Cute, Funny Animal Pictures and Plan "B"

Funny animal pictures are part of my Plan "B" to diversify and increase my security and earning potential.

Cute, Funny Animal Pictures
More than once I have been introduced as the “the guy who creates the cute, funny animal pictures”. I have to admit, it is with mixed emotions that I hear that. As a photographer my ego can’t help but want to be known for “serious” work. However, I really don’t do much “serious” work. Further, after a career of some thirty years as a professional photographer, I have never received as much genuine thanks for creating images as I do for the funny human-like animal pictures. A week after 9/11 a United Flight Attendant sent me an e-mail telling me that one of my humorous cat pics brought the first smile to her face in a week. A week doesn’t go by without my getting at least one random phone call or e-mail from someone who is thanking me for creating those photos and bringing a smile to their face.
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Millions of Pet Owners and Photo Creations
Now, with the stock photo business going through such transitional pains, I have a renewed appreciation for those anthropomorphic photo creations. I can’t help but believe that the market for products with photos imprinted on them, now made accessible by the Internet, represents a truly enormous opportunity. There are over 37 million cat owners in the U.S., and over 43 million dog owners. All I want is about ten cents apiece!

Funny Animal Pictures and Anthropomorphic Offerings
According to Wordtracker there were over 23 million searches for “funny animal pictures”. Hey, if one percent of them bought an animal print from me, and I made a mere $5.00 per print, lets see…I would make (my math is always suspect here) oh, about $1,150,000.00. If it were only so easy! But there isn’t anything easy about it. Shooting animals is certainly challenging. The stripping out of hair and fur necessary for compositing my anthropomorphic offerings sure isn’t easy. Perhaps hardest of all is attracting traffic to my site in sufficient quantities to actually provide a significant amount of revenue. But then, if it were easy, everyone would be doing it.

Diversification and Different Revenue Sources
For us photographers, stock or assignment, now is an important time to diversify. By having this “funny animal” sub-specialty I am tapping into a much different revenue source than the standard stock photo licensees. By selling photos as products, i.e. coffee mugs, T-shirts, tote bags, mouse pads and more through CafePress, I am reaching a different clientele. Photographic prints represents yet another diverse source of income that ought to be accessible to any photographer. Just like in the investment world, diversification provides an increase in security, and who knows, you just might end up liking the “plan B” more than your “day gig”!

Plan “B” and Creating Effective Stock Photos
Having a “plan B” helps me relax a bit and I think actually makes me better at my primary task of creating effective stock photos. I try and work on each aspect of my business each day, and changing tasks, such as taking a break from compositing to work on key wording, or switching from uploading images online to writing a blog entry or article, helps keep me invigorated and enthusiastic. For example, the first thing I did this morning was create a composite stock photo for Blend, followed by working on SEO strategy, then entering sales reports into my database, and finally, working on a stock photo for Getty. Now I am at home writing this blog on my laptop, and in just a few minutes it will be time to veg for a bit and watch the Olympics. Actually, that is going to happen right now…later!

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.

Long And Arduous And Worth It

This process of making the web work for your stock photography business can be a long and arduous one. I started my serious efforts eight months ago, and while I have seen results, they aren’t as impressive as I hoped for. But I am not discouraged, far from it. I am more convinced than ever that a strong presence on the Internet is going to be increasingly beneficial and important to all stock shooters.

My goal is to be getting 10,000 to 20,000 visitors a day to my site. Right now I am averaging a tad over 300 a day. That is up from one visitor a week eight months ago, but obviously I have a long, long way to go. But even with just 300 a day I am seeing a benefit. Today I was contacted by an Agency in New Zealand about licensing an image they found on my site. I asked them how they happened to find me. They told me they had searched Getty and Corbis and the “usual places” but couldn’t find the image they wanted. They then did a Google search and found my image.

Since virtually all of my images are handled by various agencies, most of those who find something they are looking for on my site are sent on to the respective agency handling that image, and I don’t know if they make a purchase or not. But I do see that every day numerous visitors do go to an image page and then on to Blend Images, Getty, Corbis, and Kimball Stock. I don’t know what percentage of these visitors’ license stock photos, but some do, and as my traffic increases so will those sales.

As I mentioned, success on the Internet, for me, is proving to be not just long, but arduous as well. The process of uploading my images, along with the metadata entry, is agonizing for me. In each of the arenas I am attempting to incorporate there is a ton of work to do. I am way behind in tagging and key wording the images I have on ImageKind. My CafePress site requires mountains of work before it will be ready for prime time. My efforts with Flickr at this point are pathetic and my own site is rife with mistakes, misspellings, inadequate key wording and lack of images…and what I really want to be doing is making images! But I firmly believe that in the long run getting my images seen is at least as important as making new ones.

Getty has instituted “stacks” in their search. The result is that while overall the bulk of my images will be seen more readily, some images will be buried much deeper. What can I do about that? I can get more eyeballs on my images through my Internet presence. I can do that by getting all of my images up online, making sure that they are key worded well, and that my site is filled with well-organized quality content. I am attempting to add quality content by writing articles, interviewing important people in our industry, and sharing my experiences in this blog.