The promotion machine is ramping up. Congrats! 

Thank you cthoman!!

Thanks for the description. I've just created a campaign and I'm excited to see the results.
Love the possibility to pinpoint the target audience much more precisely than with Google ads

And thanks for letting me know about Google ads as I was wondering about them..

Denis

RacePhoto, pages are created from your main account. So you do not create an extra account with a different email address and therefore does not violate the rules. You access your pages also from your main account and can then choose to "login" as page administrator to make changes to it (all from the 1 account).

Nice page Denis! What option did you use to promote it? Are there free promotional choices, except for just using your own contact list?

Thanks CD123!!

Once your business page is setup, through a link, you can invite all your friends to see your new page. Therefore, because it is free, needless to say that as many friends as you can get the better it is. However, you have to be careful in finding friends, because the automatic "Facebook spam police" will cut off your friends finding tool for 48 hours if you get too many warning messages. I know as it happened to me last night.. . I'll be more careful next time..

As well, on the business page, you get a "promote with an ad link" which I have tried for $10.00. Basically, once you click on that link you get this amazingly easy intuitive interface to build your little banner ad in a snap ready to go and be pushed to all Facebook's fans out there up to 800 millions of them if you want.
However you better not think that big because it may cost you that much to push your ad to that many.

All you need is a credit card or a PayPal account. You simply tailor your ad to the audience you want. You get to chose your "target audience" by choosing their countries, languages, interests by putting in keywords, ages etc... after which Facebook calculate automatically your target audience which could diminished from 800 millions to a few thousands.

Then you chose to pay by either each time someone click on your ad or each time so many thousands impressions occur. I have put in $10.00 just to test it...which will give me approximately 15-20 clicks. It is approximate because the price of the click can vary between $0.50 and $1.00.

At first this seem expensive, but you can target your audience so well that I am not sure yet if it is that expensive. So far, I got only 5 clicks in the last 24 hours, from that ad, but each one really did spend a lot of time on my site. Many other visitors came from Facebook, this forum, some other photography sites and a few odd ones from google. Oh yes, I did email some of the sites that already had my photos displayed on their sites, specifically the ones with no credit, and thank them for using my photos and gave them a link to my site...some of them email me back with good words about my site.

Denis

Got my business page going on Facebook:

http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Denis-Pepin-Royalty-Free-Stock-Images/152794394822012?sk=wall&filter=1

Denis

This is totally amateurish.  They got $80,000 from my photos and this is the best they can do??  And I am only a small fish....Can you imagine all the money they got from all of us? The non stop crap??? This is no joke???

Good work.

Thank you Shadysue!

I agree - very nice and clean site. You have definitely got me thinking that this is the way to go.

A question though - how do you start to get traffic to your site? I can understand how you can create a blog, put lots of interesting content there, and get a high(ish) Google ranking in searches. But a photo site simply has keywords and descriptions. Little reason for anyone to link to your site, and hence the chance of an image appearing high on a search doesn't look good. I guess that Google images will search and index the site, but then your images will be scattered among all the Flickr images that come up on Google Images.

I'd hate to do all the work to create my own stock site but get no traffic.

Steve

Thank you Steve!

Before I answer your question regarding traffic, I would like to go back to what I said regarding Photodeck 10GB plan. I indicated earlier that this was a great bargain, however after finding out a few things, now I think that the 10GB plan is a good but not an excellent deal. The reason is after I decided to pay for the $9.99 a month plan and started the procedure, it showed me what I would be missing once I downgrade from the free 14 days pro account to the basic account.

I though from what I read originally that the basic difference between pro and basic accounts was a downgrade to 10gb allowance, 2 price profiles instead of unlimited and some other minor things which did not concern me.  I figure that 10gb and 2 price profiles were sufficient for me. However, what was revealed is that in addition to the above mention, the basic profile does not allow to keep my url denispepin.com as it would revert to denispepin.photodeck.com, I would get only one price profile and most importantly, image buyers would not be able to download automatically and directly from my site meaning that human intervention would be needed. To me this is no longer an amazing deal. I don't blame photodeck as I still believe in their product and decided to go along for one extra month with the pro plan at $29.99.  After one month, If I don't make a sale I will reconsider if this is really worthwhile for me.

Regarding traffic: Get a short url, a clean site and spread the word and your link as much as you can.  This forum is a small but good start. Look at how many have read this thread so far. There are other places out there and it is up to you to find them. Another way I figured recently, Google make it possible to search your images by the image itself not keywords. This way I was able to find hundreds of sites that have my images without any credit to me or any agency. Because those images are my photos without any credit this is giving me a good excuse and an opportunity to contact site owners, editors or webmaster to let them know that those images are mine and that if they want anymore they can go to denispepin.com.

Of course facebook is another way as you can create a business page linked to your site. There are tons of things you can do but of course this does not mean you'll get traffic. You can only try your best. Like I said, if I don't sell anything in a month time I will reconsider. So far, according to photodeck traffic interface, I had approx 150 visitors for which many checked prices, no doubts many from here too. As well google is picking up my site on its first page when I simply google my name denis pepin.

Denis

Did you take the 10$/month (light) plan on Photodeck or the 30$/month (pro) plan? 360$ per year looks more expensive than Photoshelter but they don't take a share on the sales. Also, the 10$/month plan just comes with 10GB and that's a bit limited for hires Canon 5D shots at jpg 12.

Thank you Cobalt and Karimala!!


@AttilaTheNun, I still have 8 days "Pro Plan" free and I haven't bought a plan yet. You don't even need a credit card nor a financial commitment to get started. Photodeck would probably simply delete my site if I don't make a commitment before the 8 days expires. This is a great way to test their tools and interface without losing money...only some of your time if you don't like it.....and you'll find out quickly.

Regarding the 10GB plan, this is probably a good fit for me because it took me 5 years to build a collection of 1300 photos which amount to 6.17GB. This is only a small part of my life. For me this is a no-brainer, so far, this is the best economical way to showcase my work.  For some photographers doing "for hire" work, stock for corporate clients, editorial, weddings, family photos etc...involving a higher volume of images, may not be the best economical solution, but then again you always get what you pay for......I think the 10GB plan is a real bargain and the 40GB plan is priced just right for what you get.

Denis

Thank you cthoman and Attilathenun!

Quote from: cybernesco on November 08, 2011, 08:48

Yesterday I have noticed an iStock ad banner within my Yahoo email account. Interestingly for me, this particular ad banner was featuring one of my images directly linked to my iStock port. However, despite the extra attention, I ended the day making only $1.25. Long gone are the business days when I used to average $20-$30 a day.

The ad is based on files you've looked at in your port, or images around  or like these ones. We all get different files shown (I get my own). Many companies seem to do this nowadays - I'm always getting ads featuring things I recently looked at, even if I already bought it from the site. It's no doubt a developing technology.
See also http://www.microstockgroup.com/istockphoto-com/how-does-advertising-work/msg226634/?topicseen#new

It does make more sense now as I was probably the only one getting my image featured.....thanks

Yesterday I have noticed an iStock ad banner within my Yahoo email account. Interestingly for me, this particular ad banner was featuring one of my images directly linked to my iStock port. However, despite the extra attention, I ended the day making only $1.25. Long gone are the business days when I used to average $20-$30 a day.

Quote from: cybernesco on November 04, 2011, 20:17

Quote from: Slovenian on November 04, 2011, 17:21

But it seems sales rose for majority of the contributors.

I would suggest that sales rose for the majority of silver and below canisters which would make the bulk of most members but not necessarily the bulk of all images, hence why the poll on the right has raised and hence why the majority of gold, diamond and above are reporting terrible sales in the IS October thread. If it is this scenario, then the poll on the right will certainly drop down within the next couple of months as this can't be sustainable.

I don't know why all of you ppl are constantly giving so much significance to top contributors.

I was not giving any significance to anybody, I was just stating my observation...

Quote from: cybernesco on November 04, 2011, 13:58

Quote from: loop on November 04, 2011, 13:54

Quote from: cybernesco on November 04, 2011, 13:48

Quote from: loop on November 04, 2011, 13:42

Quote from: cybernesco on November 04, 2011, 13:31

Quote from: loop on November 04, 2011, 13:26

"Disregard of competitors?" OMG, this is new.

disregard meaning "not paying attention".....IS have to know and understand what their competitors are doing else they will lose their buyers to them....

Then, the answer for istock is cutting their prices by half. But should that happen, many competitors would cut theirs too. Next station: free.

IS have to know and understand what their competitors are doing and try to do better, certainly not by putting prices higher within various complicated collections, else they will lose buyers to them....it is that simple

It's a matter of choosing. Maybe they prefer less downloads and more income. Every time I get a Vetta or Agency sale for 12 to 80 dollars, and that happens daily, I can't avoid thinking how many sub sales I would need to match that.

I am happy for you that you are doing well!!!

I'm doing well enough, thanks. That's because I'm there. Have a nice weekend.

Well...I guess.. it is not just because you are there...but more so...hopefully.. because you have lots of very nice images....have a nice weekend too