Traffic, The New Currency For Photographers

Traffic Is The New Currency
I am not sure if the above phrase is entirely accurate, but it sounds catchy and it does convey my point that traffic is rapidly becoming the most important thing. That is especially true if you are a photographer and are involved in stock photography production. If you want to get an assignment you need to have your work seen. If you want to license stock you need to have your work seen. If you want to sell picture-imprinted products you need to have your work seen. In short, you need traffic.

Traffic Provides Alternative Income Sources
Not only that, but traffic provides you with alternative income sources. If you have traffic you can earn money from advertising. The light bulb for this first came on in my head when my brother told me he was earning $3,000.00 per month from Google Adwords on a couple of trivia sites he created. Now I don't know about you, but for me an extra $3,000.00 a month is nothing to sneeze at!

Someone Is Looking For You
Let's get back to the issue of having your work seen. You can print promo pieces and mail them out, enter contests, send e-mail blasts, make cold calls and all of the rest of the tactics that as photographers we have all employed to drum up work. But if you aren't optimizing your site you are, in effect, leaving a lot of money on the table. Let's say you are an assignment photographer specializing in executive portraits. Wouldn't you want anyone who is in need of your services to know you exist, to find your work? Who is most likely to be searching for "executive portrait photographer"? A motivated buyer! Someone who isn't locked-in to a favorite photographer, someone who has a need, someone who is exactly the person you want to reach, and someone who is looking for you! Can they find you?

More Eyeballs Equals More Money
The same is true, perhaps even more so with stock photography. We all have images that agencies have rejected, images that didn’t happen to fit the requirements of the moment, or didn’t suit a given editor’s sensibilities, but that are still good images and can be earning revenue for you. And even with the images that the agencies are handling, getting more eyeballs on them, and linking buyers to those images on the agencies site, will result in more dollars for you. People, all kinds of people, are out there looking for images. Are they finding yours?

Photography, Creating Content And Drawing Traffic
As a photographer you are already in the business of creating content, and content is the primary tool of drawing traffic. Search Engine Optimization is the process of adding quality content and making sure that Google knows it is there. There are photographers out there who are getting massive amounts of traffic and converting that traffic into income. If they can do it, I can do it, and you can do it.

Long Tailed Keywords And Building Traffic
I have been working on optimizing my site for approximately one year now. I have gone from an average of one person a week in traffic to between four and five hundred visitors a day. Oddly enough, I really haven’t increased my rankings in the search engines; I am just getting more and more long-tailed keyword results. I believe that I am in what is called the “sandbox”.  Apparently Google will sit on your site for up to a year, to make sure the site is legitimate, before moving it up in the rankings. I keep thinking “any day now”, but who knows. At least my traffic is building and is leading to more licensing, more opportunities and to more community. And that isn’t a bad thing!

Long And Arduous And Worth It

This process of making the web work for your stock photography business can be a long and arduous one. I started my serious efforts eight months ago, and while I have seen results, they aren’t as impressive as I hoped for. But I am not discouraged, far from it. I am more convinced than ever that a strong presence on the Internet is going to be increasingly beneficial and important to all stock shooters.

My goal is to be getting 10,000 to 20,000 visitors a day to my site. Right now I am averaging a tad over 300 a day. That is up from one visitor a week eight months ago, but obviously I have a long, long way to go. But even with just 300 a day I am seeing a benefit. Today I was contacted by an Agency in New Zealand about licensing an image they found on my site. I asked them how they happened to find me. They told me they had searched Getty and Corbis and the “usual places” but couldn’t find the image they wanted. They then did a Google search and found my image.

Since virtually all of my images are handled by various agencies, most of those who find something they are looking for on my site are sent on to the respective agency handling that image, and I don’t know if they make a purchase or not. But I do see that every day numerous visitors do go to an image page and then on to Blend Images, Getty, Corbis, and Kimball Stock. I don’t know what percentage of these visitors’ license stock photos, but some do, and as my traffic increases so will those sales.

As I mentioned, success on the Internet, for me, is proving to be not just long, but arduous as well. The process of uploading my images, along with the metadata entry, is agonizing for me. In each of the arenas I am attempting to incorporate there is a ton of work to do. I am way behind in tagging and key wording the images I have on ImageKind. My CafePress site requires mountains of work before it will be ready for prime time. My efforts with Flickr at this point are pathetic and my own site is rife with mistakes, misspellings, inadequate key wording and lack of images…and what I really want to be doing is making images! But I firmly believe that in the long run getting my images seen is at least as important as making new ones.

Getty has instituted “stacks” in their search. The result is that while overall the bulk of my images will be seen more readily, some images will be buried much deeper. What can I do about that? I can get more eyeballs on my images through my Internet presence. I can do that by getting all of my images up online, making sure that they are key worded well, and that my site is filled with well-organized quality content. I am attempting to add quality content by writing articles, interviewing important people in our industry, and sharing my experiences in this blog.