Funny Animal Pics, Concept Stock Photos And SEO For 2010

This funny animal picture started my Animal Antics collection of anthropomorphic pet pictures for greeting cards, coffee mugs, and other products.


I believe it will be increasingly important to produce creative, conceptual photos that are not competing with all the other images out there.

Funny Animal Pics, Concept Stock Photos, And SEO
What does 2010 have in store for me? More funny animal pics (for my efforts with CaféPress, ImageKind, Greeting Cards, and all those veterinarians and animal groomers that e-mail me seeking to use those photos), More stock photos, particularly concept images, for Blend Images, Superstock, Getty and Corbis; and more interviews and blogging. All of the above will contribute to the most important aspect of my ongoing SEO effort by providing quality content for my website.

Increased Demand, More Money, And Higher Price Points
If nothing else it should be interesting to see where the image industry goes from here. Obviously, as the economy picks up there will be both an increased demand for images and a willingness to spend more money on them, though I don’t think prices will rebound to pre recession levels. But I do expect prices in the microstock arena to increase. There will continue to be plenty of free images and a lot of very low priced ones, but as iStock has done with Vetta, there will be more offerings at higher price points. When RF first arrived on the scene the prices weren’t much higher than microstock levels, but gradually the prices grew until now, in many cases, RF prices are significantly higher than RM!

Traditional Stock, Microstock, and Fading Community
I also think that more and more there will be less separation between micro and traditional stock. After all, it is all stock, just at different price points. The trend started by Veer and Fotolia of offering stock from all categories in one place will continue. The “community” aspects of microstock will begin to fade as micro is absorbed more and more into the folds of the traditional players like Getty and Corbis, and as microstock is dominated more and more by pros and those micro shooters who excel at producing vast quantities of quality images.

Millions of Dollars And Image Theft
Another area to watch will be the anti-theft developments spearheaded by companies like PicScout, LicenseStream, TinEye and C-Registry. The millions, perhaps billions, of dollars that are being lost through copyright infringement and unfulfilled potential license fees, is just too big a piece of the pie to go unclaimed. The question is when, rather than if, image theft will get reigned in…and how much of the increased revenue will find its way into the pockets of photographers as opposed to the pockets of distributors.

Creating Stock Photos, Imprinted Products And SEO
I would probably make more money in the short term by devoting less time to my Internet efforts and SEO, and more to creating stock photos, but I totally believe that in the long term, it will be to my huge advantage to develop both my web presence and to increase my personal branding. Plus, my strategy of creating more silly pet pictures for distribution as photo imprinted products, and for increasing my print sales (through Imagekind), also relies on increased web traffic and high rankings in the search engines.

2010, An Awesome Year
So in the coming year it will be more of what I was doing in 2009. I am totally convinced that 2010 is going to be an awesome year, partly because I intend to make it an awesome year, and partly because, well, 2010 just rolls of the tongue so nicely!

SEO: Opening Doors For Stock And Assignment Photography

 The song and dance of getting photography assignments vrs. optimizing your web site for both assignment and stock photos.

Stock And Assignments
I think about stock photos all the time, but every once-in-a-while I think about assignments. There are a lot of good things about assignments; Money, fresh ideas, subsidized stock, the camaraderie of working with bright, motivated people, did I mention money?  But there are some downsides too. They take a lot of time. There is pressure. There is having to do things that you don't want to be doing. There is the stress of working with idiots (or at least people who think differently than you do).  And, oh yes, there is getting the assignments, the song and dance routine that all of us working pros know so well!

Time, Energy And Money
Those of you who are in the assignment world know of what I am speaking. There is constantly putting books together, putting time, energy and money into figuring out the coolest look, compiling prospect lists, shooting for the book, taking out ads in source books, shipping portfolios, keeping track of portfolios and so forth. Then there are the estimates. It can take an enormous amount of time and effort to put together good, accurate estimates. Unless you are truly exceptional a lot of those estimates will turn out to be, well, if not a waste of time at least a less than optimal use of your time.

Books Open Doors
But like I said, assignments can be good. The last assignment I did brought in $130,000.00 after expenses. I would be open to more of those, particularly because I didn't spend any time seeking that assignment. It just came to me. It came to me because I had written a book on Photoshop (Adobe Masterclass: Photoshop Compositing With John Lund). They say you don't make money off of books, but books open doors for you. I didn't make appreciable money in royalties from my book, but my client said that they hired me because of it. That book opened many doors for me and some of them were quite rewarding!

Art Directors, Art Buyers, And Designers Looking For Me
So I am OK with assignments, when they come, and if they are right for me. But I have no desire to jump through hoops to get them. I prefer to put my energy into my stock photography. Part of that stock effort includes SEO to get more eyeballs onto my images. But effective SEO will bring more than just stock clients. Art directors, art buyers, designers and others who are looking for a photographer with the look and style that I offer will find me. These people will be looking for me as opposed to me struggling to find them and get their attention. How cool is that? Just last week a licensing agent contacted me, all excited about the work I am doing, and exclaimed, “It was so easy to find you!”  It has been a year of heavy SEO now, but it is starting to work.

SEO Opens Doors
Good SEO is like that book. It opens doors. In the short time I have been working on optimizing my site I have had a surprising number of opportunities come my way. Some of them include a contract with a wall décor company, negotiations underway for a line of greeting cards, and a possible calendar deal. I have also executed one assignment and turned a couple of others down.  There is no doubt in my mind that this is just the tip of the iceberg. I believe that it will probably be another year before my SEO really kicks in…at least in a big way. I am totally confident that I will look back and be truly glad that I put the time and effort into making my site come up early in appropriate searches.

Penetrating The Consumer Market For Photography

Turbulence, Change And Pictures As Products
In this crazy time of turbulence and change in the photography world, I think it is extremely important to keep an eye on, and perhaps a toe in, a variety of markets. One market that the Internet seems to have opened up to individual photographers, at least on the surface anyway, is the market made up of consumers, people who want to buy pictures as products. I define that as everything from fine art prints to anything with a picture printed on it such as coffee mugs, greeting cards, mouse pads, calendars and so forth.

Cats, Dogs and CafePress.com
What I have found so far is that it is not necessarily an easy market to penetrate. With my collection of “Animal Antics” images, photos of cats, dogs and other animals in anthropomorphic poses and situations, I thought the process would be simple. Just put my images up on CaféPress.com and rake in the sales. Why is it that things so seldom work out as planned?

Cats, Dogs And Coffee Mugs
The first thing I misjudged was how much work it is to put pictures up on sites such as CafePress. A funny picture of a cat that works really well on a mouse pad invariably doesn’t fit well on a coffee mug. A photo that fits on a coffee mug probably isn’t going to fit too well on a journal. You get the picture. Not only that, but you have all kinds of products that you have to decide if you want to include. Things like “Flip Minos” and dog bowls. Then you have items like T-shirts and sweatshirts that aren’t going to print detail well. Is it better to include every product you can, or to limit your selection to products that the images actually work well on? I decided that the latter is better, except that what I have actually done is the former. I have all kinds of products, mugs, T-shirts, funny golf shirts, and the like, that don’t work particularly well with my images. I keep meaning to fix that…but, well, you know…. Decisions, decisions!

Key Words, Tagging And Traffic
Then, if you go to all that trouble, you may find, like I did, that after three or four months you have had six visitors and no sales. Does that sound like fun or what! To drive any kind of measurable traffic to your CaféPress Store front requires a ton of key words, tagging and promotion efforts. That isn’t to say it can’t be done. I am experiencing a slow but steady growth in sales. Heck, just yesterday we sold four T-shirts and made $18.00. But it does take a huge investment in time and energy. Will it pay off for me? I think it will and so I continue….

Time, Effort And Photographic Success
But back to the point of this blog. To succeed in this market will require having photography that is suited to the market, whether it is a collection of beautiful landscapes, cute kittens, or breath-taking flower arrangements…the images have to appeal to a broad group of buyers. You will need to put the time and effort into all the work from SEO to uploading images…it is up to you to bring the customers in. That doesn’t happen automatically. And, as I pointed out in a previous blog (Bill, link here to the blog http://www.johnlund.com/2009/11/passion-perseverance-and-visualization.html), you need patience and perseverance. Photographic success takes time…and an effort like this can take a LOT of time.

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!

Odds, Ends And The Long Haul

An Interview, Imagekind and CafePess.
Had a nice interview by Marc Silber Marc Silber Interview go online.
Sold a print on Imagekind this week.  That makes about one print a month since I started this concerted Internet effort, which while is still paltry, it’s a whole lot more than the zero prints I sold before I started the effort. I have doubled my Cafepress.com sales.  OK, doubling isn’t all that impressive when I tell you it has gone from an average of one sale a week, a coffee mug, calendar, or piece of apparel, to two sales a week. I have made a smattering of sales (licensing) of various images and have confirmed that people are going from my site to the agencies that handle my work (Blend Images, Getty, Corbis and Kimball Stock).

Quality Content And A Long Term Project
One thing is for sure, this SEO (search engine optimization) process is a lengthy one. Getting visitors to your site is a long-term project! It is a lot of work too. My twin brother is my web master and very adept at this. He says if you want Google to see your site as an important one, make your site important. That means quality content and lots of it. I now have over 2000 images uploaded, but at the rate I am going it will take several more years to get all of my stock photos online. One possible way to speed the process up is to hire a developer to create a robot that will harvest my Getty, Corbis and Blend images, and put them on my site.  I have a friend who has gone that route and I have to admit there is a certain appeal to it!  But for now I will just continue my snails pace of uploading.

Climbing Traffic And Click Through Ads
Traffic is slowly climbing.  Last week, according to Google Analytics, I averaged over 500 unique visitors a day. That is up from a one visit per week average ten months ago. My click through ad revenue ranges from $20.00 per day to about 32 cents a day (last Thursday). My average seems to have edged up to about $6.00 a day.  Hey, it pays for my coffee habit!

A Balancing Act And Making Images
One thing I constantly wrestle with is where to put my time. Making images and getting them up online is the fastest way to increase my income. On the other hand, I remain convinced that it is extremely important for long term success to increase my ranking with Google, and other search engines, through SEO and online content. It is a constant balancing act. Luckily I find myself enjoying this SEO process (other than the repetitive and sleep inducing meta data entry).

A Photography Blog And Building Community
A key part of my web efforts include writing this photography blog. It has actually turned out to be a fun challenge. I used to be a columnist for Digital Imaging magazine and for Picture magazine.  I would make myself crazy trying to come up with article ideas.  But with the Blog, it is more like sharing things and less like work. My goal and hope is that the blog is entertaining and informative. It is a key component of providing quality content and, I hope, of building community within both the creators and users of stock photography.

Seeing the "Big Picture"

Seeing the big picture

I once read an interview with a man who lived in the Canadian Rockies. He was quoted as saying that "…the mountains are OK, but they sure do block the view". I'm not sure that exactly applies to my following thoughts, but hey, I always liked that quote!

Social media is great. I really like the fact that I can let a lot of people know right away when I have new material up by just sending out a tweet, or making a quick post on Facebook. Looking at the "Big Picture" however, I also realize that it is very easy to get caught up in trying to get a lot of followers, and in general, spending an inordinate amount of time perusing various posts. Some of those posts can be very entertaining, but few are actually valuable to my goals. How many SEO tips does one need to read? In one post it was guaranteed that you could be in the top 10 of search results. I wanted to ask what happened if eleven people followed those tips….

I currently have just over four hundred followers on twitter, and something like 200 "friends" on Facebook. I have seen some tweeters (don't know if I am using appropriate terminology) with something like 100,000+ followers! But even if I were ever to get anywhere near that number of followers, would it be worth the effort? I doubt it. To get the kind of traffic I want to get to my site I really need to come up very early in search results. As big a number as 100,000 followers might sound, I want that number of people, or more, landing on my site each month. Those kinds of numbers can be much more efficiently achieved with providing quality content and optimizing for search engines. Social Media can be a part of that effort, but for me it is all too easy to spend too much time scanning posts. I would be much better served creating a new image, putting it up on my site, and making sure it is well key worded; and that my site is thoroughly optimized for those search engines.

For some, who perhaps are seeking a "True Fan" base, or need a more intimate connection with their "clients", perhaps social media is a more important endeavor. For me, I believe I am better off getting back behind the camera, pushing pixels with Photoshop, and doing what I do best: making images relevant to the market for stock photos. OK, I’m off to create an image (and maybe tweet about it).

Multi-tasking to success

Multi-tasking my way to success

Just finished an article about the creation of my latest concept stock photo. http://www.johnlund.com/Artcl35-conflict.htm I have this theory about one way to be successful in this Internet world as a stock photographer. My idea is to create cool stock images and then to write about them.
As I have mentioned before, the fundamental problem in this new environment of image glut, is getting your work seen. If I take the time and trouble to create a special image then it will behoove me to take the time and trouble to publicize that image. That effort actually will accomplish another objective too; the increasingly important task of branding oneself. By writing about my images I will be increasing their visibility, driving more traffic to my site, and strengthening my own personal brand.

What does it take to be successful in stock photography today? Let’s see, have a ton of good ideas, be a great photographer, know Photoshop like the back of your hand, become an expert at SEO; excel at writing, spend an inordinate amount of time on your website, be a social networking maven, and develop a strong personal brand. OK, so I’ve left a few things out….