Low-Cost Start-Up Photography Websites

Starting out as a photographer, your first expense is a camera, of course.

Free photo editing tools also exist on the net - Photoshop is great but expensive. Try GIMP and PhotoFiltre and Picasa - Picasa is mainly a good way to find your pics but it has some excellent basic editing tools which are often enough on their own. There are others you can look at but these are the ones that I have found useful.

But if you then want to sell your photos or products using your photos, printing quality prints that you haven't yet sold can be a huge investment.

And if you want to promote yourself online, then that can be another expense.

Now there are quite a few print-on-demand sites that can take care of that, yet not all produce all the items that you want.

So if you are new to this what should you do?

In my opinion, the best print-on-demand site for artists and photographers is RedBubble.com - it is user friendly and social and the results are excellent quality. However, they do not produce gift items like mugs, keychains, though they have expanded from t-shirts to include hoodies.

Zazzle.com has a range of gift items, including clothing items like shoes and ties.

FinerWorks.com will also allow an even wider range, jigsaw puzzles, keepsake boxes, etc.

Oh fine, so now I've spread my stuff over three sites. Well, it is an improved online presence, but even better is to have a single site that can ties all of these together. So now you want your own site. There are plenty of free-hosting sites to start you up - you pay extra when you can and upgrade.

And don't forget to keep taking photos - this web business can take up a lot of time.

Also, Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, etc) - link them to your site - they are a great way of getting noticed, especially if you are a very social person.

You can check out an example at Smallfox Photography and see if you like the result. However, as I said, there are many, many hosts to choose from and it is worth shopping around. Do you want to upgrade to a paid site in the future? You will get your own domain name and email accounts for the site and many other benefits, so it is worth looking at just what benefits you will get when you sign up and how much it will cost you.

And it is always a joy when you get that message: You have sold a print of....