Steve Heap – Photographer

How does Steve make money online?

Steve makes money online in several ways, including:

• Selling stock photos and videos (mainly via Shutterstock)
• Selling prints of his photographs
• Selling ebooks about stock photography
• Personalized portfolio reviews
• Fees from his membership program
• Affiliate commissions from recommending third-party products on his website (example)

How much money does Steve make?

It’s unclear how much money Steve earns in total from his online business.

However, he’s very transparent about his income from stock photography, posting regular earnings reports on his website.

In his 2019 earnings report he wrote:

I ended up with total earnings of $35,595 compared with $35,790 in 2018.

It looks like about $5000 of his 2019 stock income came from video.

In an earnings report for Q2 2020, Steve wrote:

Overall, the quarter from March to June 2020 was not too bad – ending with $8966 of which $755 came from video sales. Q1 of 2020 was slightly lower at $8458.

So in Q2 he earned $8211 from photo sales alone, which works out to $2,737 per month.

Steve includes an interesting graph in that report, showing how his earnings per image have decreased over the years:

$0.60 per image was about the norm back in 2014, but nowadays it’s less than half that.

How did Steve get started?

As per the about page on his website:

Steve Heap is a well-known stock photographer having started in the business in early 2008.

Presumably he’s been a photographer for much longer than that.

Last I checked, he had more than 14,000 files for sale on Shutterstock.

In March 2019 Steve posted this video on YouTube with lots of tips for getting started with stock photography…

What type of online business does Steve have?

Steve runs a multifaceted online business. 

According to our framework it can be broken down like this:

• Freelance (Level 2)
  Steve does personalized portfolio reviews for other photographers.
• Referral (Level 3)
  Steve has some affiliate offers on his website.
• Digital Products (Level 4)
  Stock photography and sales of his ebooks seem to be Steve’s main source of income. His site membership would also fit here.
• Physical Products (Level 5)
  You can buy Steve’s artwork as physical prints.

Follow the links above for more info and examples for each type of business.