--- In selling_stock_photography@yahoogroups.com, "Peter Forsberg" <peter@...> wrote:
>
> Howdy Fred,
>
> We obviously have very different definition of success. I can take or leave this forum. Anyway it is, I will be gone for some time anyway. Hopefully the links keep selling.
>
> Peter Forsberg
That's what you don't get, Peter. Maybe you don't have to but here it is (again) for those who do wish to get it:
When you sell your images you need to not only produce them but they also have to be marketed. The vast majority of photographers leave marketing to agencies and in turn, give agencies a great deal of their profit and control.
Because I succeeded at web marketing sooner than photography I come to this issue with a different perspective than most photographers. I realize that in this day and age it makes sense to build a marketing network as the foundation of your business; you can then sell whatever you wish that is related to that network.
For instance, because I have a large amount of traffic that is centered around images I can market posters; art prints; stock photography; clip art; fine art; pictures and picture frames... For the most part I stick with stock photography, art prints and clip art because that seems to work best for me. I leave all the peripheral "selling" to Google's Adsense, which actually accounts for the lions share of my income. The reason this is true is that Google is able to market products and services loosly related to the subjects in the images I market.
I realized this was true years ago when we started to get inquiries for things like bumpers or pets; the items appearing in the photos. This never happened when I was just marketing clip art illustrations, but with photos people were getting confused about whether we were selling the image or the subject of the image. That means that a lot of people were searching for products and coming to our pages, so having ads on those pages allows me to generate income even from the people who got to my page in error. They win; I win; I've also started to spread this wealth a bit with our monthly image contest so the photographers get a cut as well.
This is not the be-all and end-all of how to generate income from your images but it is one way for photographers to generate more income.
One thing I can tell you about marketing: unless you have a lot of money to throw at it you had better start now, put one foot in front of the other, and keep moving forward for the long haul. You suggest that my "links" as you like to call them, are a house of cards that may fall over any day now but I disagree, and I have 16 years of experience that tells me just the opposite is true, that the link I added 15 years ago is much more valuable than 10 that I add today. Search engines LOVE sites that have been around a long time, and like Gold, you can't generate 15 year old links out of thin air.
Fred Voetsch
Group Moderator - Selling Stock Photography
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/selling_stock_photography/
Owner - Acclaim Images, LLC
http://www.acclaimimages.com/
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