Friday, June 5, 2009

Selling Photos To The Largest Internet Market



A Three-Step Process For Reaching The Largest Market On The Internet

The Internet opens up not just a gigantic market for your photography, but also opens up numerous sub markets. I am using my website to get my stock photos seen by more of the “traditional” licensees of stock, to get those same images seen by potential licensees who normally would go to Getty, Corbis, Blend and the like but still might not see my images, and to reach consumers who might want prints, printed merchandise, or might want to license images for non-commercial purposes. That consumer market is the largest market out there and I definitely want to tap into it. Following is my three-step process to tap into that market.

As most of my images are aimed at the traditional stock photography market, I would guess that they are not of that much interest to the layperson. Step one is to create images that will be of interest to the public in general.
My web master pointed out to me that there were a lot of searches being conducted on the Internet for “pictures of dragons”. My associate, Stephanie Roeser, volunteered to create some dragon images from some old photos I had shot of an iguana, hence the dragon image you see above. We also have fire-breathing versions, one with a castle and so forth.

Step two is to get those images (the dragons in this case) in front of that target audience, i.e. loading them onto my site, creating products in CafePress, and uploading the Images to ImageKind (in my case) for fine art prints. With CafePress we can offer the dragons on coffee mugs, apparel such as aprons, T shirts, and baseball caps, mouse pads, journals, pet bowls and numerous other imprinted products.

Step three is to write about those images, maybe put them in a blog (wink, wink), write an article (I always knew that English degree would come in handy) Dragon Article, and, of course, make sure the images are well key worded. The article is first published on my site, then after being indexed by Google and other search engines, it is published on various e-zine sites.

It really is simple. Created images that appeal to the public, make them available over the Internet, and then make sure that the images will appear in searches. Stay tuned, I will eventually know if this works!

¬

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

"My web master pointed out to me that there were a lot of searches being conducted on the Internet for “pictures of dragons”. "

How does one find something like this out?

John Lund said...

Sean,

I use Wordtracker.com but I understand there are several such companies....

John

Anonymous said...

Interesting. I'm poking around their site, but I can't really find how they discover what people are "searching" for. I mean, google doesn't hand over a list of daily searches, do they? Seems like a seo service...

John Lund said...

Sean,

You type in a phrase you want to check out, like "pictures of". Wordtracker will then offer suggestions of similiar searches. Then you can have Wordtracker show you how many searches are being made of those phrases or words, and how many other sites compete for those words and/or phrases.

John

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