How to Earn Extra Money From Your Photography

What if I told you there is a social media platform on which you can earn money whenever somebody likes your content? And it's not owned by a big corporation but is governed by its community. In this article, I share my experience with such a platform that has been around for several years already.

Recently, I published an article about a scam in the crypto world targeting photographers. In that article, I highlighted that you should always be cautious when there's easy money to be made. But not all is bad in the crypto space. Some projects are worth exploring, and the Hive Blog is one of those.

Hive Blog

Unlike traditional social media platforms like Facebook or Instagram, which rely on likes and comments as their main form of interaction, the Hive Blog takes it a step further by offering actual rewards to content creators.

It is a decentralized blockchain-based platform with a unique way to monetize content. On Hive, you can not only showcase your photographs and share your articles, but you can also earn so-called Hive tokens. And while this might sound abstract, there's an easy way to convert those into Fiat currency.

I've been using the Hive Blog since its creation in 2020. Before that, I was a regular contributor to Steem, from which the Hive blockchain was forked when concerns about the concentration of power among a small group of Steem stakeholders arose. The goal of this fork was a more decentralized, community-driven platform for content creators, curators, and users. If the Hive blog will succeed with that in the long term is to be seen. But for now, the developers and the community still actively work on those goals.

On Peakd, one of the many decentralized app front ends for the Hive Blog, you can get an overview of current proposals for improving Hive's blockchain and infrastructure. Such proposals are a way to influence the direction of Hive. Developers use them to allocate funds, and users can vote for proposals they deem important.

Before I now share how you can earn money on Hive, I want to explain a key aspect of the blockchain. I mentioned that you earn Hive tokens for your content contributions. I also wrote that you can exchange those tokens for Fiat currency. But they have another use: you can convert them into so-called Hive Power, which translates into influence on the blockchain. One example is when you vote on other content. The more Hive Power you have, the more your vote is worth. You can even decide how much of your Hive Power you want to dedicate to a vote as a way of giving better content large rewards.

I should mention that only Hive Power worth several $1,000 will have a noticeable impact when voting on content. A typical contributor will not move the needle a lot.

How to Earn Money With Your Content

Let me be honest: Posting content on the Hive blog is no way to get rich quickly. It's not even a way to get rich. As with any social media platform, getting noticed and building a following takes time. But if you regularly share content, you'll slowly gain traction, and your posts will start earning rewards.

I've been on the blockchain for several years and have built a small following. But the money I earn from my articles varies. That's why I was looking for a way to provide value to the blockchain without much effort. My solution for that is reposting articles I write for my blog. The amount of work to create a repost is minimal, as I show in the feature video. It takes less than 10 minutes.

With apps like TravelFeed, you can set a "canonical" tag so Google doesn't flag such content as duplication. Instead, you gain additional exposure and another way of creating backlinks to your homepage.

From my experience, longer articles create more exposure than just posting a photo with text. The core idea of Hive is that the more value you add through your contribution, the more rewards you should get. It doesn't always work, and it's best to experiment and see what content gains the most traction for you.

On my blog, I post my long-form content only once a month with different success. The earnings vary, as not every article gets seen by the same amount of people. In one year, I make several hundred dollars that way with minimal effort. I keep one part of it on Hive and exchange the rest into other currencies through BlockTrades. If you have an account at one of the major trading platforms, you can use BlockTrades to send your money there and convert it into Fiat currency.

It's also important to note that the earnings are split equally between the authors of an article and the people voting on it within the first seven days after its creation. The idea is to create an incentive to be active on the blockchain and interact with other users' content. It means that my Java Indonesia Landscape Photography Guide did earn me around $65, while the voting period on my Sekumpul Photography Guide is still active.

Conclusion

If you are a professional photographer, a few $100 might look like peanuts. Turning posting on the Hive blog into a proper income stream would require effort and a much higher frequency of contributions and interaction with other users' content than I do.

It might still be beneficial to get an account and at least dabble with the Hive Blog. It has been proven that it's not one of the many fading trends in the crypto space because even though the token prices are down, people continue to post articles. And if the crypto market enters a period of hype and rising prices again, its nature will also help the Hive token to gain value. Then, a few $100 a year can quickly multiply.

And the best thing, in my opinion: you don't have to put any money into Hive to get started. It's one of the rare crypto apps where you can make money from a blockchain without an initial monetary investment.