Photography Business | PhotoBusinessGuide.com

STEP #12: Wait for approval

April 27, 2010 By nrjberg Leave a Comment

After you uploaded your images you usually have to wait a few days before you know if they are accepted or not. If you followed the advice in the previous steps you have a good chance to get them accepted in your first attempt but don’t give up if you failed the first time.

If they are rejected you need to find out why. It’s not always easy because many agencies just say “rejected” and leave some vague reasons why. Analyze all information you have and redo step #7-12 again and do NOT give up. It sometimes takes a few attempts but eventually you get the hang of it.

If you’re images are approved then congratulations!

After your images are approved you still have some work to do. First you have to give the images a title and don’t forget to include the most important keyword in the title if possible.

You also should write a short description of the image and here you should also include keywords whenever you can.

If you didn’t embed the keywords in the image you now need to copy and paste your keyword from the text file to the web interface.

REMEMBER: Keywords are extremely important to make your images visible when the photo buyers search for keywords. Without relevant keywords your images exist in vacuum and will not be noticed.

OK, so you have now passed the 12 steps to a big profit microstock photography business is ready to try your wings but guess what…

There’s More To Come

I have added two more steps that will transform it from being a “big profit” microstock photography business to a “kick-ass mega profit” photography business.

The last two steps is what separates the leaders from the followers in this business so read, underline and memorize the last two steps.

But before you continue – you need to promise me to take action. It will make you no good if this information ends up slumbering on your hard drive or as a nagging thought in your brain making you feel as a procrastinator.

Next step is due tomorrow so stay tuned!

Previous posts in this series:

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Filed Under: Microstock Tutorial Tagged With: Image Submission, Images, Keywords, microstock agency, Microstock Tutorial, Photo Buyers, Photo Search, Photography Business

Start A Big Profit Microstock Photography Business

April 26, 2010 By nrjberg Leave a Comment

Maybe I’m confused (I hope I’m OK but I decided to release my new special report “Start A Big Profit Microstock Photography Business – 12 Steps To Sell & Resell Your Images” for free.

16 pages of pure content.

No email address required, no jumping through hoops…

… just download the report from this link.

I need to know what you think about the report. Drop me a mail or make a comment below.

Over and out.

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Filed Under: Stock Photography Tagged With: business plan, microstock photography, Microstock Tutorial, Photography Business

How to Grow Your Photography Business

February 9, 2009 By nrjberg 1 Comment

The greatest lesson I’ve learned about running a photography business online is that there are only 3 basic and fundamental ways to grow your business. EVERYTHING you do in growing your business should be centered around these fundamentals.

1. Increase market reach

The market reach is how many potential clients you drive to your website through online and offline advertising and other means.

You can for instance buy banner ads, advertise via Google Adwords, distribute flyers, post on message boards to drive traffic to your website.

2. Increase conversion rate

The conversion rate is simply how many of your visitors buy your photos or services from you in comparison to how many visitors your website had in total. For instance if 3 out of 100 visitors buy from your website you have a 3% conversion rate. This might not sound very high but believe me, a 3% conversion rate is maybe not outstanding but it’s definitely quite good.

You can increase your conversion rate in many ways by for instance improving navigation of your site, pre-selling your clients and providing a good irresistible offer.

3. Increase the lifetime value of your clients

The third and final way to grow your business is to increase the lifetime value of your clients. The lifetime value is how much each client buy from you in total over the years you run your business.

Increasing lifetime value can mainly be done in two ways

Increasing the price
Selling more times to your client

A client that once purchased something from you is much more likely to purchase again so old clients should always be given special treatments. If you regularly send them special offers they can’t resist they’ll keep buying from you over-and-over again.

Don’t you agree that if you a) increase your market reach, b) increase the conversion rate and c) increase the lifetime value of your client you’ll be able to grow your business as much as you want?

In fact, everything you do should be centered around these three fundamentals for business growth:

Increase market reach
Increase the conversion rate
Increase the lifetime value

Nothing else is important in terms of growing your business.

You can also express the business growth with this formula:

Market reach x Conversion rate x Lifetime value = Money on the bank

Let’s assume you increase

Market reach with 10%
Conversion rate with 10%
Lifetime value with 10%

Your business has not increased with 30%, it’s increased with 33.1% (1.1 x 1.1 x 1.1 = 1.331).

If you methodically and consistently work to improve these three areas you’ll see an incredible growth of your business.

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Filed Under: Marketing, Photography Business Tagged With: business growth, photo business, Photography Business, photography marketing, sell photography, selling photography

Webhosting for Photography Websites

February 9, 2009 By nrjberg Leave a Comment

The one lesson i learned years ago is to never build a photography business on a free web hosting account. And i mean it, NEVER!

I used a free web host initially and had to regret it later. One day it was gone… stopped working… they just decided discontinue with the free service. Imagine you have built up a good site, have a lot of traffic to the site and one day it’s gone. You have to start all over again.

Here are the top 7 reasons why you should NEVER rely free web hosting for your photography website:

It simply looks VERY unprofessional
The storage space and bandwidth is very limited
Most free web hosting include advertising on your site
You have very limited support if your site is down
They might just disappear one day and your site is lost
You won’t get your own domain name
You can find quality web hosts for VERY cheap prices nowadays

There are so many good quality web hosts available that there is simply no reason to be cheapskate charlie and use a free service. You can get a quality web host for $4.95 per month. Come-on, you can afford that!

Here’s a simple 7 step checklist for selecting a webhost:

Guaranteed uptime should be >99.9%
You should not need to sign a long term contract
Your account should include CPANEL and Fantastico for easy installation of blogs and image galleries etc.
The web hosting service should include 24/7 support
Ample of disk space and bandwidth (unlimited is best)
Possibility to seamlessly upgrade your account later with more domains, SQL databases, dedicated server etc. when your business grows
Provide Linux web hosting (don’t use Windows)

I often get the question “which web host do you use?” and the answer is Hostgator for most of my sites. I’ve tried many other web hosts but Hostgator is the one that nearly always works flawlessly for me and they provide good value for money.

Hostgator.com fulfills all 7 criterias in the checklist and they also have one more added benefit. They are very popular and this means that most scripts for blogs, shopping carts, image galleries, CMS etc. have been tested and works great with Hostgator.

Hostgator web hosting might insufficient if you start driving a huge amount of traffic but don’t worry about that for now. You need an insane amount of traffic to your website before it becomes a problem so let’s call it a positive problem if it happens . And you can always upgrade to another web host.

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Filed Under: Create Website Tagged With: photo business, Photography Business, sell photography, selling photography, web hosting, webhosting

Get Free Traffic to Your Photography Website

February 9, 2009 By nrjberg Leave a Comment

You have a lot of things working against you when you try to get free traffic to a newly created website.

The search engines and especially Google likes old domain names. All new domain names end up in the sandbox for a few months and it takes years to garner trust from the search engines
It takes time to get incoming links to a new website
It takes time to create content for the website
It takes time to get a higher PR (Page Rank) value
etc.

In short, it’s darn difficult and takes time to get a new website ranking high in the search engines. But there is an easy shortcut you can take.

Here’s how you can take a “free ride” on other websites and get free traffic

You can “piggy back” on the hard work other website owners have done to get traffic to their website and the best part it’s free traffic for you.

Note: the concept of piggy backing might not be new to you but i’ve added a unique twist that makes it much more effective.

Step 1: Find a photosharing website that fulfill the following criteria’s

You can put an outgoing link in to your website from the photo sharing site. It’s great if you do NOT get a “nofollow” link but it’s OK if you do.
The title you give the image is included between the TITLE tags
The title you give the image is included in the ALT tag
You can set keywords for the image
Old site with lots of traffic and images, a high PR and rank high in the search engines.

It may sound complicated but it’s quite easy to find out if the photo sharing site fulfills these criteria’s. And once you found one it’s as easy as 123 to piggy back on the free traffic from the website. More about that later…

Step 2: Upload your best images images to the photo sharing site and give them keywords

After you uploaded the images you need to give each of them a very specific keyword they should be optimized for. For instance, if you have an image of the Niagara falls at sunset you can use the keywords “niagara falls sunset”. Make sure the keyword is relevant to the image and that it’s a keyword you think people would use when they search for an image like this. There are many free tools on the web that helps you find out how many times a certain keywords is searched for.

Important: Make sure you include the keyword in the caption and/or title field for each image.

Step 3: Put a link to your website in the description field

Now you just have to put a link to YOUR website by mentioning something like this “You can find many more beautiful images like this at YOUR WEBSITE”

So people come to the high traffic website, find your images and get interested, Then they click on the link and come to your website.

You just got free traffic to your website!

This concept to piggy back is not new but there’s a unique twist in that you keyword each image and put the keyword in the caption/title filelds and that the keyword also is added in the ALT and TITLE tags. This makes it easy for Google and other search engines to find your images.

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Filed Under: Create Website, Marketing Tagged With: photo business, photo sharing, Photography Business, photography marketing, search engine optimization, sell photography, selling photography

PhotoBusinessGuide.com

STEP #12: Wait for approval

There’s More To Come

Start A Big Profit Microstock Photography Business

How to Grow Your Photography Business

1. Increase market reach

2. Increase conversion rate

3. Increase the lifetime value of your clients

Webhosting for Photography Websites

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