MicrostockGroup

Maybe you have tried this before, but I got a $100 credit from Google Adwords recently (and I have seen $75 offers in magazines like Business Week). I decided to write a long and detailed step by step guide to getting started in Stock Photography on my blog http://www.backyardsilver.com and create the article as a free downloadable PDF as well, and then use my $100 to create the Adword boxes that appear next to search results on Google. It looks like each click will cost around $1, and so I will get 100 visitors who are presumably already interested in stock photography to my blog, and, hopefully making use of my referral links.

I did a test run earlier in the week and at least one person has clicked through to Canstockphoto, but as the cost is zero (ignoring my time to write the article), it seemed like a good plan!

Steve
http://www.backyardsilver.com - My Blog
http://www.backyardimage.com - My best photos
http://www.backyardartisan.com - My wife's jewelry
You get the marketing positioning - all I need is a backyard theme for Zazzle and we will be all set....

Yes, I did weigh that - although if someone is going to try to get into the business anyway, I may as well try to help them. Anyway, what is another 1000 images in the 14M already on Shutterstock!

I think I originally signed up using some of the links on this site - which helped me a lot in the early days (and still does!) - and so I'm following the same logic for the next generation...

Steve

Yes - I do keep them quite small, and the best sellers are saved with more JPEG Compression, but I agree there is some risk! This is always a conflict - how to make the site look attractive and the images pristine, but not lose them to theft.

I'll try the watermarking feature in Lightroom - is there a way to make the images secure from right-clicks in Wordpress?

Thanks for the warning, though!

Steve

Thanks for your advice. I need to keep my bigger images on a site designed for the purpose and leave smaller thumbnails on the blog.

I decided to reduce the sizes of the most popular images and add a low opacity copyright symbol to them. For those interested in adding that symbol, there is a site that offers a range of free to use copyright symbols here: http://www.copyrightauthority.com/copyright-symbol/. I lowered the opacity to about 10% and saved as a PNG to keep the transparency and then used the Copyright editor in Lightroom to add the symbol on export.

I'll investigate the right click protection in Wordpress though - my early investigations suggested they were relatively easy to get around, though.

Steve

I think I have come up with a solution to the right click problem, which was exacerbated by me uploading larger than necessary images to the wordpress blog - which lets someone click through to the large image and then download that one for free.

Wordpress allows you to choose the link that is opened when an image is clicked - this normally points to the larger file size on the local server. When I have a larger image already on-line in a protected environment (like Smugmug), I simply replaced the local link by one pointing to the image already online. A viewer would then be able to see other images taken in the same location - for instance, the Washington DC Cherry blossom image now links to a page of related images around the Washington area. I guess there is a chance that someone would be interested in buying one of those (I live in hope...)

Where I don't have an image already on-line on my own site, I can point the link to one of the stock site pages for that picture, or just leave the link blank, in which case all anyone could copy would be the small "thumbnail" image on the blog.

I've no idea if anyone has copied and used these images, but this seems to fit into my workflow for new posts and I have gone back and modified the obvious earlier posts where I had a large file size accessible.

I guess you can never be too careful...

Thanks for your help on this

Steve
http://www.backyardsilver.com

I have a little list of referrals on Dreamstime. Most of them do nothing, a few of them have uploaded some pictures, and some of them are buyers. I guess you don't object to the last type of signups?

I obviously touched on a raw nerve with the idea, and I don't want to open up old wounds. Just a couple of comments. On the Google Adwords - Google are giving away $75 in free advertizing in a number of magazines - I saw one in Wired last week. You are competing with the main stock sites who themselves put up Google ads, but if the photographer joins via my ad and I get a referral, then the industry is in no worse shape than it would have been.

Since I did this, I have had 13 referral clicks to the various sites directly from the site, but I have no way of knowing how many people clicked the links in the free e-book. Time will tell if this was a waste of time and effort.

Steve
http://www.backyardsilver.com