Hello from Whitehorse! I'm spending a few days "North of 60" in Whitehorse, Yukon visiting a school chum from Ryerson, Cathie Archbould. We're putting our heads together this weekend to work on our businesses, do some information sharing, and come up with some ideas to sell and promote our stock photos. Cathie is also shooting a lot of the weekend's activities for a local magazine called: North of Ordinary, which is available on Air North flights. Yesterday we bombed around town a bit and I took the shots above of a man made ice climbing wall. While being here I've also had a chance to read Dan Heller's book: Profitable photography in the digital age, which is a great resource for anyone considering selling their stock photographs online.
First off, great book Dan! If you haven't read any of Dan's business writing, check out his business blog or his website: www.danheller.com. I know I've mentioned him before, and I must say that his approach to the business of photography and stock photography is realistic and straightforward. I wrote Dan a month or so ago to get his opinion on joining PhotoShelter to sell my stock. He didn't endorse nor dis-endorse PhotoShelter, but he encouraged me to just get started any way I could. So, I did. I started scanning my stock photo collection and naming the files and adding text to my site using the search engine optimization techniques I learned from Dan's seminar I took last October. Just for fun yesterday, I looked up my web usage stats for February. To my surprise I had been found by search string terms that directly matched the text in my file names or the description text within my site. For example: "woman triathlon" was a search term that came up in my stats. So, to find out how high I ranked with that term, I plunked in "woman triathlon" into Google and was not shocked to have 345,000 returns on that search. I was ranked #14! Yes that's right, showed up on the second page! In case you're wondering how long it took to get noticed by search engines, it was less than a month from the time I published the triathlon page of photos. So, my point is, SEO works! - even for beginners, and even on a small scale. If you are planning to sell your photos, either stock or assignment using the Internet, all you need to do is employ some simple SEO techniques and you will get noticed, and probably sooner than you think.
So, next steps? I'll keep loading more and more images and keep using SEO techniques. Another thing I learned from Dan's book was that to make money in the stock business, you need to have a high volume of good quality images. You want to drive traffic to your site so that you will rank high in searches, make a few sales and then build your client base. Right now I only have about 100 images online, but there are a few hundred more high quality images sitting on my hard drives and DVD's. I've got my work cut out for me, not to mention, I'll keep tabs on what the search engines are looking for and make sure I have lots of product in those categories. I'll drop a few shots of different subject areas on my site to test the market. The search terms that come up in my web stats, are the ones I'll bet there is a demand for. The more demand the more images of that subject matter I'll shoot and upload. I'll let the market (the buyers) decide what's important instead of trying to predict it. Pretty exciting stuff for me. I'll let you know if it works.
