour. If you calculate the amount of time it takes you on average to finish these surveys, you will often make much much less than the minimum wage. Plus, some of the surveys seem sketchy to me. On Mturk, sometimes you get directed to unsecure sites or the surveyor wants you to download an app on your computer or phone or both. Personally, I just don’t trust those types of surveys, so that really narrows my options.
As for options like Survey Junkie, it’s based on a point system. It’s a lot like Mturk in that you have to consistently answer surveys in order to become eligible for better paying surveys. The amount of time you spend can also vary considerably for the same amount of points–e.g., 40 points for a 5 minute survey vs. 40 points for a 20 minute survey. One hundred points is equivalent to $1. You need a minimum of 1,000 points to cash out, which generally takes about 2 months. If you’re interested in learning more, read this article. The article also provides a list of other survey sites/apps as well. If you have any personal experience with these sites/apps and are willing to share, comment below please!
Virtual Assistant (VA): I know very little about being a Virtual Assistant. Reading through some people’s experiences on Reddit, it seems difficult to juggle with a full-time job. It also seems like you have to be very well-organized and able to quickly shift tasks (example; example2). If this is something you’re interested in, you can search for virtual assistant jobs on sites like remote.co, upwork.com, and flexjobs.com.
Blogging and Affiliated marketing: Apparently, there are people out there that make money blogging. I can’t find any solid data on earned income from blogging. It seems like a vast majority make $0 to less than $100 a month from their blog (e.g., digitalnomadwannabe survey results; blogtyrant; lifehacker 2014). Although I would be ecstatic if my blogging resulted in positive cash flow, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend blogging to everyone. High quality blogs take a lot of time and effort. Additionally, the only way you’re every going to make money from it is by marketing it. You can’t make money from a blog that isn’t visible. That’s a lot of work too. With that said, I’m not completely ruling this out as a legitimate side hustle. If I somehow manage to generate income from my blog, I will absolutely share the details. I’ll probably start by researching this very detailed site about making money by blogging on WordPress. The thing that sticks out to me is the option for affiliated marketing. Sometimes this costs money and oftentimes you have to have a certain level of readership before it’s even an option. The process is very similar for email marketing, but every option I have ever seen costs money to pay for a service where you can manage your marketing campaigns (e.g., Mailchimp). In researching both affiliated marketing and email marketing, it seems like you should already have a product or service you’re trying to sell. Ideally, I would prefer to promote a product of my choice on my site (or newsletter if I had one), but of course it doesn’t work that way. There’s still a lot of potential here though and definitely something I plan on looking into. If you’re making money through your blog or have in the past, please respond in a comment!
Tutoring: I’ve head a lot about tutoring sites but there are so many out there. How do you know which ones are legit? Some of websites aren’t even fully functional, like telelanguage, or look so generic to be real like gofluent. It’s probably best to go with a reputable company for something like this, like Chegg, Magoosh, Tutorme, and skooli. I’m less sure about sites like Englishfromatoz, qkids, and landiEnglish. Some of these sites require that you have at least a Bachelor’s degree and some have a very low acceptance rate. Tutorme, for example, has less than 4% acceptance rate. In general, it seems like compensation is between $10 and $20.
Online Instructional Videos: Selling an online course seems like it has potentially high returns if you do it right, although like blogging data, I question how representative the data are for this. According to this site, you can make between $1,000 to $5,000 a month from your online course. It seems pretty time-consuming though and you have to have a skill that you can teach. You also have to market your class. The one real drawback for me is that you should probably be pretty comfortable being filmed, which I am not. Here are some tips on monetizing an online course. It’s also probably a good idea to aim for the most successful platforms (see Owler for a list of ranks and revenue by company).
Airbnb: Airbnb isn’t an option right now because I don’t have an extra room to rent out. I do have experience with listing a spare room on Airbnb though. I really enjoyed it! It’s fun meeting new people while earning some extra cash–we were ultimately net positive after Airbnb fees, cleaning expenses, and electricity. If you’re interested in this option, I recommend checking Airbnb listings in (or very close) to your neighborhood to get an idea of how much you can charge. Make sure that the listing is/would be very similar to yours. For example, do they have a private bathroom; do they have a private entryway; is there parking; do they have air conditioning; is there access to extras like a pool or fitness center; how close are they to restaurants, bars, coffee shops, public transportation, and grocery stores. Also, change the dates to see how many nights a month their room is typically booked to get an idea of how much you can make. Remember to account for fees that Airbnb charges and local taxes. Some cities also require that you register with the local/state government, which may or may not come with an additional fee.
Freelancing: After browsing through fiverr and freelancer, I’m not sure if I have a skill set that I could easily sell as a side hustle on one of these sites. The writing section looks like an option I could probably sell services for but some people are offering prices as low as $5, which definitely makes me wonder if it’s worth it. I’m also worried about the subjectivity of someone’s assessment of a product like writing and how this could affect the way I’m rated. Additionally, even if I could do something like build a website (a skill I’m trying to learn btw), how can you ensure that you deliver a product that the client is happy with? For example, what if they don’t quite know how to communicate what they’re looking for and then that misunderstanding results in something they don’t want? This option makes me nervous but I wouldn’t completely rule it out as an option. I’ve definitely been entertaining the idea of selling stock images and learning web design so I can try to build website templates.
Part-time job: It would depend on the job. I don’t hate the idea of working at a cafe or something like a plant nursery, but this is definitely the least flexible option. Unless I’m able to find a part-time job that is fully remote with flexible hours, I can easily rule this out as an option.
eBook: An ebook seems like a better option than creating an online class or freelancing because it’s less limited to certain technical skills. However, I’m sure some topics sell better than others and there may be a steeper price to this option than the others since you may need to pay to self-publish. I’d probably start with blogging first since it comes with a lower cost and requires a lot of the same skills, including identifying your audience and marketing to them, in addition to skillful writing.
Selling things: Personally, I don’t have things lying around my house that I can easily sell on Craigslist or Ebay. If I do have something to sell, it’s probably something I’m going to sell for a lot less money than what I purchased it for. So if anything, selling on sites like Craigslist or Ebay is about recuperating costs rather than earning additional income, especially because I’m also not very motivated to find things that I can purchase for cheap and resale–which is also sometimes referred to as drop shipping if you’re selling your product on sites like Amazon. There’s also the option of trying to sell something that you made on sites like Etsy, which is actually kind of complicated with their fees, sales taxes, and shipping costs. This is something I’ll write about sometime in the future because I have a product sitting in my closet that I haven’t listed on Etsy because trying to figure all of that stuff out made me want to repeatedly hit my head against my desk.
Conclusion: So that realistically leaves me with the following options: Survey apps, Freelancing, and Blogging/affiliated marketing. I’m putting online courses, tutoring, and ebooks on the back burner for now, but I haven’t completely ruled them out.
‘A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it’ – Max Planck
Stella Min 