Marketing Your Online Stock Photography
I’ve been spending a good amount of time over on Twitter.com and have connected with tons of really talented photographers. Today I was asked by fellow Twitterer Mike Panic (www.mikepanic.com) how he could best market and present his iStockPhoto stock photography.
I do not know Mike other than a brief exchange that we had on Twitter today, so the first thing I did was jump over to his website to see what he was all about. Right of the bat I noticed is that he had no mention of his stock photography anywhere on his site, at least that I could easily find. So from there I moved on over to iStockPhoto.com and did a quick advanced search for Member Name Mike Panic and still no luck, 0 results. I’m sure Mike probably signed up under a Nickname that I am not aware of. Typically the third thing I’d do is ask Mike to send me an email, so I can see what is in his email signature if anything at all, but for the sake of time I opted to let that go.
Sorry Mike I’m not picking on you, rest assured you are not alone when it comes to overlooking the most obvious ways to not only Market your stock photos online but your entire business in general.
Below I offer these 3 very easy solutions to help you increase your online stock photo exposure.
- Create and host an alternate gallery on your personal website with large images that link directly to the image on your stock site of choice. At the very lest have a link that takes the person directly to your stock photo gallery.
- When signing up for an account on a stock photo site such as iStockPhoto.com don’t use a nickname such as “PhotoAce” use your real name, this will allow for people to easily find your work.
- Get in the habit of creating an email signature and listing all the sites and places people can find you and your work. It might seem a little vain at first, but get over it. Figure out how many emails you send out each day, that’s free advertising.
I hope this advice helps Mike and all photographers out there trying to increase exposure in this ever-increasing competitive marketplace.
If you have solutions that have worked for you we’d love to hear it. Leave us a comment.
If you are a Twitter user make sure to follow me at www.twitter.com/crismitchell I reciprocate the follow for anyone follows me.
jackie connelly:
I would also add 2 thoughts to this post to help Mike:
(1) KNOW YOUR MARKET. Who is going to buy your stock photography? One could start by considering the medium your stock photos are appropriate for and who would potentially buy them. Then, tell them! On average (depending on who you talk to) people must hear about you/your service/your product 6-8 times before they’ll buy.
(2) COST. One must consider the cost of their marketing efforts in comparison to how much they’re going to potentially make from these stock photos. If I’m not mistaken, I could go to iStockPhoto right now and buy any number of photographs for $5, $2 and even $1.Given that, how much money are you willing to spend on the marketing on something that is going to earn you a percentage of that $1? This is called ROI (Return on Investment).
Keep us posted as to how it goes!
~ j
Posted on December 31st, 2008 at 4:30 am
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Posted on December 31st, 2008 at 10:05 am
Mike Panic:
Chris, first and foremost, thanks for following up with an article after our brief Twitter exchange, so nice to see positive things actually come of Twitter.
I’ll address what you assessed to the best of my ability.
When I rebuilt my site about a year ago (and still continue to build on it) I purposly went with a very minimilistic layout, and I chose not to put iStock badges on the site. I’m a photographer for hire first, stock photographer for passive income second. Since I don’t sell prints online (yet) I assumed it was in my best interest to not sell stock directly from my site. This holds some water when you consider I still do family photos, magazine layouts, etc. etc. I’d rather that they pay me a half day rate of $6-800 instead of buying a few stock photos for $5-10.
You are correct, searching iStockphoto won’t show my name, even though my username is Mike Panic. This happens for 2 reasons - iStock’s search engine was never geared to show results for usernames and, I signed up in 2002 when they allowed spaces in usernames. A Google search for Mike Panic will show my iStockphoto porfolio as the 5th link.
For the suggestions:
1: http://www.mikepanic.com/category/stock/ - While it’s not terribly obvious, it does exist as part of my blog.
2: My username is: Mike Panic. I have talked to the admins and they will change it to MikePanic (no space) when I want, but they just sent me 250 exclusive business cards, so I will be waiting a while yet.
3: Done, I promote both my website, which you listed above and my side project, Randomn3ss.com, but not my stock porfolio persay.
Again, thanks for using me as a test subject. I’m still not sure putting an iStock link right on my site, since I do paid photography as well that often makes several months worth of iStock royalties.
I’ve also started to include both my mikepanic.com and iStock exclusive business card (with free credits) into items I sell on eBay when mailing them out, just as another way of marketing myself and trying to get the name out there more. I do well on iStock, all things considering, but always looking for new and better ways to promote. Again, thank you for the write-up.
Posted on December 31st, 2008 at 2:06 pm
Cris Mitchell:
Alright a little action here
Jackie you are dead on knowing your market is key and this dovetails perfectly into what I was going to suggest to Mike.
Mike I totally understand your concerns about mixing your work for hire business with your stock business. While I don’t want to get into a big debate over the validity of microstock sites or come off as being rude, I think the reason why you are in this situation is because you are trying to sell your photos for a fraction of what they are worth, with the hopes of making it up in sheer volume. With this business model you are always going to run the risk of having a client buy a $2.00 image over hiring you for your day rate is. Heck you run that risk no matter if you have the links on your site or not.
If you were going the route of a more traditional Rights Managed stock agency, having links to your stock images right on your site would not be a be an issue at all. Take for instance my friend and amazing photographer Amyn Nasser. From his website http://www.amynnasser.com, Amyn links directly to a gallery right on his site called Image Licensing Lightbox where he has direct links to his PhotoShelter.com account. There is no conflict here because Amyns Rights Managed Stock Photos are licensed for hundreds to thousands of dollars depending on their usage. Amyn also is a shrewd marketer and also lists all of his stock agencies in his email signature as I recommended in the article.
So with all this said you have a simple solution, just register another domain name ie: MikePanicStock.com and keep things totally separate from your main site, this will give you the best of both worlds. Again if you have to rely on people trying to find your stock work on iStockPhoto good luck
Just don’t forget to include your link back to your Work For Hire site in case someone doesn’t see what they want and wants to hire you for a custom shoot 
As far as the username issue on istock, i’ll admit I’m not that versed in the intricacies of iStockPhoto, it was just more of a general suggestion to always use your real name as opposed to a nickname when you want people to find you.
I’m going to try to cook up a workflow solution that will allow you to easily manage personal galleries of your stock work with direct links to your istock photos for purchase. I’ll try to find a few minutes over the next few days to do that, so keep your eyes on the site.
Thanks again and keep the comments coming.
Cris…
Posted on December 31st, 2008 at 3:14 pm
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Posted on January 1st, 2009 at 4:50 am
Marketing:
Your article is very informative and useful. Glad I found it. Cheers.
Posted on January 29th, 2009 at 8:17 pm