Marketing and Promotion Guide for Selling Microstock Photos by Microstockinsider

Marketing & Promotion for

Microstock Photographers

ÂŠ2011 microstockinsider.com

This is preview version of this document Please feel free to add your comments (and highlight my many typos) at http://microstockinsider.com/guides/microstock-photographers-marketing-guide Thanks, Steve steve@microstockinsider.com

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Contents 1. SCOPE................................................................................................... 4 2. INTRODUCTION....................................................................................5 3. MARKETING OR PROMOTION?............................................................ 6 4. TERMINOLOGY..................................................................................... 8 5. CONTENT BASED WEBSITES..................................................................10 6. MAILING LISTS AND RSS.......................................................................13 7. GOING SOCIAL....................................................................................16 8. WHAT DO YOU DO WITH ALL THIS ATTENTION?.................................. 22 9. CONCLUSIONS.....................................................................................24

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1. SCOPE

Who is this guide aimed at? If you are reading this guide then you probably already have a more than passing interest in promoting yourself online as a photographer. You likely already have a personal website (or at least dabbled with some online presence), social services or posted your photos/ portfolio on a flickr like service. Many microstock photographers operate on a part time basis, some with the intention of turning that into full time work in the future. There are two ways to look at self-promotion from a microstock view point: • Concentrate on taking great photos and they will sell themselves. • Market your work everywhere which way you can to earn more. A few years back it was easy to think the margins in mirostock did not allow any scope to spend money/time on self-promotion other than a basic webpage or blog. As microstock becomes the ‘norm’ and more photographers work at microstock as a full time job I’ve started to see countless photographers marketing themselves in all kinds of novel ways.

This guide is just as useful to hobbyists as it is to full time microstockers. Some of the topics however clearly require some investment in time which is beyond the scope of most people who only have a few hours to spare for their casual online activities. Marketing online is so easily scaled; you can spend as little or as much time as you like taking different approaches, the keys to it all are the iterative cycle of planning, implementation, measurement and refinement/analysis. You probably think your biggest hurdle at the moment is “how can I build a website” “how can I get 1000 followers” “how can I build a mailing list” – that’s the easy bit. Creating a plan that works is much harder to do, measurement and interpretation of results can be really quite challenging. Refinements to your plan often include simply accepting a failure and learning from it. We are going to look at marketing only in the online space, for photographers or illustrators who are selling ‘images’ as their products, i.e. stock photographers. Photographers working in other fields may be able to take away some useful information. ©2011 microstockinsider.com

2. INTRODUCTION

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To start with I really must highlight that with the diversity of images photographers take it’s impossible to create a one-size-fits-all marketing guide. A recent thread on microstock group (2010: http:// www.microstockgroup.com/general-stock-discussion/strategiesfor-self-marketing-in-microstock) started me trying to organize 10 years of online experience into an easy to read guide. Most marketing activity online boils down to the following 4 options, each of which I will look at in more depth below:  Turn into a social network guru building networks of buyers who you have a relatively hands-off relationship. Posting your images sprinkled with your affiliate links at any opportunity – you match the images to an audience who wants them making your ‘network’. A network that buyers want to be a part because you make it useful for them; hopefully they will also be taking part suggesting useful material themselves.

 Build a website or blog and create regular written content that in time will hopefully attract visitors, some of who will be buyers. Such written content might also be on an article syndication network, press releases and guest posts. Making use of forums by helping answer questions too, just make sure you are answering buyers questions, not photographers’.

 The traditional independent stock photographer method - create a contact base of buyers and sell direct to them. I don’t recommend for microstock, but it’s not something to rule out, consider it depending on the price point people are willing to buy your images at. Some of the tools used in this style of marketing (CRM) email lists etc. are still useful.

Which is best? Only you can work that out, and often it’s a mix of some if not ALL of them as your audience demands.

 As above but with your images make the main part of the content. Create a gallery of images, sit back and prey. To promote this perhaps give some of the images away as free samples with a creative commons license to attract image users, then try to convert visitors to your stock archive into buyers. ©2011 microstockinsider.com

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3. MARKETING OR PROMOTION? Strictly speaking, we are only taking about promoting here, the other three marketing P’s, price, product and place in microstock are something you don’t have too much control over outside of branding yourself and doing a few things with descriptions. You can sell direct in addition to microstock or you could try selling specialty work or rights managed, if you do then you open yourself to a lot more decisions including those other P’s (which for the most part I’m not going to discuss in too much detail).

Custom Shoot

Knowing your customer So the microstock agency has set the price, and provides a place of sale. As the photographer you have already created the product to match the audience so you should already know your audience reasonably well. It’s still worth a recap on who exactly that microsotck audience is and where they sit amongst stock photos buyers as a whole. You should already be well aware that microstock has a bigger target audience than traditional (macrostock) because of the lower prices. The pyramid idea I’ve drawn here is derived from the work C.K. Prahalad

Rights Managed & Macrostock Premium Microstock Microstock Creative Commons, Free & Stolen

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A lot of photographers ignore or shun the bottom of the triangle. If there is a single thing you take away from this section then it’s the knowledge that those people (image thieves and all) are a resource that can, if you choose, be tapped into. You don’t have to give anything away for free, just have you eyes open. I once read photographer explaining how they had modified their website to block/redirect anyone visiting via google images – yes google images is a source of huge quantities of traffic whose sole intent is quite often ripping of your photos, but technologies like picscout are today turning even stolen photos into a resource for you. This entire guide is dedicated to getting more pairs off eyes onto your work so denying that ‘the tier below’ exists is somewhat foolish.

The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid is there, it just needs to the tapped, it probably won’t form your entire promotion effort, and in fact it might not form any part of it, but it is there. Be warned it’s a sector of the market based on fractions of cents per visitor and tiny margins - certainly not for everyone, and certainly not a place associated with quality or style.

You probably already know that microstock agencies have been selling premium collections for some time, essentially marketing a macrostock (midstock perhaps) priced product at people who came to buy $1 images, needless to say they only convert a tiny percentage – it’s all they need to, some buyers can quite easily move a level up or down given the right image.

4. TERMINOLOGY

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No area of expertise is complete without lots of jargon and a sprinkling of TLA’s. Here is a small glossary to get started with, some you will probably have heard of already, or can guess the meaning. This is just the start of it; there is a full glossary at the back of this guide. Lead Someone you have in your marketing sights. Someone who, with your help will soon be reaching your ‘Goal’. Goal The target you have assigned to your Leads. It might be to buy a photo, get them to signup to a mailing list, navigate your site to reach a certain page, click an affiliate link etc. Conversion What happens when one of your leads reaches your goal, normally applied to the end of the sales process i.e. a sale rather than one of the ‘funnel’ steps on the way there. A conversion ratio is the percentage of your leads that convert into a goal. Funnel A series of steps which your leads pass through in order to reach goal. e.g. See your Ad > Click it > Read Web Page > Subscribe for Updates > Click on a link in an email > Buy an Image. You can analyze the funnel to see where your leads are dropping out of the process. For microstock there is a dead end where you loose track the buyer when they leave your site via an affiliate link, so you can only track people so far.

CTR click through ratio, the percentage of people who when visiting a page click on a link or a banner of your choosing. CRM customer relationship management. The method (usually a software tool) by which you keep track of your leads and previous customers. It’s quite common not to keep track of individuals at all when dealing with microstock. CRM software is employed by the sales teams in big business to convert the leads generated by the marketing department into paying customers. CLV customer lifetime value, how much you (estimate) that someone you have snared with your marketing hook with generate over the time they buy from you. Most of them (IMHO) will buy just the one image from you and never return, but the ones that you can turn into repeat customers (with reminder emails etc) are very valuable. CAC customer acquisition cost, how much you spend on advertising to gain one new ‘average’ customer. Say for example you market with email lists, the CAC may be the cost to get one person to signup. And the CLV is the value that the average customer brings you before they leave your list. This gets very hard to track when you apply it to anonymous things like RSS subscriptions. The same does apply, each RSS subscriber has a value, in the microstock arena it’s likely to be a quite small (don’t expect that each subscriber is going to bring you $100 in purchases in a year, I’d suggest that value to be not even $1. ©2011 microstockinsider.com

Marketing and Promotion for Microstock Photographers | Microstockinsider.com | 9 SEM Search engine marketing. Using paid placements and SEO methods to generate traffic to your website from a search engine. SEO Search engine optimization. Making your site understandable by search engine robots and creating strategic links. If you are not in the first page of results on google then you are not really in business! SES Search Engine Submission - the ‘art’ of getting your website listed at a search engine, mostly comprises of the previous two SERP (or SERPs) Search Engine Results Page. Where your images should be. It’s hard work as you face competition from all the microstock agencies who also want their images to be there. MLM stands for “horrible scam” and is a way to describe “pyramid schemes” without ringing alarm bells Drip or Autoresponder Series, getting people to subscribe (usually with an incentive of information, or a freebie) to receive a sequence of predefined messages from you. The message being carefully tailored to be useful to the reader with a subtle marketing message on the side (that includes just keeping the viewer aware of your brand, and making regular visits to your site).

5. CONTENT BASED WEBSITES

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Your Photos make Great Content. In the online world Content is King (so everyone seems to say). Get people looking at the content and you can then use that to market your work. Everybody’s work is different there are a multitude of different ways to market it, fine art landscape may go down very well as desktop wallpapers (no, that’s something to look into seriously, there is money there) but conceptual stock images would not. Different target audiences market in different spheres, professionals using linked-in are not in the market for frivolous distractions like pretty screensavers or link-bate like “50 beautiful flower photos”, likewise someone arriving at the portfolio site of a commercial photographer it not the least bit interested in their latest microstock or freebies. Less is very frequently more when defining types or sections of content, this is why you tend to see photographers with more than one website, a site for each market of their work if they work in more than one arena. One thing that photos do have on their side is that they can be very engaging, especially on an internet where people skim over text without reading the detail, use this to your advantage. Conversely photos are not easily found by search engines unless you also use some words to describe each one. As a photographer you have a ready source of great content and all the tools and opportunity to create something bespoke on demand. I loose track of the times that bloggers recommend you should include a really great image in your post to get attention, despite the text of a blog post being the most important part it’s often the photo that captures you to read the entire story.

Blogging ain’t want it used to be Less people blog these days, perhaps to rephrase that “they post less conventional blog posts”. A photographers blog is more likely to feature somewhat infrequent large posts and along with an aggregation of other content they have posted on social netwoks, be that a sidebar with flickr images, facebook updates of their most recent tweets. If you are a social network hater that’s fine, your blog can just as easily aggregate updates from services like smugmug or anywhere else you are posting or commenting. The ‘blog’ or personal page is still important, it’s the hub of the posts and comments you have shared with the world and somewhere that those who are interested can get to see your personal side. Blogs are different now to what they were five years ago for various reasons, one is that visitors now want to dip in and get as much or as little interactivity as they choose. They might be interested in your personal ratings on twitter, they might only be interested in major updates, new images in a certain category or they may want to see a feed of each and every single photo you have shared online. Your ‘site’ now allows them to do all of this with, at simplest, just a few cut and paste widgets.

Where do I even start?

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Branding and target audience are something you should already have an idea about. It may be multiple separate brands or hats to wear “me as a microstock photographer” “me as travel photographer” “me as an illustrator” “me as a commercial photographer” “portrait photographer” etc. Some of these hats coexist nicely together and some need to be kept separate – common sense I hope. It never looks all that professional to see a photographer portfolio of wedding portraits with a few stock or commercial product shots stuck in on the side as an “I also do this” – it’s a turn off to both audiences.

Keywords, Google and Your Target Audience Something to consider: It may well be that to get your image onto google and make your site a PR6 (or whatever your aim) then the way to do that is to attract non buyers to link to it, provided that a buyer also uses the same search terms (or one that google sees as the same ‘intent’) all of those non-buyers who enjoyed your site and ‘voted’ for it with a click will mean that when the buyer comes along to do a search your site is in the search results. I hope I don’t have to make it obvious that being ranked number 1 for “funny cat pictures” is perhaps of less use than “photos business people” but still if a buyer searches for “cat photo” and your site still gets a good rankings and offers a solution to licensing them then great. Google is quite happy with this type of set-up, your page with a good quality cat photo is perfectly valid search result for both people wanting to look but not buy and those looking buy “cat” photos. The same might not be so true in the future as search engines get smarter and try to figure out a searchers ‘intent’ certainly if they stick the world “buy” or “stock” on the end of the search string you might be somewhat penalized.

Another benefit of targeting the perceived “non buyers” is that given the right content the message you send can be viral, as it’s not perceived as marketing, just “something fun”. From my point of view most viral marketing happens quite slowly. Not overnight, simply put if your content is good people will link to it or mention it, over time, provided that the content does not age then more will link to it, more will see it and click on it in google images. Eventually your content will, if it’s better than all the other stuff online rise to the top. That’s the best place to be: long life quality content instead of flash in the pan viral “one hit wonders”. I think is very had to achieve any kind of instant viral effect with a stock photo, the images from my experience that bring in traffic from google images and web search are very loosely what I would call ‘oooh that’s pretty’ be it sunsets, travel locations, flowers, cute critters etc. That said if you have enough photos online you will also start to see ‘long tail’ results from unusual subjects or searches with quite specific search keyphrases.

Segmentation

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For a content based website you choose your target market up front, and it’s pretty much fixed. So choose your branding, domain names, email addresses etc carefully. Neither too specific nor too vague, it’s possible to narrow or diversify later but not if you have locked yourself in with a choice like “allbreedsofcatphotos.com” and later decide you only want to photo Siamese. You can also target specific demographics amongst your sites’ visitors later on with updates and hub pages tailored directly for them.

Timely Vs. Evergreen Content It’s easy to correlate an increase in sales following a popular blog post, but the big question here might be “yes I made 20% more sales for 1 day after I posted about my recent trip to India, would it of been better if I had put that time towards writing a larger detailed story about Indian travel photos which will attract traffic to my site for several months to come”? Okay, provided that your 20% extra sales justify the time spent to blog then you have a working business, keep posting, keep the sales coming. It’s much harder to measure the effect of creating long term ‘evergreen’ content on a website – something that is of use for at least a year. Such ‘campaigns’ can take months to bear fruit, and you didn’t plan properly in the first place you may have ended up creating a successful niche website that’s only frequented by people who have no intention of buying your images. I personally think there is still a lot of life left in creating useful, detailed and relatively static content that will draw in traffic for years to come with little maintenance overhead – it depends on your audience and niche. That last sentence might sound like a no brainer, but a quick look

at “google alerts” or social bookmarking sites would lead you to believe that everything online is glib, with vague conclusion, less than 1000 worlds long, full of subheadings and just one link to someone’s website. Did you ever bookmark or go back to a post like that?

Fingers in Pies or Sharp Focus Deciding to focus on one business or diversify into several is mostly a matter of personal choice. I think a little from column A and a little from column B. Focus is great, but so is being entrepreneurial and bursting with new ideas. I think it’s just wise to stay away from the two extremes: • Complete focus and overwork, leading to lack of creativity, boredom, burnout or unhealthy obsession, Tunnel vision. • Starting too many different, ill conceived or disparate ideas, completing few/none of them, failing to learn from mistakes, being unable to use knowledge gained to do better in the future projects. Understand that for many people working as a photographer eclipses or overlaps a previous hobby, so it’s fine to have a ‘little side line’ in something, the benefits might purely be recreation that is not accounted for on a balance sheet. Measure or estimate (not guesstimate) how much time each business takes compared to its incomes, but factor in your own personal motives. Lots of photographers love their job and make just enough money through personal choice rather than biting the bullet to do something they enjoy less but earn more. Your choice. ©2011 microstockinsider.com

6. MAILING LISTS AND RSS

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No marketing roundup is complete without mentioning mailing lists and email aka “permission marketing”. According to Jacob Nielson (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/ newsletters.html) email newsletters remain the internets best tool for supplementing a website. A website and a newsletter complement each other. In some respects you can think of the two in tandem operating like a facebook fan page or other social media platform. Users can both find the fan page online to ‘pull’ and do research at their pace, and be ‘pushed’ news and updates at a time of your choosing. These days most (but not all) email contact is done by request, that is you provide mechanisms for users to subscribe to notifications and updates, and they choose what they want to hear and how, examples might be: • New posts on a Blog • New images matching specified keywords • Replies to the comment I just posted • All images posted in the “food photography > asian’ gallery • Important site announcements only • Special offers when they are available

Provide these ‘notifications’ by opt-in email and RSS if you can. In fact provide everything you can via RSS, even if you think that your buyers are not the kind of people who know what a ‘feed reader’ is. There are plenty of bright sparks online who will take any RSS feed of data they can and turn it into some useful service – a service hopefully with your name all over it, or at least things you have posted. This is not theft, it’s syndication, it’s something you want, it means anything you write or images you post have a broader reach. Even if sites syndicate your content without attribution to you as the source you can still liberally sprinkle your posts with links back to your own site or watermarks. There is still life left in traditional mailing lists and auto-responders, but they are not easy to operate successfully, I’d leave them until you have plenty of visitors/followers, getting people to part with their email address and opt in is difficult but can work well if you dangle a carrot of some kind when they confirm their subscription. Look at mailchimp for a free list up to 1000 users. It’s hard to get more than 10% of users to even click on an email, less to convert them into a purchase that way. If you want to keep people up-todate touch via email then I’d suggest letting them subscribe to a feedburner email and then look into hosting your own mailing list. Self hosting is a serious and somewhat fraught undertaking if you have more than say 1000 subscribers, but may be the only way unless your list can justify the price of a mail-out at a hosted service – for the pennies involved in microstock the sums often don’t add up unless you have very highly targeted audience with high click through and conversion rates.

Timing

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There are two types of message – the instant ‘notify me when this is updated’ (request messaging) and the ‘please subscribe to our newsletter’ list (permission marketing). Obviously the request messages / rss etc need to be as instant as possible, but there is also value is offering users digests of information to receive weekly or even daily. If you have a large enough mailing list you can justify writing tailored content each week or month to update contacts with “what’s happening”, it is however a hard juggling act to balance the frequency and content of these updates, too much and users will unsubscribe, to specific or too generalized information and they will also leave. Take it from me and anyone else living outside of the US, when we receive a message about Black Friday or some other US holiday, it’s usually greeted with “what the hell is that?” and “Well it looks like I’m so special to them, they cared enough to not even bother working out that I don’t live stateside”. This brings us neatly on to segmentation.

Segmentation

A good email marketing service of software allows you to segment your contacts; this is can be vital to keeping subscribers happy. Good titles and copy are still important, but with segmentation you will deliver a message that a reader finds interesting, this is the type of message that gets read and hopefully acted on. Scattergun emails to everyone can work and may be the only thing you can budget for, The same message to all users can have negative effects, those not interested in them won’t open, may just leave them in the spam bin (a bad thing) or even worse if you send out a series of emails they are not interested in they may mark it as spam or simply filter everything you send to them. Getting your emails actually delivered to someone’s inbox is a fight, the internet is infested with spam emailers, and there are quite a lot of technolgy hoops to jump through if you don’t use a paid email marketing service.

The 90 day rule Marketing edict states that you should keep in touch with your contacts at least every 90 days. Any less and your subscribers start to forget who you were and think your emails are spam. Staying in touch too frequently unless your messages are really interesting also risks loosing your subscribers as they feel they are being pestered by marketing junk. Monthly newsletters are fine providing you have something good to say, weekly can also work if you have a weekly special deal, or digests of the weeks posts.

Revolving Door of Image Buyers

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When microstock opened up a new market for casual buyers of stock images it also introduced a problem, rather than having clients who regularly purchased images (those clients do still exist) most of the ‘new’ buyers were individuals who buy occasionally, seldom, and even only just once. Don’t spend too much time keeping in touch with those kinds of prospects or you’ll soon be penniless – if you can do it in volume with very little overhead then fine. Try getting subscribers to tell you what they do for a living if they signup for updates, that will tell you which category they fit into, professional designers and image researchers are to be cherished, amateurs and interns who drew the short straw are somewhat less useful to milk for repeat sales. It’s also useful to collect demographics of the industry the subscriber works in or is working for.

7. GOING SOCIAL

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Social media is very exciting.

Exciting - adjective: a word used by the marketing industry use to describe something that is cool new and that no one is quite sure what to do with; the only thing certain about exciting things is that we all want to dive onboard in case we miss the boat. For me most forms of social marketing are like the traditional art of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) combined with Mailing Lists except that you are dealing groups of people instead of individuals, and leveraging those individuals to help you, you have a lot less control over what is being spoken freely by anyone who wants to voice their opinion. There is plenty of scope for personal contact, but for micrstock I remain sceptical about having enough hours in the day for one-on-one dialogue unless you increase prices to make it viable. Depending on what exactly you are promoting it can be hard put a figure on CLV (customer lifetime value) so don’t let me stop you making one-on-one contacts. All the traditional rules apply to the “push” part of social media: timing, matching messages to the right audience etc. The clear benefit in social being that if people like what you tell them then that message is by some mechanism passed on to the rest of their network “they do the marketing for you” (– if it was only that easy!) Be wise with social networks and the platform they operate on, as a very simple example, I think about 5% of my friends on facebook are in some way related to the photography or design industries. Conversely I’d estimate that an overwhelming proportion of the people who follow me on various twitter accounts are photographers

or designers. I’m not suggesting that trying to get image buyers on facebook to ‘like’ your photography work is a waste of time, clearly it has some use, It’s just important to consider what type of network people have created, some examples • a network of people working in a chosen industry e.g. linked in (potential gold dust?) • a network of their friends and family (still a useful vote for your content if they like it, but it’s far less likely to come to the attention of someone in a position to buy) • a large network of people who will happily subscribe to lots off things and pay little attention to what they follow (all vanity? are those high numbers as good as they look?). • a small network of people who are very selective about what they watch and pay interest to everything that comes in their inbox. (Quality counts) • a following of random people who adore you like a celebrity because it’s cool to do so • a network people you cajoled into following your after they visited you website – little more than a glorified mailing list. • a network that your customers set up on their own to talk about you over which you have no control, not really relevant to a photographer I admit (and in fact you don’t have much control over any social network!) --- one size does not fit all.

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Of course for what I would call frivolous content (funny animal photos, cool looking desktop backgrounds and phone skins you know the kind of stuff) then the more people linked to you in the network the merrier, and there is nothing wrong with using this kind of universal content (a.k.a. cyber drivel) to attract ‘traffic’ just be aware that less of them will convert into stock photo buyers – so think more about targeting the buyers. The non-buyers who like your work are still a useful asset, every ‘like’ and ‘retweet’ is a vote for your content, and opens the door to another pair of eyes, as well as being considered by search engines and algorithms as one indication that your content is something good.

Something I would always keep in mind is the more people see your work the more likely it is that one of those people will be a buyer. Be that the 1 in 10,000 who saw it on flickr or the 1 in 100 who converted after finding your work after using a term like ‘stock photo’ in google. I’m not suggesting those numbers are accurate, but to emphasize that not all sets of eyes and mouse fingers are alike.

The true power of social media is not you sending out your marketing message but harnessing, perhaps you could call it ‘steering’ the people talking about you, and how those messages other people post are interpreted by the community as a whole. Your messages can, at best, only serve to plant a seed. Only if your message is liked/enjoyed/hated/ useful to the community will the message spread. Your single marketing voice if used in a traditional “posting press releases’ fashion is for the most part completely lost in the crowd unless influential people spread the message… there are always exceptions to any rule, especially if you dangle a carrot (competitions, freebies etc)

I personally underestimated the power of facebook for many years, dismissing it as unprofessional / and non business oriented. A facebook fan page can be a very valuable tool in your social media marketing kit, it does require investment, and if you are already stretched across a lot of other tasks either outsource or decide if it is more or less important than your current marketing activities. Want lots of fans? It’s fairly easy to buy them for 5 to 10 cents each with facebook advertising, so don’t use those numbers alone to compare your success against your peers.

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Pull – content on the web that people can search for or use for research and reference

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Social marketing is just another spoke in the marketing wheel, without a hub to actually promote you don’t have much; your hub can be your images in lightboxes on a microstock or a facebook fan age. Ideally, and if you have the time/knowledge/budget it will be a website that you control and manage, a site to which you can add your content (not necessarily stock images either).

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Push – messages sent out for promotional purposes, news and updates. Most social platforms combine and blur the two together allowing the community to organize, tag or rate collections of push messages hence creating useful resources of ‘pull’ type content as well as keeping their users updated with the latest news that is available.

The goal of your marketing wheel can quite easily consist of several things combined, be that referral links, direct sales of photos, ad supported content, or further promotion of each of your spokes. It can even be entirely further promotion e.g your goal is to get more people to your mailing list on which you sell advertising space, it’s not easy to work purely ad supported and so this would be a path grow a network, in the end the goal will probably want to be selling those photos or at least referring clients to them. I’ll look at the goal more in the next chapter. ©2011 microstockinsider.com

What makes popular social content?

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Content is (almost) always king. Even in social networking you often find that the most popular ‘networks’ are the ones that provide something really useful to their followers, almost all of the time that is some kind of useful information. Occasionally you will come across someone who has created a ‘brand of themselves’ and who’s opinion seems to be what everyone is following, for the most part in photography I’ve seen that the popular people in social media are the ones who provide a contestant stream of useful information, call me old fashioned but I still call that stream of useful posts ‘content’. Create good content and people will come, generate automated banal drivel and few will listen.

mileage in creating lightboxes in some form, be that a microstock site or perhaps picking a selection of related images from flickr and hosting a page that links to them all.

A good source of up to the minute (literally) and relevant news also creates very attractive content that people will follow or subscribe to. I add the caveat that the news needs to be specific to a niche target audience. One person’s facile celebrity gossip is another person’s goldmine of entertainment; likewise “what’s new in image search and microstock subscriptions services” might sound like a dry subject to most photographers but buyers might love you.

I could be blunt here and say that attractive but insubstantial “bimbo” content is the order of the day. In depth articles are good but get buried all too easily, use the frivolous stuff to grab people and then get them hooked on something good. I very much dislike what I just wrote but it seems, sadly, all too true. Top lists and any kind of useful comparison or roundup that lets visitors see ‘the best’ in one place seems to be the stickiest content that engages social users. Sadly, long in-depth discussions and debate seem to be under represented in the social sphere - where the attention span is at most 30 seconds. All that said about easy to digest ‘link bate’ I do see sites having great success with complex content like tutorials that I would guess take days of work to put together – after all you are sit here reading this. A mix of the two is perhaps the best approach, some regular, easy to generate ‘fluff’ and some much more in depth content. There seems (unmeasured) to be ©2011 microstockinsider.com

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Which Social Networks? facebook the largest network, but also somewhat private (fan pages are mostly public), it’s not a place that people seem to do much digging for information, but they do respond to the likes and recommendations of their friend or peers. Studies suggest that while teenagers and university students spend vast amounts of time socialising on facebook they do not use it to gather information about products or companies etc. – it’s purely seen as a way to keep in touch with friends.

twitter, nothing like as big as face book but it’s users are perhaps more informed, or at least influential. It’s a common stop with people looking for instant news on something that has just occurred, the problem being a few weeks after you post something it might as well be consigned to the land that time forgot.

Flickr, okay so it’s more photo sharing that a network, the little social aspects come about commenting and feeds of images uploaded by your friends. I mention it not because of its social credentials but because it is ‘the’ photo sharing site (by share I mean sharing with others so they can view your work).

linked in - a network for professionals, you need to know people before you add them to your network meaning that you can’t just dive in and market to people – makes this a much less ‘spammy’ place and certainly somewhere you tend to trust what being said(?!?)

Writing Marketing Copy 101

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I can only scratch the surface here, writing titles and one line teasers for blog posts is an art in itself – I know what your are thinking “but I’m a photographer”. Having got clients to your website make them feel at home. Avoid everything on your site being ‘about you’, and place the focus on the site visitor – e.g. “images to suit any project budget, if they don’t look great in your design you may cancel the license and get your get your money back (if you’re selling direct of course) - Instead of “we have budget priced images, we have premium priced images, our images all look great and are highest quality, our images all have a full money back guarantee”. Visitors are looking for a solution to their needs.

Teasers – short snippets of text in that you use in emails, RSS feeds, index pages and so on. They need to have a strong information scent, or sometimes just be intriguing; depending on your audience they will either “only click on messages that they think are interesting” or “will click on things that intrigue them to find out more”. Although the latter may consist of the cleverest pun you have ever written it’s also a cheap marketing trick that only works sometimes, and pisses people off most of the time.

Landing pages of any campaign should both explain your product or service and also leave the visitor wanting to find out more details--in short leaving them with a feeling that you are providing a way for them to help themselves with their own problem, not ramming a marketing message down their throats. Some of the most powerful marketing utilizes customers own reluctance to buy, offering solutions to common “I can’t use a service like this because…” problems. Embed this information in relevant parts of the site not in the form of an FAQ or a stilted “but wait, there’s more…” essay.

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8. WHAT DO YOU DO WITH ALL THIS ATTENTION? In this final section I’m going to take a look at what to actually do with all these people whose attention you have grabbed: for microstock the options are: • Referral/Affiliate links – send them to your portfolio or an agency home page and earn if they buy. At lot of online affiliate schemes offer a poor deal for the promoter, often just a few percent. Most microstock referral programs are much better, offering. 15-20%. See http://microstockinsider. com/referral_schemes for a comparison. Referral links are a fine example of what is known in marketing circles as ‘cross-selling’ i.e. attracting visitors with one product or offer and selling them something highly related once they have arrived at your site. • Have them scratch your back: As I mentioned in the social media chapter get them to subscribe to an email or rss, bookmark, like, follow, rate your photos, comment on them, favourite them, etc. In doing so new visitors you have attracted come back for more or spread your message a little further to their network of friends and followers.

• Sell direct to them – Provided that you have attracted the right traffic there is nothing wrong with setting up a cookie cutter image sales site be that a service like clustershot or smugmug or your e-commerce site. I don’t think if should be the first place you look and not something you should invest a lot into unless you fully understand what you are dealing with. Unless you trying to sell some of your images outside the stock photography market, e.g. framed prints, digital downloads for consumers, you might find you earn more with an affiliate link simply because of the vast number of images each agency has there is likely to be something that fits your buyers needs – you can’t please everyone on your own website and image collection.

Read more on microstockinsider about website content management solutions for photographers.

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Just to reiterate my stance on direct selling by microstock photographers, setting up your own website will give you a: • Professional presence online and a URL to put on business cards • If you can get a few people to link to it will get a little bit of traffic from google but not that much. • Somewhere to send people who email you asking to license an image that you have not already got at an agency. • A headache / A deficit of spare time / An empty wallet. • A good understanding of marketing and why you have failed. It will not • Allow you to sit back sipping wine while buyers flock to your website. Unless you work hard to send people there they won’t go and they won’t buy. • Make you any different to the thousands of photographers each day who have just the same ideas, sadly your photos are unlikely to be significantly better than the best of theirs. • ‘Just work’ without some serious investment in time, regular updates to software, getting hacked at, and in the end having a site that is nothing like as good or as a comprehensive as an agency when it comes to having a streamlined buying process.

Remember what I wrote earlier, this guide is only about promotion. Opening up the other marketing P’s Price, Place and Product is not something to take lightly. It’s typical for microstockers to feel it would be great if they could just sell what they wanted direct without having images rejected, on reflection that does not sound like such a great offer to buyers does it? You should not set yourself up in competition with microstock agencies, use their affiliate links to make the most out of them; they are of course a perfect match to your buyers needs, and make perfect ‘companion selling’ on most photography sites frequented by people in the design industry. All of my playing direct selling down to one side for a moment, I’m cautiously sure that future semantic technology does open the door to photographer selling direct, levelling the playing field. As with current text based content the best and most relevant quality photos by ANY photographer will “float to the top” in google or some other search service. When/If that happens your photos had better be good! You will face the entire world of photographers as your competition. ©2011 microstockinsider.com

9. CONCLUSIONS

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There is more marketing and promotion methodology online than ever before; new promotional channels are, it seems, being invented endlessly. Promotion still comes down to the some basic things: Planning and Goal Setting Everything you do should be thought through properly and more importantly measurable. Think about setting success and failure criteria for each ‘promotion’ you create – even if it’s all thoughts in your head. Timeliness Divining a good time to publish a new post or post an email is somewhat of a black art. Weekly updates are sometimes useful; sometimes you only need to update every couple of months when you have lots of new content. Segmentation Knowing your audience and their needs, and as needed separating them into groups to match your message to their needs. Analysis Looking at which of your messages or content gained the most ‘traction’. Be that a rise in sales, page visits, positive social messages and bookmarks, views of an image. Which messages fell on deaf ears and why? Your messages might be fine; perhaps they are just too many of them? Perhaps they were not what your audience wanted to see.

Online Promotion as brought us some new options to this mix: Planning and Goal Setting Read and analyse for hours but sometimes it best just to give things a try, If you don’t set things up right it can be really difficult to be sure if something has worked – and that’s very de-motivating. Timeliness Social media can be a treadmill of new posts. Nothing says fail better than a twitter account or blog ‘news’ that has not been updated in 3 months. If you can’t keep to a regular schedule then design the requirement for regular updates out of the system so that it will disadvantage you less when/if you don’t post. Segmentation Your market now comes looking and finds you. You provide them with the means to segment themselves by selecting a variety of communication options that they want to see. Analysis Google analytics on a website or the demographics on a facebook fan page give great information on who and where the people in your marketing space are. You will want to dig much deeper, “who came from where, what did they look at, where did they go, and what did they buy” is the type of question you will be asking yourself. Also record and analyse the amount of time you spend on each marketing method.

ANNEX - Tools

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You can do a lot marketing tasks manually if you have enough hours in your day (>35 hours a day is good), below is a listing of sites and services that are useful in managing, monitoring and improving your online marketing activities. Excel or Google Docs Spreadsheet, if you are not cutting and pasting things into excel pivot tables you are doing something wrong (unless of course you have some really sophisticated analysis software which does the same task. Analyse and analyse until you are paralysed (well okay sick to the teeth of it). – Better still get someone else to look over your data too it’s easy to overlook something important, in all those charts and diagrams. Google analytics, one of the best free website analytics packages available, can be simply installed on most websites with simple cut and paste code provided. You should be looking to track ‘goals and conversions’ integrate search keywords so you can see what people are looking for on your site. You can spend hours analysing traffic, and while it’s interesting to look at, it’s also VERY easy to interpret these websites incorrectly. If you come to some conclusion that a change to your site is needed then do some A/B split testing or make the change then go and monitor the difference one week to the next (not quite as scientific but often enough to confirm you have not made things worse!)

Google adwords, home to the useful keywords analysis tool. Choosing your primary keywords (i.e. titles of websites and user / profile names) is more of a marketing choice that a promotional one, useful to analyse but don’t spread yourself too thin chasing keyphrases without due planning. https://adwords.google.com/ select/KeywordToolExternal Google alerts, get your brand in there, your website, and keywords you are interested in for daily email digests of what’s new, often including “what’s new in absolute garbage” but still useful. Google webmaster tools – (yes this is starting to sound like a Google party) webmaster tools not only displays hints from google about what it thinks of your content, it can also highlight “doh” situations like problems with robots.txt or hackers placing malware onto your site behind your back. Alterbox, useful resources on web suability (if a little dry in writing style). you’ll soon have everything on your site with nice blue underlines. http://binarycanary.com website monitoring service, alerts you to unauthorised changes and server down time, allowing you to suspend advertising campaigns in your site is having problems.

Marketing and Promotion for Microstock Photographers | Microstockinsider.com | 26 http://adsense.blogspot.com/2006/08/abcs-of-ab-testing.html post on google adsense blog about AB testing of two types of ad. A more powerful AB testing system (and funnelling) is provided free of charge by google analytics. Mailchimp.com An excellent mailing list service, that can post updates fro man RSS feed or send an autoresponder sequence. Olso check out their library of guides at http://resources.mailchimp.com loopfuse.net Marketing automation, free for small business users, it optionally connects your CRM to your website with tracking, lead generation forms and some email marketing tools.

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ANNEX - Glossary

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API Application Programming Interface. A specification on how two pieces of software will communicate. For microstock this is typically some software on a website or computer that accesses information at a microstock agency. Depending on the features that the API offers this could facilitate searching, selling images or collecting sales information for a user. CAC

Customer Acquisition Cost

CLV Customer Lifetime Value, The (estimated/average) total value of a customer, used as a measure against customer acquisition cost CAC. When looking at a microstock affiliate program for image buyers look for either a large one-off percentage of initial sale or a long term lower percentage of ongoing sales. If you run your own website and sell images you can calculate these values as a measure of profitability. CMS Content management system. The software that a website runs on, allowing users to search, or comment, even buy your images etc. Comp Image An image used to form a ‘comprehensive layout’ which is a mockup or sample of a finished design created to give a client an idea or choice of what the final design will look like. comp images are generally a low resolution version of the final image and may be watermarked. These are given away free of charge by an image library / stock image website to allow a designer to create a design and wait for customer approval before purchasing the full cost image.

Creative Commons A license system which allows you to easily share your work (photos) with others online. Creative Commons defines various types of license between full copyright (which you have by default) and public domain (no rights reserved i.e. given away without strings) If you plan to give any of your images away I’d recommend you opt for a creative commons attribution license, (or an attribution non-commercial use license) CC is one of the options on popular image share sites like flickr. see http://creativecommons. org Credit System Most of the microstock sites operate a credit system, where a buyer can purchase credits in advance which can later be spent on buying images. This allows the buyer to purchase credits in bulk at a discount so reducing the cost of the images at the basic basic rate. Each site varies this scheme often 1 credit is worth $1, on some 1 credit costs $2.50, while on others more than one credit must be spent to purchase a single image. Not to be confused with a ‘credit’ as attribution to the author of the image such as that which would be displayed along side an image in a newspaper or on a website etc. CRM Customer relationship management. Can refer to software or a service. you might do it in your head, in your email address book, or using the records stored on you website, whatever solution you use CRM is the way in which you keep track of customers and potential customers, so that you maintain a profitable relationship, gain new leads, and optimise time spent on leads that are not fruitful.

Marketing and Promotion for Microstock Photographers | Microstockinsider.com | 28 DAM Digital asset management is the process and/or tools used to keep control of a photo portfolio. At first you might organise your photos into folders, as you get more images then you might have different disks with different image times. the more images you have the more complex the process. With just a few 1000 images then you can probably remember where each image is and quickly find it, But if you have 10,000 or more, then finding and image you took several years ago can become difficult. DAM software solutions vary in price from free (bundled with your OS or Photoshop) to corporate ‘don’t ask’ pricing. EL Extended License - these usually make a hobby microstockers day as you can earn a lump sum like $25 in a single sale. ELs are made where the buyer wants to use the image on a product for sale or extended runs of an advertisement or book, such uses are outside of those allowed by a standard microstock royalty free license EXIF Information about an images stored within the image file inself. the data is usually embedded into the image either by the camera or scanner used to create the image, digital cameras often embedd useful information about ISO speed, lens angle, flash and exposure settings. This data is often useful for the photographer to review the settings of an image they took. FTP File Transfer Protocol, A method of transferring files between two computers which has been around since dinosaurs roamed the internet. FTP provides a method of submitting photos to microstock sites without having to select each image individually using a web browser interface. FTP can be complex to set up but once configured uploads can be as simple as dragging all your photos into your FTP client.

IPTC IPTC is a standard format used to store details about an image, including the author, keywords etc. this information is often embedded into a jpeg or photoshop file so storing keywords and description inside the image itself. Also see EXIF data LBRF Low Budget Royalty Free, a.k.a. microstock or low cost/lower resolution/restricted use image collection from a full price agency Macrostock Traditional or full priced stock images. Typically this is the description now applied to images from sites like alamy or the RM and RF collections of the major full priced industry players such as Getty. Compare with midstock and microstock. Metadata For microstock this is information embedded into an image file, it can be data from the camera (EXIF), location (GPS) and/ or a description and keywords which you have embedded (IPTC). Metadata can also refer to information embedded into a web page to help search engines understand the content. MicroStock Selling stock images for a low cost, with the business plan that if the images are cheaper more people will buy, this contrasts with traditional stock images which can be very expensive. Some critics would say that microstock sites source these ‘cheap images’ from non professional/non photographers who do not know the value of their work; but the microstock industry continues to grow strongly and has done for more than 7 years. Midstock Royalty Free Photography supplied at a price somewhere between microstock (a few dollars) and full priced or ‘macrostock’ ($50 or $100 and up, depending on use)

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PR Page Rank, Named (rather cleverly) after google co-founder Larry Page. PageRank is a google trademark and is a measure of how ‘useful’ and well linked your page is. PR0 un-ranked, up to PR10 which is top of the pile. PR4-PR6 would be considered a quite reasonable rank for an individual photographers website home page.

Public Domain Images and photos that have been released by the photographer into the world for use without strings or any terms at all. As such these images may be redistributed, copied or even sold. Typical PD images are seen on free clipart sites. The US Government also has a large collection of PD images for use ‘by the people’ Rights Managed A photo usage license what requires the end user to specify when, how, where and how many times the image will be used, i.e. 1/4 of newspaper page, inserted on one day, 100,000 print run on that day. Royalty Free Selling images with a license that does not specify how many times the image can be used or in what media (some restrictions will apply depending on use) micros stock terms usually follow the royalty free system. Contrast with Rights Managed RSS Really Simple Syndication, A feed format(s) which allows software ‘read’ information from a website. Typically websites provide feeds of blog posts, news, or images. End users can read these feeds in services online or software called a ‘feed aggregator’ which allows them to browse new information in feeds they have selected in one place.

SaaS Software as a service, an application that is served to you online so there is no need to install it, typical examples in microstock are ‘cloud applications’ like isyndica or microstockcharts

SEM Search engine marketing. Using paid placements and SEO methods to generate traffic to your website from a search engine. SERP (or SERPs) Search Engine Results Page. Where your images should to be. It’s hard work as you face competition from all the microstock agencies who also want their images to be there! SES Search Engine Submission (the ‘art’ of getting your website listed at a search engine) Syndication Providing something (information, images, news) with the intent that it be distributed by a 3rd party to a wider audience. Online this mostly comprises of RSS feeds, although can also be articles which are uploaded to a syndication service. The motive generally being marketing/promotion. UGC User Generated Content, websites where the site users create most of the ‘content’ that visitors are interested in, this could be a site that hosts user blogs (blogger.com) or product reviews, image gallery (flickr.com), a microstock photo library. Widget edit term A small piece of code you can cut-and-paste into a website. Can be used to display a panel with your latest images, news posts, updates from an online service. Placed in the sidebar they provide visitors with fresh information and can be used to monetize a site.

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Orvil Wright never had a pilot’s license – you don’t need permission to innovate, and success comes from achieving something the critics say cannot be done.

You can do anything online, but that does not mean that you have to do everything.

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