Sell To The General Markets
Advance Notes: Search engines are a boon to stock photographers. Photo editors use Google to find photographers who have a hard-to-find or out-of-the ordinary photo. By giving keyword descriptions for each of your photos based on what search words you think a photo researcher would use to find the photo, you can make more sales.
Thanks to the Internet, search engines have now made it possible to sell those images in your photo files that are outside of your main photo specialization areas. Example: You may be known as an aviation photographer, but you have an outstanding picture of a particular waterfall in Oregon – in the wintertime. It may be just the image a photobuyer needs. How can you let potential buyers know about such images in your stock photography files?
Here’s how you can make contact:
List all of your images on a text-based website, either your own or a database that provides you with your own web pages, like the PhotoSourceBANK. (See http://www.photosource.com/products/psb.php) Label your photos with highly specific descriptive keywords (describing each of your photos). Photobuyers seeking content-specific pictures enter keywords for their search, describing what they need. If you have a match or near-match, your information will jump up for them. They will find the photo’s source: you.
HOW-TO
Anticipate how a photobuyer might search for a highly specific image. If you were a photobuyer that needed a photo of a pileated woodpecker in wintertime, you wouldn’t list “bird,” or “woodpecker, “ but “pileated woodpecker in winter.”
On your own website, or your personal web pages in a photo-search database, make your own “text” pages, listing 3 and 4-word descriptions of your photos. The “web crawlers” that capture information from the web, search personal databases as well as the massive ones.
If you get in the habit of entering brief descriptions of each of the marketable photos in your database (not only the main photos you feature at your site), you will have sales come your way.
Rohn Engh, veteran stock photographer and best-selling author of “Sell & ReSell Your Photos” and “sellphotos.com,” has helped scores of photographers launch their careers. Increasing numbers of photographers are putting text-based lists on the Web of the photographs they have available, either on their own web sites or on high-traffic photo databases like the PhotoSourceBANK (see www.photosource.com/products/psb.php). Photobuyers use such databases to find photos and to save research time. To receive the free report: “8 Steps to Becoming a Published Photographer,” visit http://www.sellphotos.com
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