MicrostockGroup
Microstock Photography Forum - General => Selling Stock Direct => Topic started by: Aviation-Stock on December 22, 2016, 15:58
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Hello Microstockers,
during the next months I am planning to create my own stock photo agency in a niche (aviation). Now I am in the process of finding the right software solution.
I found out that there is even a WordPress theme for selling your own photos, it is called „Stocky“: https://themeforest.net/item/stocky-a-stock-photography-marketplace-theme/8087525?s_rank=1 (https://themeforest.net/item/stocky-a-stock-photography-marketplace-theme/8087525?s_rank=1)
Anyone here who tried it out and may share his thoughts or show a result? It has almost 1000 downloads.
Those of you who run an own agency: Did you use a software or is it self-coded?
Markus
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New Symbiostock for me
Steve
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What is your experience with the new Symbiostock? Ah I see you made a blog post about it (one year old) but I'm gonna read this first...
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My experiences - as a piece of software and a solution for hosting and selling your images online, it has been great. No issues, easy to use (once you are online and that is easier if you actually follow the instructions), easy to add photos to and the SEO seems to be good in that my images get good placement on Google alongside the major agencies.
Sales have been few and far between though. I think Vector people do better, and some of the Symbio people seem to be doing OK, but they tend to do more social media stuff about their sites. I'm a bit lazy there.
As I think I said in my blog, I see it more as a vanity project and if the world shifts more to buying from smaller unique agencies, I will be there and ready!
Steve
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Does the new Symbio have better support for install and working problems? Leo looked at mine and couldn't figure out why it wasn't working, and he's the genius who wrote the original. I mean that as the compliment he deserves.
I don't know if it was my host or something I mucked up in the code or a plugin or what. Never worked right, I removed it. Could have been wordpress version was bad.
Anything other then Symbio that anybody likes and works? what about that photostore or ktools or what it's called?
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I use Photodeck and really like it. They offer free trials.
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Buy a Domain name right now for your Niche then put together a basic site that is optimized and then see if you can get it to rank on Google 1st or 2nd page before you put a lot of work into it. If you can't be found then its pointless unless you plan to spend a lot of money marketing online and offline to drive traffic to your site.
Not trying to discourage you but Stock Photos and keywords related to the industry is very competitive and hard to rank for in the organic search on Google so that is why you should do a trial run if you plan to run your own site.
No traffic means no sales no sales means your in the hole for time, and cost of making and operating the site.
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Does the new Symbio have better support for install and working problems?
Yes, we don't seem to have very many. The forum is pretty quiet, which is probably a good thing.
The advice on testing Google ranking is a good one, although I have found that unless your images are pretty unique, even getting into position 1 or 2 on Google Images doesn't guarantee sales. You might get some views, but the people looking on Google Images rarely want to pay and the ones that are willing to pay often have accounts on the bigger commercial agencies. So I do get views on my images, but that rarely translates into a sale.
Steve
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For Yadda, and anyone else considering an independent site, here is a 5 minute quick start guide for Symbiostock:
http://www.symbiostock.org/docs/3-minute-guide-to-launching-your-store/ (http://www.symbiostock.org/docs/3-minute-guide-to-launching-your-store/)
If you follow these instructions you will be able to test it out rather quickly. And of course it's completely free.
If you don't already have a web-hosting solution you can get one for $8.99:
http://www.symbiostock.com/hosting-packages (http://www.symbiostock.com/hosting-packages)
And test it out that way. There are a few benefits to hosting with us, all outlined through that website.
Finally, with regards to stability, this is one area that the new Symbiostock has been quite stringent: we've had no serious bugs during the lifetime of the software, and approximately 95% of all reported issues are due to third party hosting issues.
As Steve alluded to, this is a large infrastructure and along with Symzio's new automated link exchange system, people are seeing huge boosts in their rankings. Whether this translates to sales right now or not is highly dependent on market conditions, but for the very small investment in getting your site online and making full use of all the free features the entire Symbiostock and Symzio system provides, there is no better option for maximized independence in my opinion.
Any other questions, shoot.
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I've had enough traffic on my original symbio site to qualify for Google's matched content ads which display your pages in among other adwords paid ads (eg http://cascoly-images.com/pix/ (http://cascoly-images.com/pix/) to see the resulting ads) -- that generates enough income to preserve the site and I'm moving some of my travel and science pages to this WP site
however, sales have been nil, even with 150K views per month - I think google images and ms agencies just present too big a hurdle for the average self hosted site to be worth it anymore - since I haven't seen anyone post real sales numbers to disprove this hypothesis my conclusion is good SEO just isn't being converted into sales
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Steve
I agree - you can have a great site with great SEO, but people aren't willing to pay even 99c! By the way, I clicked on one of the financial ads on your site - those pay best!
Amazing number of visits though!
Steve
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I own cmsaccount and there is also ktools.
cmsaccount will do the job for you but it is not perfect.
some of them will allow you to search your portfolio on sites like shutterstock.