I was actually quite amazed by the statistics. We don't have the largest collections, and we have taken a break from uploading over the past year. My guess is that a strategy of a diverse collection has helped maintain our sales. This is not an original idea... 25 years ago, the sales manager of a stock agency provided invaluable advice. Clients then would make a research request (the old school version of a keyword search) and researchers would send out slides. If you didn't have an image in that delivery, there was no way you could make a sale. My goal as a generalist photographer was to populate as many "keywords" as possible with good images. (Please note this is quite different from populating images with as many keywords as possible!) The diversity helps maintain the long term income potential of a collection.

The prices vary- from $80 to $800. Make an offer.

Correct, we have a release from the owners on all animals we photograph. Maybe we're "old school" but having a release can only add value to the image.

We're using di-GPS with the 1DsM3. Works great! You really want to avoid time-synching with GPS data and images if at all possible. The di-GPS embeds the long/lat  (and more) directly into the EXIF fields as you shoot.

If you have a H3D39 or similar camera, then Hasselblad makes a GPS attachment that also embeds the data.

(We started using GPS 4 years ago to keyword locations using time-synching and most of the time the data worked great, but you were never quite sure if the times were exactly correct.)

http://www.dawntech.hk/di-GPS/index.htm

There's a bunch of freeware or inexpensive apps out there to place the images on a Google map.

Scared as hell- everytime! While a shoot might seem routine, there's always the chance of creating that image you never knew possible. And photography connects us with ourselves, and other people.. and sometimes the images might be even be a Rorschach test. The day I'm not scared is the day I stop shooting...

Hi, I have a few domain names for sale if you need a name for your marketing site. All prices USD.
I can add 3 years to current expiration for an additional $35/name.

$85          BLUESKYSTOCK.COM   
   
$180   STOCKPHOTOCONNECTION.COM

$125   INTERNETSTOCKPHOTO.COM

$50           MAUVEPICTURES.COM

$150   SMARTPHOTOGRAPHER.COM

Please email me directly at [email protected]. If you're serious, PayPal same email immediately and first person sending payment reserves the name. All other funds will be refused.

Ron

For what its worth, this is my third USA recession since being in the stock business. Stock photography is amazingly resilient to general economic conditions. There is currently a major decline in print use that drives the high end sales, but that is driven by competition w/ the internet, not from the economy.

On another note, recessions are perfect times to start a business. The cost of doing business is less, and finding qualified people, free-lance or full-time, is more cost effective. The cost of money is at the lowest point in many years. I just had a major design magazine approach us to advertise at 50% off the list price, doesn't get any better!

My advice would be to find and occupy your niche so that when the cycle ticks up, you're ahead of the game. Think 5 years out.

Ron

We have Sara, an awesome full-time editor who also produces the shoots for iofoto. We used to do all the retouching and keywording in-house, but now outsource the work. Sara handles some of the uploading, but we also outsource or hire freelancers for the uploading as well. We've found that even though we might save some money by trying to do everything ourselves, that we have more time to think about creating good selling images when we're not distracted by the process.

We have an extra work station in the studio set-up for free-lancers to use for the uploading. The retouching is usually done at their location.

Hi Adelaide, thanks for your question! The other photographer is a full-time employee- copyright of images created by an employee under USA law are automatically owned by the company. This is not a secret, for over a year we have been very open that the iofoto images are created by a team. Here's more info on Gray: http://www.iofoto.com/profiles/profile-gray-mitchell/.

As you may remember, Dreamstime sponsored a workshop where the "winner" would come to the iofoto studio for a few days. We just wrapped up 3 days with Tomasz shooting both studio and location. Tons of fun!

Here's the DT forum thread:
http://www.dreamstime.com/forumm_8218_pg5

Here's today's lighting set-up:
http://www.iofoto.com/lighting/

And behind-the-scenes from Day 1 and Day 2:
http://www.iofoto.com/dreamstimeworkshop/
http://www.iofoto.com/dreamstimeday2/

Over 9% revenue increase in March over February- and our strongest month to date. Uploaded about 500 new images- 3% increase in portfolio size. Nice to see the StockXpert price increase have immediate impact!

to MJP: Thanks for the suggestion- I have downloaded and installed- we'll see what happens!

to FlemishDreams: Joomla is a more powerful CMS, but my experience was already in WP, so I opted for the lower learning curve. Unfortunately, I'm not that tech savvy- I would rather be shooting than hacking CSS!


By the way- thanks to both of you for sharing these great suggestions with the community!

Wow! I didn't know this- but anyone can help push their page to higher search results by creating  links from their own site. While no one knows for sure, many suspect that Google evaluates the number of links to a page as a measure of how useful the page might be to others.

That is one of our goals with the iofoto.com home page. We support all our distributors- links are embedded throughout the site.

By the way, a site like iofoto.com is easy and inexpensive to set-up. We use a free Wordpress design template and Dreamhost servers at less than $15/month. There's even less expensive, or free hosting, available as well.