by Dan Padavona
The past few years have been particularly difficult on photographers. Agencies have turned on photographers in greater numbers, saving their bottom lines by decreasing the commission percentages they share with their contributors. As a result, many photographers are becoming increasingly curious about selling images from their own website. In this article, I will discuss implementing a lone wolf approach to selling images from our own websites. We will assume sales of royalty-free stock photos, but this approach can be applied to rights managed photography, event photography, and more.
Ignore the Naysayers
Bring up the idea on a message forum of starting your own stock photo website, and you will attract a throng of naysayers.
"Why would anyone go to your website when Megastock Agency has 20 million images to choose from?" For reasons I do not completely understand, photographers have adjusted to the idea of online marketing much slower than other businesses have. Perhaps it is because so many have relied on agencies for so long, that they simply see no other way to market their work. Marketing your photography requires solid business skills first, and photography skills second. Understanding the way people buy images and following proper search engine optimization is arguably more important than creating fantastic images.
Certainly nobody is going to purchase your work unless it is quite good. Just realize that there exists an endless supply of talented photographers producing excellent images. Success or failure is often determined by skills in marketing, writing, and programming rather than image making.
Requirements for a Photo Website
If you intend to create your own photo storefront, you will need to have an integrated shopping cart. The days of taking email orders and waiting for a customer to send you a check are gone. Customers in 2012 expect the ability to purchase an image online and download it immediately.
Secondly, you need a strong portfolio which balances quality and quantity. Does that mean you need 20 million images to compete with the Megastock Agency? Of course not. But you will need a minimum of 20,000 to 30,000 images to be taken seriously and to attract the attention of the search engines. Think of every image as a potential item to link to,or be found through a search engine. This is a loose description for what is referred to as an "internet footprint." Poor quality images will scare off visitors. High quality images will increase the potential for sales, and potentially even more important, encourage people to link to you and talk about you. When you become the subject of chatter on the internet, search engines figure it out fast and raise your rankings. Links are an even stronger endorsement of your website.
One piece of advice. Don't sell microstock. Microstock quality and pricing is perfect for students, bloggers, etc. who require a lot of images for very little cost. A blogger expects millions of images to choose from to meet their diverse needs on a daily basis. Unless you can procure millions of images, you don't want to play in the microstock space.
Instead, look to target serious buyers who need a few specific images for their business. Offer them licensing rights which extend well beyond the microstock agency, and price them accordingly. If a buyer can find your image through a search engine, and your price meets her budget, she won't care that you aren't a huge stock agency. You have the image she needs. She can buy from you immediately rather than looking for a needle in a haystack at the stock agency.
It's important to have enough images that you will be found. Don't have enough images to host? Consider partnering with like minded photographers and combining portfolios.
Out of the Box Software
Setting up a website to handle sales with an integrated shopping cart, while managing a large portfolio of images, is an advanced programming task. There are multiple out of the box solutions for automating this, including KTools Photostore and Photoshelter. Our website utilizes Photostore. However it has hardly been a simple solution, and I would not recommend it to anyone lacking advanced web programming skills. A thorough understanding of PHP, MYSQL, and an ability to customize .htaccess files is mandatory. If you don't know what these languages are, or don't feel up to the task, then you are better off hiring a website designer to do the work for you.
Search Engine Optimization
We found the biggest problem with the out of the box software packages to be poor search engine optimization. In particular, many of these software packages name image files with underscores. For instance "florida_summer_sunset.jpg". Search engines tend to concatenate words separated by underscores, rather than treating them as separate words to be evaluated individually. The correct methodology is to replace spaces with dashes, per the Wordpress page naming convention. It's important nuances like this which we found the software packages failed at.
Moreover, we found these packages were notorious for including miscellaneous numbers and symbols within the URL. This additional information causes search engines to weigh relevant terms less heavily, and at worst confuses the search engines into improperly ranking the page.
Content is King
Now that you have a store up and running, and a full portfolio of images, you need a way to get the attention of the search engines and attract visitors.
Just as important as your images is the text on your website. A small business on the web must wear many hats, and one of the biggest hats of all is that of the article or blog writer. Consistently churning out articles which your readers enjoy, and search engines can find, is critical. It gets your site visitors and links it would not otherwise receive.
Search engine optimization experts might have you write content for target keywords important to your website. While having a few of these words naturally appear now and then, I feel this advice often results in lousy content which is geared toward search engines rather than real people. Don't do that. Focus on writing great content which your readers will want to share with their friends.
Real World Inspiration
Rather than focus on the naysayers, look to excellent examples of photographers who have made this strategy a successful one. Excellent photographers such as QT Luong, who runs the Terragalleria photo site, and Dan Heller have successfully made careers in photography sans agency. Both have strong photography skills. But just as important, both bring web marketing skills to the table which most photographers have not learned.
If you are considering breaking away from the agency and selling photos on your own, know that you will be in for a long struggle to gain traction. But it is hardly an impossible task. Start with a well designed web store, add strong content on a consistent basis, and you will have a much higher chance for success than if you had simply put up a website and hoped for a sale.
Daniel Padavona is an avid photographer, and the founder of Warmpicture Royalty-Free Images. Daniel lives in upstate New York with his wife Terri, and his children Joey and Julia.
