Microstock Group - A meeting place for microstock photographers

I've been thinking a lot about Twitter lately, and how to best use it to drive traffic to my portfolio - the right approach might prove very profitable. Here's an easy way to get started: click.

It might be good to follow this Twitter group, too.

Sending a thumbnail or an image with a commercial (or any) watermark would be bad Twitter manners.
I sent a link to this low-res image (400x600) on Flickr, then provided a link to it on iStock.

Thanks for the link sharply. I’ve been trying to understand the point of Twitter…I guess this could be a start.

I was worried about letting my images without watemarks so I sent the one with teletubbies as watemarks


Then this picture is unusable and I'm sure it's a winner!!!

I checked out your site on Flikr Sharply, but couldn´t see any links to you ports??.  Do I have to sign up to see that?

It's against the Flickr terms of Service (TOS) to provide a link on the same page as the image, but you are permitted to link on your profile page - here's mine.

Using Flickr can take a little bit work: you have to find popular and relevent groups to join, then 'send' your image to them. Flickr uses an 'Interesting' algorithm to rank images, where a comment or 'fave' is the equivalent of a DL. The biggest drawback with Flickr is it's 'tit-for-tat' atmosphere: few people will comment or fave your images if you fail to reciprocate, making your stuff fall into a bottomless hole. It's critical to spend your time there wisely. I used to spend a fair amount of time there, but have ignored it in the past year or so. I still have a few highly ranked images, though.

I only get the occasional tweet from the MicrostockGroup account. Seems to correlate pretty well with new threads, not new posts.

Oops, my bad. Leaf must've changed things since I followed it. Still, not much use in that for me - I can just as easily poke my head in here as see it on Twitter.

Yep, I had the same observation, but with some people I enjoy the nonsense chatter.  I have two accounts.  @microstock which is purely business, and @leetorrens which is my nonsense chatter. I think if you choose carefully who to follow you can keep your timeline pretty free of nonsense chatter. I hear @nytimes is rather light on personality.

That's true - if people post too often or too much nonsense, I drop them.  Hopefully, I'm careful enough to post mostly interesting business stuff with the occasional personality bit.

I dropped @Cutcaster because John had promotional auto-tweets setup to go off every few hours which bugged me. He uses discount coupons, so he can see exactly how much revenue he's generating through Twitter - quite smart. While he's using it to drive sales, I'm clearly not his target market. I use it to build relationships and hope that by providing value (linking to interesting stuff, breaking news, spreading rumors, etc) I can build authority in the microstock niche, which helps my blog. Neither my method or Johns is more holier than the other, but they do represent different value opportunities to followers.

That's the beauty of Twitter. It is what you make of it. If you want to muck about and pass time, you can. If you want to use it for pure business, you can. It's just a tool. Use it in whatever way works for you.

Yes, I did too.  He's a nice guy, but all I got were cutcaster ads and coupons out of it.

Just to make a correction, the NiltoMil twit is going to be
http://www.twitter.com/niltomil

the MattAntonino one is for all-things-me.  You'll get sports on there sometimes, business that isn't micro, photography, micro, everything.  If you ONLY want micro stuff, follow niltomil not mattantonino