I've just lunched a new web service for helping creators get financial support.

You can check it out at: http://getsupportribbon.com

I've shared source code of Micro-Stock-Monitor widget on https://github.com/ntrifunovic/Micro-Stock-Monitor

To modify widget use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashcode

Name of Site: @n3funovic_photo
URL: http://ntrifunovic.github.io/pictures/
Owner/Artist/Photographer: Nemanja Trifunovic
A brief one or two sentence description: My various images

Quote from: michealo on April 17, 2013, 10:17

Quote from: ntrifunovic on April 14, 2013, 20:56
Also I had an idea, but I don't have time to realise it right now and I don't know if people will find it useful.

Idea is to make program that you point to a folder with your images and it builds static website like http://ntrifunovic.github.io/pictures/ using only metadata from images ( Title, Description, Keywords, ... )

This tool would make it very very easy for photographer to generate personal portfolio and even sell their images online ...

And building of this tool shouldn't be that hard, by the way my primary profession is software engineering

How this sounds to you all ?

+ host it on amazon aws

Using http://heroku.com is much easier.

You can also make entire website static. This way you can host it anywhere.

Quote from: yuliang11 on April 15, 2013, 10:43
At that kind of resolution and images without watermark at all , i think people will be stealing it first.

I'm going to do something about this

Thanks

Quote from: cascoly on April 14, 2013, 22:23

reading the meta data is the tricky part -- I've done something similar using a WP plugin that
formats an RSS from smugmug to give a wp post such as

http://www.buydigpix.com/wp/?p=231

then you can move that data to into a webpage that shows thumbnails, and IPTC info, eg http://cascoly.com/photo/civil-war.asp

(the reason for moving to a non-wp website is my main website gets more traffic than the wp one)

I was thinking of reading IPTC info locally and generating entire site locally ( making static html website, my site is entirely statical and made automatically from few markdown files http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ ).

This can be easily done with python or any other programming language as well. I've singled out python because there are lot of packages that do most of the work for you.

Also I had an idea, but I don't have time to realise it right now and I don't know if people will find it useful.

Idea is to make program that you point to a folder with your images and it builds static website like http://ntrifunovic.github.io/pictures/ using only metadata from images ( Title, Description, Keywords, ... )

This tool would make it very very easy for photographer to generate personal portfolio and even sell their images online ...

And building of this tool shouldn't be that hard, by the way my primary profession is software engineering

How this sounds to you all ?

Quote from: ShadySue on April 14, 2013, 18:20
The more your images are 'out there', the more chances there are that they will be stolen.

This is interesting topic. How can somebody protect their microstock images from being stolen ( for example form site that bought them ) ? I guess it can't be stopped

Quote from: Pilens on April 14, 2013, 20:24
Doesn't gumroad.com charge a cut of 5% + $.25 per transaction?

So 100 sales at $.99 earn you $69 and 10 sales at $10 earn you $92.50 after their cut is taken out.

I guess, I don't understand "why?" either... 

That's right. I think more sales would make more predictable income, which I find nice This can also be achieved with large portfolio ...

Quote from: Poncke on April 14, 2013, 19:47
How do your buyers feel if all of a sudden your images cost more? Better start higher and adjust to a lower pricing, than the other way around.

When I start selling direct, I will ask between 10-25 dollar for an image sale.

Well photography isn't my primary job, but I try to get some profit from it or at least learn something new ( develop myself bla, bla, bla ) So that's one of the reasons I posted this topic. You are probably right about this

I'll probably do few experiments concerning pricing models over time and of course notify microstockgroup community about results 

99 cent price is just a test to see if I can sell my images this way. My reasoning is that if I can't sell images for 99 cents I wouldn't be able to sell them at higher prices. I can always bring prices up

Also I would be happier to sell image 100 times for 99 cents rather than 10 times for 10 dollars.

Hi I made my direct stock selling site http://ntrifunovic.github.io/pictures/ using https://gumroad.com. It was much easier than I expected it will be. It took me less then half an hour to figure how everything works and I now need couple of minutes to upload and add image to my site ( most of this time is for uploading content ).

Anyone knowing little HTML  (or ready to learn it) can easily make something like http://ntrifunovic.github.io/pictures/ so I guess it's easy part.

I'm not sure how I'll attract buyers
Hard part in my opining is to make sales.

Do you guys know whats the best way to lure the customers ?

I started by offering free pictures and opening dedicated twitter account @n3funovic_photo for notification about new images.

I found this link: http://www.askvg.com/kludget-engine-free-utility-to-use-mac-os-dashboard-widgets-on-windows-and-linux-desktop/ it's explanation how to use program from this website http://kludgets.com/download/ to run OS X widgets on windows.

Hi,

I've created very useful widget for OS X that shows your current earning balance on your dashboard.

There is DT only version and version with Fotolia, Dreamstime and iStock.





Get it here

I found this link: http://www.askvg.com/kludget-engine-free-utility-to-use-mac-os-dashboard-widgets-on-windows-and-linux-desktop/ it's explanation how to use program from this website http://kludgets.com/download/ to run OS X widgets on windows.

Hi,

I've created very useful widget for OS X that shows your current earning balance on your dashboard.



Get it here

I found this link: http://www.askvg.com/kludget-engine-free-utility-to-use-mac-os-dashboard-widgets-on-windows-and-linux-desktop/ it's explanation how to use program from this website http://kludgets.com/download/ to run OS X widgets on windows.

It's been almost a month since I created my website, here are some statistic for this period:

175 Visits
124 Unique Visitors
2,361 Pageviews
13.49 Pages/Visit
00:06:52 Avg. Visit Duration
70.29% New Visits

Note: Site has been expanded a lot since this topic was started.

Norton has re-evaluation website 

The result of this re-evaluation is a change in the Norton Safe Web rating for this site.

Old rating: unsafe
New rating: safe
For details about this site report, you can go to: http://safeweb.norton.com/report/show?url=sites.google.com%2Fsite%2Fntrifunovic

Thank you click_click for your comment. It's kind of comments I was looking for.

Thank you Microbius for notifying me.

I hope everything will sort out, but it's annoying that I can't do anything about it.
Now I can just wait for Norton to evaluate my site separately...

You can check that warning in details at https://safeweb.norton.com/report/show?url=sites.google.com%2Fsite%2Fntrifunovic as you can see these warnings are reported by other sites from google sites platform, mine site just picked rating from root domain (sites.google.com).

I registered at Norton SafeWeb as a site owner and this is the message I received concerning this issue:


   Please note that sites.google.com/site/... is part of google.com/site. Because of this, the rating that you see next to your site name may be the inherited rating from google.com/site. Your site sites.google.com/site/... will be eligible for independent rating at a later time.

I made my first promotional website few days ago, and I want to share my experiences here with Microstock Group community. 

You can check it out here: https://sites.google.com/site/ntrifunovic/

I also made a blog about this on Dreamstime (http://blog.dreamstime.com/2012/03/12/promotional-website-experiences-_art37260).

Here is the copy of content from the blog:

It took me very little time to make it because I used Google sites as a platform.

I was rally impressed how fast and easy it was to make it.
It actually took me just one afternoon to make it

Here is how it works:

Google sites (sites.google.com) is an online site creation tool which helps you easily create websites. You can also use html to code some parts of the website, but I noticed that not all html tags are allowed

Google will host your website on their own servers and will give you some web address like http://sites.google.com/site/ntrifunovic (you are always going to have sites.google.com/site/ in the beginning of address). When you create site you can easily connect your internet domain (you need to rant an internet domain if you want to use one) with your website.

After I created my website I connected it with Google Analitics. Google Analitcs (http://www.google.com/analytics/) is another free web application which monitors traffic on websites and gives you many useful statistics.

Summary (Good and Bad things I have noticed)

Good:
Very simple and easy to use.
User friendly.
Free.
You don't need any specialised software to create your websites.
You don't need to worry about web hosting.
You can easily connect your site with Google Analytics to control traffic on your website.
There are numerous templates and gadgets you can easily add to your web sites

Bad:
Not all html tags are allowed.
Limited possibilities.

Please leave a comments and critiques of my website.
I also hope someone is going to find this post useful

Congratulations