An elephant at the bar...and an email campaign to promote my stock photography.
Leveraging Assets
I often find myself wondering why the world needs any more
stock photos, and lamenting the fact that so many of my images have disappeared
both in terms of visibility and in terms of sales. It has occurred to me, frequently, that I might be better
off leveraging those old assets (stock photos) rather than just creating new
ones. I have actually been working to that end in my efforts to get more
traffic to my website where almost all of my images can be found. But I have
decided to up the ante a bit by actually promoting my work. To that end I have
signed up with AgencyAccess and have put together an email campaign for the
next year. I actually made my first mailing a few days ago…I sent out 4700 emails to
mostly art directors and art producers with ad agencies, in house art
departments, and a smattering of magazines. I will report the results in my
next blog post and will report my overall progress here as things develop.
Focusing On Humorous Animals
As part of this same project I have also changed my website
a bit. I have focused the home page gallery and the portfolio section on
conceptual and humorous animal imagery. If some one searches using the search
window or the “Stock/Categories” all of my imagery is available. Probably 90% of
my images are handled by agencies, primarily Blend Images (of which I am a part
owner) and Getty but also with SuperStock and Corbis. It is a slow process, but
I am linking each image to the agency that handles the work. If that linking
has not been done yet then when someone inquires about licensing an image the
query comes to me, otherwise the interested party ends up at that particular
image on the stock agencies site. I am also having a light box added but that
may take another week or two to be implemented.
Google Image Search
The vast majority of people finding my images on the
Internet don’t end up on my home page but on the individual picture page via a
Google image search. But I think
by focusing my home page on the funny animal pictures I can get more links that
should raise up my imagery as a body of work higher in the search order of the
various search engines. At least I hope so!
Licensing And Assignments
In the worst case scenario I will be out a couple of
thousand dollars, I will know one more thing that doesn’t work, and I will be
better able to focus on finding what does work. On the possible (and I hope
probable) up side I hope to get some good licenses and perhaps even an assignment
that fits my situation. In addition, if more people come to my site, find
images they are interested in, and then go on to license them from an agency,
then those images will also start to rank higher in the agency searches as
well…hey…at least the theory is good! I firmly believe that the biggest
challenge facing photographers today is getting our work seen, and that sitting
back and waiting to be found is not the best route to success.
