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Messages - steheap
Pages: 1 ... 55 56 57 58 59 [60] 61 62 63
1476
« on: March 15, 2011, 11:05 »
Warren I also think things are going pretty well, but I'm really missing something with Cutcaster. I have had maybe 750 images online for several months and nothing - zip! Is there anything special you do to your files when you upload them to Cutcaster? Perhaps I am missing an important step (at least I hope so) Steve http://www.backyardsilver.com
1477
« on: March 02, 2011, 10:46 »
Real numbers say nothing at all unless you have all of them. I don't know how many files you have online, whether your sales are up or down. If you have 50,000 files then your result is pathetic, if you have 50 files then your result is brilliant. I don't know if your sum of money is more or less than last year (or if you have a big increase in files online or not) so I don't know if things are getting better or worse for you. This is a good point. I mentioned earlier a total set of earnings of $500 in the month, and I have now added a graph of the number of images online on each site at the end of February to my blog. The average is around 1300 mainly travel type images at this point.   Hope this is useful for beginners. I wish I had maintained a database of the number of images online through 2010 - I think it was about 300 or 400 last January, but I'm not very sure. Steve http://www.backyardsilver.com
1478
« on: March 01, 2011, 09:41 »
Ah - I see how it works. I got the emails to say that the various loans have now been made so I may as well kick off a few more. With such a great February (wish...), I can afford it!
Steve
1479
« on: March 01, 2011, 09:26 »
And I would suggest concentrating on sites that have more sales and action. You seem to have picked sites based on whether you can see views per image - I have not heard of Visco, and Canstock is a nice agency (good for very quick and reasonable reviews), but very up and down in terms of sales. Try to get onto Shutterstock and watch to see which ones get sales. Steve http://www.backyardsilver.com
1480
« on: March 01, 2011, 09:09 »
Unfortunately, this is a short month, and the results show that (and then some!). Total earnings were just $500, down 20% on January, but there were no real winners outside the main stock sites. Shutterstock and iStock were around the same level as January, Fotolia achieved its best month ever, but the rest of the sites were just steady and boring no large image sales, and some sites with no sales at all. I've continued to add images - the most recent following a vacation in St Thomas and St John (working vacation for a stock photographer!!), but these were too late to make much of a difference. To make it worse, Shutterstock rejected about half with "Poor lighting, white balance may be incorrect..." I'll have to sell that x-rite colorchecker! I keep a graph of sales per site on my blog - I'll work out to post that here for the next month. I've noticed that most people only post the percentage of sales from each site - is there some risk in posting actual numbers? Steve http://www.backyardsilver.com
1481
« on: February 28, 2011, 21:22 »
I've just joined as well - started with four loans until I get the hang of it
Steve
1482
« on: February 27, 2011, 18:48 »
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
1483
« on: February 22, 2011, 12:18 »
And one request from me: Please make the sign-in time longer. The site appears to automatically log out after around 30 minutes of non-activity - you can't immediately tell that it has happened, until you try to edit an image and then the page just sits there trying to load. You need to reload the whole page and sign in again to continue. No reason why you can't have several hours of non-activity for a site like this. Steve http://www.backyardsilver.com
1484
« on: February 22, 2011, 10:19 »
Hi Robert I was the one who complained about the 250M limit on uploads - thanks for clarifying that this was an old email. I do think the new site is a big improvement over the old approach (I had pretty much stopped uploading to Panther some time ago) but I did run into a limit this morning. I have a lot of images to upload and so when I saw your response this morning, I restarted my FTP. I did hit a hard limit at 1024MB (ie 1gig) - all files after that point were rejected with an error stating that the Quota had been exceeded. I do need to get on the site and start adding the main keywords etc. but it does look as though there is a hard limit of FTP space. Steve http://www.backyardsilver.com
1486
« on: February 21, 2011, 15:28 »
I asked the site to send my user name and password for FTP, and it was in that email: "Important : - Avoid special characters in file name - Edit or remove images in your FTP folder within 7 days - Your available FTP space: 150MB (please do not exceed this) - Please do not create sub-folders in your FTP folder" Perhaps it is not a real limit? Steve http://www.backyardsilver.com
1487
« on: February 21, 2011, 13:08 »
Did you see the restriction that you only have 150MB of FTP space (which turns out to be about 38 images). So the upload process now needs to include separating all the files I haven't uploaded over the past 2 years into blocks of 150MB... As well as waiting 258 minutes for the FTP to process and then going through all the steps against each image (or at least now we can create a set of images to edit) Why is this so hard.... Steve http://www.backyardsilver.comPS - anyone know if this is a hard 150MB limit or just something we need to manage ourselves?
1488
« on: February 12, 2011, 12:23 »
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
1489
« on: February 11, 2011, 16:11 »
This is an interesting question. I do edit in ProPhoto RGB (which is set in Lightroom in Edit:Preferences:External Editing), and if then I save the file in ProPhoto as well as my master, but the JPEGs I create are always converted to sRGB. I did that because I assumed that most buyers are looking at the images on the web sites on their computer monitors and I thought all monitors were easily able to show sRGB, but only the better ones can show a wider gamut. Is there a common view among the experienced contributors about which color space to use for uploaded images? Steve http://www.backyardsilver.com
1490
« on: February 11, 2011, 11:22 »
It is easier than you think. It is in Edit/Convert to Profile in Photoshop. I wrote a little action that combines all the layers, converts to sRGB and then I am ready to save as a JPG. Steve http://www.backyardsilver.com
1491
« on: February 11, 2011, 09:00 »
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
1492
« on: February 11, 2011, 08:04 »
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
1493
« on: February 10, 2011, 22:35 »
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
1494
« on: February 10, 2011, 19:03 »
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....
1495
« on: January 18, 2011, 13:21 »
Mark You have some great products there now - about how many products do you have in your store now? Steve www.backyardsilver.com
1496
« on: January 05, 2011, 10:55 »
Mark You have really worked hard on that store - some nice customizations. I've been trying to come up with interesting takes on products, but at least with Shutterstock you get some pretty immediate feedback when you upload images - it seems to take a long time for a sale to come along with Zazzle! Steve http://www.zazzle.com/backyardimage
1497
« on: January 03, 2011, 10:57 »
Thanks all, for your help in putting one of those rotating Flash product bars on my Zazzle store! I investigated the promotion of Zazzle a bit more and came across an interesting gadget that shows the top products in any particular search, and if someone uses the gadget to buy one of the products, you get a commission for referring them to the site. It can contain your own products, but I think it makes more sense to show the best selling ones on the site and get some referral earnings based on those. The site with the details (it is called My Zazzlit) is http://www.highton-ridley.co.uk/tutorials/zazzlit-gadget-tutorial-adding-it-p1.html. Here is my example in the left hand sidebar of my blog - I used "Valentine" as the search term, but will change this as the year goes by. http://www.backyardsilver.comI've no idea how successful it will be, but it takes little effort as he gives you the code and explains very well how to customize it. Steve
1499
« on: January 02, 2011, 13:45 »
Donding You have that rotating panel of products as well - I can't seem to find the option to put that on the home page! The site looks OK to me - I like the calendar (you have been to the same waterfalls as me - looks like Cucumber falls on one of them!). I sold 8 of my Kauai calendar this December, and, while I was lucky to get a best product award, the only external marketing I had was to mention the calendar a few times during the year on my blog. It is also possible that someone searching for a specific location for a calendar is more likely to find one than a more generic places of beauty title? Maybe having it named and tagged as waterfalls may get more traction? However, I'm only learning here, and plan to try to create a niche of products - although I missed the Christmas season with this product: http://www.zazzle.com/waiting_for_santa_card-137526653313345648, I think I will focus on a bengal cat set of products with cards, mugs etc. and perhaps some more calendars. Steve http://www.backyardsilver.com
1500
« on: January 02, 2011, 09:57 »
Mark How did you get that rotating panel onto your Zazzle page? I know how to get that into your blog or personal website, but did you directly edit the code on the Zazzle page to get it on your shop page? Steve http://www.backyardsilver.com
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