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Messages - Elenathewise

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626
I'll reply to everyone's PMs later tonight.

627
Cthoman, I love your site and would love to have you on board. However, please consider this - if I already had an established site with high traffic, would I be asking for just 20 dollars to plug your link in? The cheapest relevant adverts we found are about 250 dollars, and that's the bottom.
Plus, you're not sharing your customers in this scenario. You are redirecting customers to other sites in case they don't find what they are looking for in your portfolio. So you're not losing a sale - you wouldn't have made it in the first place.

All understandable. I just wasn't crazy about the link exchange and link redirecting part and I didn't see the value in paying $20 a month at this time.  If there was a test drive or it was based on affiliates, I'd be much more likely to sign up. I like the idea and I'll definitely keep an eye on it, but I have some other things I'd prefer to pursue first. That's just my 2 cents. I'm often wrong and am prone to changing my mind.

Cory, about affiliates - you'd be doing exactly what you don't want to do: driving traffic to other people's sites for free. You won't be losing sales, but why should someone who never spent a cent or made other effort to advertise their store benefit from your advertising? In the scheme I propose everyone will have to chip in to drive traffic to the common place. Only fair in my opinion.
And yes, I think we will do a trial run - offer a month for free while we're setting up, but after that we'll need cash to start marketing.

628
By the way, KTools partial search is easily fixable. Check my site www.elenaphoto.com - we don't have a partial search. Plus we made a few simple  tweaks that makes it better. We would be able to share this knowledge with our participants.

629
'As I said, we won't accept everyone. We will review the sites before adding them.'

Ah, so now we're turning a bit elitist?  Only people that you like can participate?  What qualities is the 'review' looking for?

What kind of 'advertising' are you planning on doing for this link page?  Facebook ads?  Google ads?  I'd imagine you need a more thorough plan for prospectives before they'll participate.

Sean - when you give me a link to your site, I'll answer your questions. Right now it's a mute point - you are discussing things for the sake of discussing things. I respect your work but I am bit confused about your position here - why do you care?

I am not taking anyone's money right now. I am asking people who'd be interested to express their interest to me. Once I have enough potential participants, there will be details,  but they won't be discussed publicly on this forum. Common sense, no?

630
Elena,

I applaud you for taking the leap and trying to get something like this going, I run my own site but till now have done nothing to market it other than referring buyers who have contacted me via regular sites, and yet I am seeing more and more sales coming in through my own site, There is definitely a market for something like this.

My concerns are similar to a couple already mentioned, namely:

- I'd only be interested if there was a central search that subsequently sends the buyer to the site for the image they found.
- Plus, as bad as it sounds, a serious concern of mine would be my images being mixed in amongst unregulated content, I think that could do more harm than good for both me and the site you're creating.

I echo Christians comments, it's a start and whether it works or not anything that raises the knowledge of buyers going direct to the creator is good in my book.

The content will be highly regulated. I wouldn't share my advertising money with something that won't sell.  The central search will not be available at first, but we might be able to implement it later.

631

A portal with just links to personal sites won't score high in Google since it will be considered as a link farm.

it won't be just a link farm if the all the sites it links to actually links back to it

Thank you. I am not proposing just a link farm. I am proposing a - simple at this point - system to achieve 2 main things:
1. Give our customers more choice so they could actually purchase the image they need and come back if they need more.
2. Pull our resources to be able to do some broad advertising.

The customers will be able to do a search of descriptions on the portal site (it's not a rocket science to implement) providing we can get to hundreds of entries (which I doubt, not at this point).

About Google ranking - I have no ambitions to beat Getty in Google ranking, are you guys insane? We don't have a chance to directly compete with big guys and we won't even try. We are talking here about small niche market of conscientious buyers who would want to purchase from artists directly and willing to make a few extra mouse clicks to do that.
We won't make millions doing that. But we can make some money if we pull our resources.

I can go ahead with few people that already contacted me and put more of my own money into promoting a site and build it up and drive traffic to it. You can sit back and watch me do it. But if you decide to join a year later when the site is "offering more value" - well, it won't be 20 bucks a month to join, hope you understand. More value will cost more.

632
'The search engine needs to be in full control of the contributors too. If you do a site-wide search on photodeck, photoshelter, smugmug, clustershot - you won't have any ranking between quality and snapshots.'

Right, well that's one problem with any co-op idea.  If you want people to come and use it, it must present quality. While everyone thinks their stuff is awesome, there'd be no control over innumerable sunsets or peoples snaps.  And as Groucho said, sort of,' I'm not sure I'd want to be a part of any club that would have me'.

As I said, we won't accept everyone. We will review the sites before adding them.

633
Interesting idea. More links are always good. As a just launched site though, the value doesn't really seem to be there. Paying for a link to a page that has no page rank and sharing my customers with a new site doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. I'd prefer to partner with someone more established. I'll keep you bookmarked and see how it develops though.

Cthoman, I love your site and would love to have you on board. However, please consider this - if I already had an established site with high traffic, would I be asking for just 20 dollars to plug your link in? The cheapest relevant adverts we found are about 250 dollars, and that's the bottom.
Plus, you're not sharing your customers in this scenario. You are redirecting customers to other sites in case they don't find what they are looking for in your portfolio. So you're not losing a sale - you wouldn't have made it in the first place.

634
I would like to avoid this thread being turned into yet another discussion of "What is to be done?" I appreciate everyone's opinions but if you'd like to bounce around some ideas on how you think someone should do things, please start another thread. And please go ahead and buy Clustershot if you're interested in it, I am not.

We are accepting reasonable suggestions from people who already invested money and time into creating their own stores. Our site will develop well beyond it's current simple layout, give us time. We as a member of the site are directly interested in the best buyers experience possible, and we have resources to implement that.  But we need to start simple so the site is working right away (like beginning of February).

And yes, 20 dollars a month is a ridiculously low price to pay for your site being advertised, but if we have sufficient participation we can gradually build up the brand and the relevant traffic. And it will take time - it won't happen in a month. But it can be done. So, if you already have an online store with your images, we will be glad to hear from you.

635
General Stock Discussion / Re: yuri interview on John Lund
« on: January 22, 2011, 09:56 »
I am confused by his numbers:
Does he say that hi average return per image (for entire 2010) was $7.10?

Is that what he got paid from all the agencies or some calculated figure after he subtracted all his expenses?

Because I find that number shockingly low.

I think he might mean per month.

636
Answering some questions I received through PMs - monthly fee is to enable us to advertise the site. The operation cost of keeping the site is negligible. If we get 20 people to participate, we will have a 400 dollars monthly budget, which is very low, but still it's possible to do some advertising with it.
We can pull our resources and be better off than on our own.
Or we can keep endlessly talking:)

637
A site that showed thumbnails and (preferably) prices for each file, with a redirect to that image on the owner's site would make sense. A kind of workers' co-op. I think a lot of designers might like that, knowing that the whole price went to the creator, and I'm sure a lot of photographers would. It would provide an easy sales pitch, too.
Such a site could also act as an intermediary, selling credit bundles to companies that don't want to mess with a load of individual card transactions and passing the images to the buyer and the sales cash - less, say, a 5% administrative fee - to the photo's owner.  I see some difficulties in setting that up but I don't think it is impossible. 

That would be a feature request for the future.

638
I'm not sure a page of links is a solution to anything.
Sean, you're an istock exclusive and can't possibly sell images on your own. I am not sure why are you even getting involved in this thread. I offer something concrete and very doable  to help  - loosely at this point - organize people who started selling on their own. Instead of spending hours and hours in pointless discussions.

639
I did.

'The portal site will have links to participants' sites.'

That's not really a portal.  A portal would interact with the API of individual sites making them searchable from one place.

Not necessarily - although we may get there at some point. We call it a portal now in a sense of a "doorway" to stock photography offerings (by individuals), and it's not just a collection of links but a way to direct customers to search multiple sites, although at this point not "from one place" - they will have to go to a portal site and then visit other sites if they choose. If a search on your site didn't turn up any results, you will be directed to the portal site, where the description of the available sites will help the buyer make a choice where to do.
So, we'll start with that. Being able to search multiple sites from the portal directly would be a good feature, we'll see what we can do about it in the future.

640
Ummm, you're just making a site of links?

No. Pls read above.

641
To everyone selling their own images from their own websites:

The weakest point of selling your own portfolio from your website is limited choice of images. You can spend tons of money advertising but still the fact that you cover a limited number of subjects will severely limit your customer base.

To overcome this obstacle, WE ARE ORGANIZING A NON-PROFIT PORTAL SITE.
http://www.stockimageportal.com/

The idea is simple. The portal site will have links to participants' sites. The participants will be required to do just 3 things:

1.Link to the portal from their online store homepage
2.Put a link to the portal when a customer search on their site comes up with no results (we can help with the code there).
3.Pay a small monthly fee to maintain the site and advertise it (20 US dollars per link per month).

We are not looking to make money from this site. This is only to help us link to each other, have a small advertising budget and make sure customers have better shopping experience. You can join or drop off anytime you want (if you stop paying we'll just remove your link). We also reserve the right to not accept the link (for example, if you are selling just 5 images on your site we won't accept it).
We don't care what software you use or at what prices you sell your images for, as long as searching and buying on your site works.
We will keep you informed on how your money is spent.

Please PM me if you're interested in participation.

If you have questions, please post in this thread.

642
General Stock Discussion / Re: yuri interview on John Lund
« on: January 21, 2011, 20:01 »
I am a bit confused by this statement:

 "My return per image topped at 9.1 USD in 2009, and in 2010 it topped at 7.10 USD. It is continuously falling and I expect it to top at 5.6 USD in 2011."

When Yuri is talking about return per image - is it return per image per year?? Or per image per month?? Probably not per day:) but still what's the time frame?

643
Well, here is ours:
www.elenaphoto.com/store
Also on KTools. My computer genius husband had to fix some bugs in their software:-), but other than that seems to work fine.


Now what's the inside tip, what did Hubby have to fix? :)



One of the bugs was in the shopping cart, if you add several items to it including enhanced license the total wasn't what it's supposed to be - one of the items was getting counted twice. We reported that to the Ktools, they said they'll fix in next release.
Another one was not really a bug but a "feature" - it's the way the search gets done, by default their search includes a partial match, for example, if you type "ice" in the search, you'll get images with "office" which doesn't make sense and unacceptable from my point of view. So we fixed that now it shows only full word match.
Stuff like that.

644

He also said, I would appreciate that you do not tell 'my story'. (Just so we are clear this story or this post was not authorized by Daniel or Yuri.)
....
 I told Daniel that I could not honor his request not to do a story, but I did send him a draft of the story I had written asking for comments and corrections and told him that if I didnt hear from him I would publish the story later in the week.
....

Oops!... :-)  Someone is just too successful for their own good:) 

645
Okey Sean. My fault I did not see Laflors post, I missed it. My bad.

Jonathan

You mean, Yuri's post?.... (JUST KIDDING!!!:))

646
Actually, if I were in Daniel's shoes, I'd ask Jim Pickerell to edit the piece, to limit the chance of misinterpretations spreading further around the Internet.

Well, we do already have this angry mob assembled, so we might as well go after him next.  ;D

LOL!!! You crack me up :-) this is funny stuff:-)

647
Well, here is ours:
www.elenaphoto.com/store
Also on KTools. My computer genius husband had to fix some bugs in their software:-), but other than that seems to work fine.

648
Photo Critique / Re: lighting/white balance crit
« on: January 15, 2011, 22:38 »
I definitely see magenta tint in both images. Simple "auto color" in Photoshop may just fix that. I would invest in a monitor with color calibration if you're serious about stock photography.

649
Adobe Stock / Re: Low (almost none) views
« on: January 15, 2011, 18:38 »
Things should pick up from now on sales-wise and views-wise (this is already happening). First couple of weeks of January is always very slow.

650
Very interesting read. I was looking at "Daniel Laflor"'s portfolio a while ago myself and was wondering if it's just a part of Yuri's portfolio under a different name:). With very restrictive upload limits for non-exclusives it's very hard to grow your presence on Istock. So, to avoid those restriction one could register under a different name (or hire a real person to do that) and shoot some stuff exclusively for Istock... (not that I would see anything wrong with that). The images definitely have identical "look and feel", and yes there are models that appear in both Laflor's and Arcurs' portfolios.
It's either that, or Yuri trained a very capable competitor to himself;-)

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