MicrostockGroup
Microstock Photography Forum - General => Selling Stock Direct => Topic started by: humannet on October 20, 2012, 03:15
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1. How many photoes I should have?
I mean, at least how many photoes I collected, including other photographer's input, I can start thinking make a website selling photoes!
2. How to handle the licence and contract if a sale is made
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I think you are missing a dozen more areas you need to cover.
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I think you are missing a dozen more areas you need to cover.
I agree
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Don't think when, think why? Unless you come up with a new way to sell images, the market is already overcrowded. It's like opening a restaurant on a street full of restaurants. Most of them are selling the same food, aren't making any money and should close. There's no point opening yet another one unless it offers people something the others don't and has a chance of being noticed.
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The last successful "new" site is PhotoDune. But they're not new actually, since they're part of the Envato group, already selling illustrations, video, audio, etc...
The previous successful one is DepositPhotos, but they had millions of dollars to invest in promotion - they even paid for uploads.
In the meanwhile, we've seen tens of new sites popping up and then failing within months (or staying, but with no sales at all, which is the same).
What you can do instead - if you really want - is starting a site to sell your OWN pictures directly. It's quite difficult (especially to get sales), but not overwhelmingly difficult in comparison.
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Buy Royalty free images - £1 each: [url=http://www.microstockphoto.co.uk]www.microstockphoto.co.uk[/url] ([url]http://www.microstockphoto.co.uk[/url])
really? how is it going?
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Buy Royalty free images - £1 each: [url=http://www.microstockphoto.co.uk]www.microstockphoto.co.uk[/url] ([url]http://www.microstockphoto.co.uk[/url])
really? how is it going?
I started uploading photos to Photoshelter 6 months ago. I did no promotion at all, and - as expected - not a single sale!
Then, I added this front page at www.microstockphoto.co.uk (http://www.microstockphoto.co.uk) just yesterday. Will see if it leads to some sales... with a bit of SEO. Still too early to say.
My site was initially intended to recruit affiliates, but it seems it's useless... Out of nearly 70 affiliates at a major site, only 2 passed the test and both have less than 50 pictures. So I am now starting to target buyers. I have a few good affiliates as well, but they are my friends and I literally forced them to start selling photos... so they don't count. And I am not doing it anymore since it takes a lot of time to convince them that pets and shores are not a good subject.
£1 is an experiment... once I'll get a few sales, I will gradually increase price a bit.
I am also unsure about which currency to choose (Photoshelter allows only one at a time); I chose pounds as most of my photos are architectural pictures from the UK. The rest are mainly from Germany and Italy, so Euro may be an alternative.
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Buy Royalty free images - £1 each: [url=http://www.microstockphoto.co.uk]www.microstockphoto.co.uk[/url] ([url]http://www.microstockphoto.co.uk[/url])
really? how is it going?
I started uploading photos to Photoshelter 6 months ago. I did no promotion at all, and - as expected - not a single sale!
Then, I added this front page at [url=http://www.microstockphoto.co.uk]www.microstockphoto.co.uk[/url] ([url]http://www.microstockphoto.co.uk[/url]) yesterday. Will see if it leads to some sales... with a bit of SEO. Still too early to say
£1 is an experiment... once I'll get a few sales, I will gradually increase price a bit.
thanks for sharing, it looks very simple, effective and fast, nice job!
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I think the OP doesnt want to start an agency but his own site for his own photos.
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thanks for sharing, it looks very simple, effective and fast, nice job!
thanks! simplicity was my goal - and I used the most powerful HTML editor in the world: Notepad
I think the OP doesnt want to start an agency but his own site for his own photos.
Well, he said "how many photoes I collected, including other photographer's input" so I thought he meant an agency
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The English is a bit broken, I thought he wanted other photographers input, as in advise.
But you could be right now I read it again.
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If you're taking payment through Photoshelter your clients are probably paying you through paypal which lets your clients use a credit card so you can take any currency. I assume you have to price them using one currency but it's simple enough for buyers to find a currency converter and figure it out.
In terms of selling your own photos, you want to be able to have enough that a client can search but most clients will find your photos not necessarily by going directly to your site, but through a web search that brings up your keywords. I'm not sure what the minimum number of photos is. I have a mix on my site - photos I've done on assignment and photos that were shot specifically to license as stock.
I probably had less than 500 photos up when I licensed my first photo directly from my site, and many of them were not actually available as stock. While it would be far more successful if I had several thousand images, clients have come back to my site, so I'm assuming that there are enough.
I haven't started marketing my site yet - for that I'd probably want to have at least 2,000-3,000 stock photos available. If you want to take a look at my site www.campyphotos.com (http://www.campyphotos.com) and ask me any questions, feel free to. It's a work in progress. Better to get started and build up as you go along. Good luck!
-Marianne