Do you have photographs by the hundreds, perhaps even thousands, piled in shoe boxes or just cluttering up your hard drive? Are your pictures as good as, or perhaps even better than, those you see everyday in print? Would you like to see your images published, with your credit line on them and most importantly, would you like to make money, extra cash, for an asset that is currently just gathering dust? Then read on. To survive as a photographer in today’s economic and technological climate you have to think outside the box. You have to make each photograph that you have sell in multiple markets. As a successful stock photographer that is exactly what I have done and now I’m going to share twelve marketing ideas with you. Ideas that can start you making money with photos that are just hanging around, or increase your income if you are already selling your images. I have tried many of the ideas I’m about to share with you. Those that I have not tried, I keep trying to find the time to try. I have had varying degrees of success with these marketing techniques, but I believe in all of them. The success of any one of these strategies is going to be directly related to the belief you have in it and consequently the amount of plain old fashioned effort and hard work you are willing to put into them. The techniques I have had success with are those that I have worked at. When I have just given an idea a casual try, with little or no follow up, not surprisingly, it has not done as well. Being successful and making money in photography takes work. Just, I suspect, as it does in any other field. Some of the following ideas will cost you nothing up front (my favorite), some will cost you a small sign up fee and at least one will be rather expensive. My preference is always to pay as little as possible up front and then a commission to the seller at the time of the sale. That way you are risking only your time and energy and the sales outlet has an interest in seeing that your work earns money. The whole photographic world today is digital. If you have slides or negatives, get a scanner. Also, the bigger the file size that your camera produces, the more sales and marketing options you will have. A bigger file size does not guarantee a better photograph, but it will absolutely lead to a larger pay day. Finally, I think that black and white is making a comeback. Don’t despair if all you have are beautiful images from a bygone day. There are sales opportunities for black and white as well (just as soon, that is, as they are digitized). By the way, when I talk further down about selling an image, I’m actually referring to the licensing of the use of the image. You NEVER, EVER sell your original. Never! If you did sell your original, you would never be able to sell it a second and third and fourth etcetera time. One of the beauties of photography is that you can re-license the use of an image indefinitely, and one image can continue to bring you revenues for years! So when I write, "sell" think "license". Now off to make some money. $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ 1) The Stock Agency. The stock agency is the traditional way to earn a passive income with your camera. You take the images you have in your file and transfer them to the file of a company whose only job is to license the use of your images. The agency takes a commission on the sale. Getty, www.gettyimages.com is by far the leading stock agency in the world. Because of their status they only work with the very, very best in the photographic world. Unless you are in the elite, it will be very difficult to get them to take your work. Other reputable agencies and agencies I have worked with include agefotostock, www.agefotostock.com Veer www.veer.com and MyLoupe www.myloupe.com For the longest time agefotostock had the reputation of being an extremely photographer friendly agency. I’m not so sure how true that is currently. You can find many more stock photo agencies by doing a Google search on "Stock Photography". 2) The Microstock. The microstock is a relatively recent phenomenon on the photographic scene, the product of new technologies and the internet. The microstock functions in many of the same ways as the traditional stock agency. What makes the microstock different is that it licenses your pictures for as little as a dollar (leaving you with a commission often of around twenty cents). In theory, the low price will create a phenomenally large number of sales. My suspicion is that the only ones making good money from this deal are the microstock agencies themselves. However, if you can bear to license your images for as little as 20 cents, having images at microstock files will make you money. The current industry leader is istockphoto www.istockphoto.com This is not surprising as they are the microstock agency owned by Getty which gives them tremendous marketing clout. What is surprising is how amateurishly the agency is run. Never the less, because of their marketing strength you will make more money with istockphoto and you should try them first. Other reputable microstocks include 123rf www.123rf.com and Shutterstock www.shutterstock.com . Again, a Google search on "microstock photo" will yield many results. Also, further information on the microstock industry can be found at the Microstock Forum www.microstockforum.com/index.php
3) Posters and Canvas Reproductions. Why not take a page out of the artist's play book. After all, photography is an art too. I am particularly fond of this marketing avenue. They are numerous web sites that will reproduce your photographs as posters, on canvas or as giclees (which are basically your images printed on various forms of art paper, like watercolor paper for example). Artist Rising www.artistrising.com is the segment of art.com that is dedicated to living artists. Upload your photos to Artist Rising and they will sell them for you as posters. Art.com does a lot of marketing so you need not do all that much. I am pleased to get regular checks for only 98 images on-line from Artist Rising. Fine Art America www.fineartamerica.com takes the same concept one step further. When your images are on their site, they offer posters, giclees (on seven different papers surfaces and in many different sizes depending on the size of your images) and reproductions on canvas. Unlike Artist Rising however, Fine Art America does not appear to do any marketing and what marketing it does seems to draw other artists. You will have to market your own products here. An excellent way to market the posters, giclees and canvases from Fine Art America as well as from other product oriented sales channels for your photographs is on Ebay. A discussion of marketing on Ebay is beyond the scope of this paper but let me just note that if you set up your auctions or your Ebay store as if sales where being done on a drop-ship basis you need spend zero dollars on inventory. Just note in your auction that the item being sold is a custom order and may take up to four weeks to deliver. Don’t place your order with Fine Art America or any of your other suppliers until you have received 100% payment from your auction. Like magic; sales without any inventory cost! 4) Be your own Photo Agency. There are a number of different web sites now available that effectively let you act as your own photo agent. You get to upload your images to a site that is basically all yours, that is feature rich, that will act as an archive and that has ecommerce functions. For my money (and this is the expensive marketing method) Digital Railroad is the best of these archive/sales/agency sites (although I have recently become aware of www.foliolink.com and may change my mind on further examination of that site). You can see my Digital Railroad site at www.bradrickerbystock.com (which will automatically redirect you to my own Digital Railroad space). Digital Railroad also has a marketplace where you can submit images once you have a Digital Railroad site. Their market place functions much like a traditional stock agency. 5) T-Shirts. I love this idea. Put your pictures on T-shirts and other clothing items such as ties, aprons hats and a whole lot more. Zazzle www.zazzle.com is one of the most innovative sites I’ve come across in a long, long time. Not only can you place your pictures on clothing, you can put it on USA Postage Stamps that you can then attach to letters being mailed. You can submit images to Zazzle which they will include in their marketplace for others to use in designs. You get a royalty if your photo is used. Or if you have more energy, you can design your own custom store on Zazzle which they market for you (along with all their other stores, of course). Once again, Zazzle products with your images can be sold in your Ebay store. 6) Coffee Mugs. Take the direct printing concept of your images onto various products a step further. How about putting your great pictures on coffee mugs, steins, wall clocks, mouse pads and a wide variety of other goods. You can do this at Café Press www.cafepress.com Once again you can open a store on Café Press to sell your photo products. And again, you can sell the same products on Ebay. 7) Self Published books. This option will take more than one image. And it will require some thought as to the type of book you want to publish, which images you want to use and how you want to present them. But once you have all that figured out, go to Blurb www.blurb.com I’ve rarely been as impressed with the professionalism of a marketing web site as I have with this one. They will guide you through the process of publishing your photo book and once it is published, they will list it in their marketplace for sale. I have even heard of photographers who have taken their published book to local book stores and made sales (that, of course, could just be marketing hype). What I am sure of though, is that your book would make a fine item for auction on Ebay. 8) Limited Edition Fine Art Prints. This is old school photography. Art galleries and art galleries will often take framed prints on consignment. I currently sell all of my Limited Edition Fine Art Prints through my Ebay store, http://stores.ebay.com/Brads-Visions. It is important that you sell Limited Editions (mine are of 300 only) because this makes you look important and increases the price, that you offer to sign all of your sold prints (another prestige item) and that you deliver all Limited Edition Prints with a letter of authentication. It is also important that you charge a high price for your Limited Edition Prints. The bottom line here is that if you don’t take your work seriously, noone else will either. 9) Postcards, Greeting Card, Note Cards. This is another print on demand item that has great sales potential. Just offer up your favorite images as a series of postcards or greeting cards, If you live in a tourist areas, local stores ought to snap up such collections. Even in non-tourist areas attractive images of kids or animals or a wide variety of other topics can be marketed. My favorite place to get these printed is at Moo www.moo.com It could be that I just like the web site name, but the prices are reasonable and the quality good. Obviously, this type of paper product is another item that could do well on Ebay. 10) Art Sites. Take a look at Etsy www.etsy.com and at the Saatchi On line Gallery www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk .Both of these are art sites from which you can sell photographs. Etsy started with a bang just a couple of short years ago. You can sign up for an account and pay a minimal fee (twenty cents per listing) and you have your own store on a high traffic site. The problem with Etsy, it seems of late, is that it is another site where artists look at other artists work, but there are no buyers in sight. This another case where you will have to put in some promotional leg work on your own. Saatchi is an extremely well know art gallery in London. They are trying to expand their reach by letting just about everyone post and sell art through their on line gallery. They have set up a special gallery for photographers. Whether you will actually get seen on this site remains a question. But it is worth posting images just to say you have work at the Saatchi in London (well, sort of) and with the Saatchi’s reputation, it might just lead to sales for you. 11) Social Networking Sites. My Space www.myspace.com Facebook www.facebook.com and other social networking sites are huge. My friend, who is a professional marketer, tell me that these sites are starting to dwarf everything else on the internet. While I suspect she exaggerates, these sites can only be ignored at our peril. I have yet to figure out how best to use these resources for sales. Perhaps if you get there first you will gain a competitive advantage. Good luck. While I’m listing sites that ought to have good potential for making money that I have not explored, I should mention Craigslist www.craigslist.org Craigslist is a resource worth exploring. 12) Your Own Website. Your own web site is a must have if you are going to be taken seriously as a photographer. If you are just out to make a little extra cash and have some fun selling the pictures you already have, it may not be so critical. In either case, you can set up one of two kinds of web sites. The first is a product site where you sell you photographs and any of the other related products we have discussed. The second is called a portal site and basically gives information away for free. Where it is obvious how you make your money with a product site - the cash register rings with every sale you make, it is less obvious how money is made on the portal site. You make money by filling your portal site with photos and information that people will be drawn to and can see/read for free. You then monetize your site through Google Adwords and affiliate referrals. A portal site has the potential to make far more than a product site. I will be writing more in depth on the subject in another piece. There are huge numbers of sites willing to help you design and post your own web site. I have used Go Daddy www.GoDaddy.com and their Web Site Tonight feature. Another outlet that keeps sending me emails about free sites is dotPhoto www.dotphoto.com .The persistence of their marketing effort lends them credibility although I have no first hand knowledge of their product. A new means for developing a product web site has just been brought to my attention by a source I trust. While I have no first hand knowledge of this opportunity, it looks so interesting that I plan to follow up on it as soon as possible. Vstore www.vstore.ca (note that is "ca" not "com") offers free basic product stores that appear very feature rich for the price. V store seems to be making its money through Google Ad Words and affiliate referrals, It does not look like you will ever have to pay anything for the site and you keep 100% of your sales (less the ever present credit card processing fee). Well, that is it. My marketing efforts, for the record are:
www.gettyimages.com search under creative, advanced, photographers for "Brad Rickerby
www.agefotostock.com search under photographers for "Brad Rickerby"
www.veer.com search under my name again.
www.bradrickerbystock.com
www.artistrising.com/galleries/Brad_Rickerby
http://fineartamerica.com/profiles/brad-rickerby.html
http://stores.ebay.com/Brads-Visions
http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=31344
http://www.myspace.com/bradrickerbyphotography
I will shortly be opening a vstore (what a great idea and for free) and a new Business of Photography free information web site (if you would like to be put on the mailing list once the site is open, write me at brad@bradrickerby.com. The advantage to being on that list is that you will get articles like this one for free). Good luck with selling your photographs. Your comments, suggestions, ideas and anything else you would like to share with me are always welcome. Please write at brad@bradrickerby.com.
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Tip ... Business themes are much more marketable than travel or nature stock
