SEO Advice for Photographers

If you want to be found on the Internet by people searching for photographers then good SEO is essential!

Google, (or any search engine) is looking for the best site to send to a searcher.   So, of course, if you want to get on the first page of the search engine results you site has to convince Google or whatever search engine is being used that your site is the best or at least close to the best.

Google doesn't rely on just your website, but also looks at the links on other websites that point to your site. For instance, if someone searches for "photographer" then Google goes and looks through its database and finds websites that are related to "photographer".  Let's say Google finds 10 sites that are tied for 1st place.  All ten are really good sites. To break the tie, Google will look at how many links are pointed to the sites, what the links say, and where the links come from and it will assign a score for those links.  The links from the most important websites will count the most. Links from unrelated sites are worth almost nothing.

There isn't much you can do about the links from other sites. Unless you are buddies with the owner or something you most likely will not be able to have the links say what you would like them to say.  You would like them to contain the keyword phrases you are trying to get a good ranking for.

The only place where you have control is on your own site. Once you have a "perfect" site, (search engine wise), then you need those good links.  If your website is really good, other sites with related content will link to it. But again, all you can do is make the best site you can and let the links happen!

So let's see what you can do about your own site. Google looks at 200 variables to makes its decision on where to rank your site. This includes things like spelling and grammar; good sites don't have a lot of miss-spelled words and/or poor grammar.  It checks to see how many pages the site has, how many of those pages are related to the keyword phrase being searched for, what the keyword density is, what kinds of ads if any are on the page, how cluttered the page is, etc.  Nobody (outside of Google) knows for sure what the 200 variables are and how they are rated. 

You can have a great website, but unless you tell Google about it you still won't rank well. For good SEO, all you can do is make sure your site is really good, is easy to use for humans, and can communicate that to Google.

If I was Google, I would first look at the title of the website.  If I were looking for a photographer for a book cover, I would not bother with a website that had the title: History of Mesopotamia.   However, if I spotted a website titled " John Lund, Professional Photographer, Sausalito, California, then that might be worth taking a look at. The search engines will look to see how often "photographer" is used on each page, and if your site has the word on 3 pages but someone else has it mentioned on 48 pages then they will probably get better results than you.  But that is just one variable of 200...

If a keyword phrase is in the title, it should be in the text of the page at least once. Each page on your site is a chance to optimize for a keyword phrase, maybe two, but not more than that.  It should be good reading for a human. So you might have a page related to "business photos", and one titled "Financial Concept Photos" and one "Photoshop Composite Photos" etc.  If you have lots of pages, each optimized for a phrase or two, Google begins to think maybe you are an expert.  That gives you better ranking.

When you look at the source code of your page you will see near the top of the page something like this:

That is the title tag and is in the "Head portion of the page".  In other words it has to be between the tags and also in the head portion will be the description tag... put it under the title tag:

.

Pictures have an alt tag you use to tell people who can't see the picture what it is about.  Google reads it.  It's for blind people and people that have text only browsers etc.  Put a good detailed description of the photo in the alt tags.

Typical alt tag (for the picture at the top of this blog):

alt="A woman executive stands at the top of a lighthouse in an urban setting scanning the horizon for opportunities and risks in the world of business and finance."

HTML has something called headings. H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6

H1 is the most important heading. Use it only once on a page.  Google thinks it’s more important than regular text. H2 is next in importance... you can use it once or twice under an H1 tag. H3 and lower you can use lots of if you want to. But they are for headings of paragraphs, nothing else. If you are going to work on your site I would suggest you take a few online tutorials about HTML.

So, as far as SEO goes...

Make as many pages as you can about different aspects of your business.

Include as much text as you can on each page... between 250 and 500 words is good.

Put the keyword phrases in your title, alt tags, body text, use headings with the phrases in your body text, and don't use the phrase too often.  Usually 1 to 3 times in the body text is good. 10 times is too many for 250 to 500 words.

Google has to spider your site before it can index and then rank it.  So be sure there are links on your pages that Google can read so it will know about all your pages, or make a sitemap to tell Google what pages you have.

Join Google's Webmaster Tools.  It tells you everything you need to know about how to rank well at Google.

Use Google analytics.

And there you have it, my webmaster's sage advice on SEO for photographers…have fun!

Forget about Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is secondary to content for building significant traffic for your photography (or other) business.

SEO, Quality Content, and Search Terms
Am I serious when I suggest to photographers that they forget about (SEO) search engine optimization? Well, yes and no. The point I want to make is that SEO is really about fine tuning your website. It can be important, but it really isn't the most important thing. If you want traffic to your site, and the ensuing benefits (for me that means selling imprinted holiday gifts through cafépress.com, licensing stock images, selling fine art prints and earning revenue through click through ads), then what you really need is content, quality content. Almost invariably the photographers who have substantial amounts of traffic get that traffic through a large number of search terms, not by being number one in any given search.

First Page Ranking And Increased Traffic (or not)
It may seem like being ranked on the first page for a desirable search term is the answer, but there are a couple of reasons that such a goal might not be the best approach. For one thing, getting ranked on the first page for anything other than your own name can be rather a daunting task (and even there I am up against a famous actor named John Lund as well as several other photographers who for some odd reason have my name). If you are just getting started you have a huge disadvantage going up against those who have already secured their positions. You will have to get past those who probably know what they are doing and have a huge leg up in terms of what search engines value: content, links and time. Secondly, ranking highly for a given term doesn't always bring the traffic you think it might. That was driven home to me when, over a two week period of time, I constantly ranked, with Google, between four and six for the term "stock photos". During that period of time I found no detectable increase in my traffic from when I was ranked in the low hundreds, which is where I have fallen back to today for that particular search term.

Traffic Comes From Content
Today, for example, I had over five hundred people get to my site from search engine queries (other traffic comes from those "links" and referring sites). The number one search term that brought visitors to my site was the term "John Lund" with 5 visitors. No surprise there, the surprise is that I only had eight search terms that brought in more than 1 person. 99% of my traffic comes from search terms that are only searched for once in any give period of time. To get truly significant amounts of traffic you need a lot of search terms and you get a lot of search terms by having a lot of content.

Content, Links and SEO
The two things that search engines value most are content and links. You get links by having content that people value enough to link to. So it all comes back to content. In a sense, photographers are fortunate to have content to put up…and yet pictures hardly count. Search engines can’t “see” pictures…so pictures become a kind of excuse for the words, which hopefully entice humans to come see the photos. SEO, or search engine optimization is simply the process of organizing that content to make it most accessible to search engines, and to people. Remember, the "robots" that search engines use to index the Internet (and hopefully your site) are themselves optimized to "think" like humans…because the search engines want to deliver good results to humans. Search engine optimization is something the search engines want you to do well, and Google, with the lion's share of Internet searches, is happy to tell you what to do for SEO. But the most important thing you can do to generate traffic for you web site is to provide quality content. That is why I say to forget about SEO (OK...not entirely), because without the content the SEO isn't going to do you much good.

Quality Content, Links and Time
Quality content will bring links and links will raise you in the rankings increasing both your traffic and, bringing in more links. It all takes time though. Lots of time. I estimate that three to five years are needed to produce the kind of traffic…thousands of visitors a day…that will lead to a significant difference in your photography (or other) business. It can be done. Photographers like Quang-Tuan Luong, Rolf Hicker, and Dan Heller have proven that. Content, links and time comprise the path to traffic. SEO is great, but your priority should be quality content, and lots of it.

Achieving Internet Success In Your Photography Business

Because building significant traffic does take a long time, and loading content is a grueling process (I am thinking here of the process of uploading, keywording and captioning photos),

I think it is best looked at as part of an everyday routine. I try and do a little bit each day. It is that old slow and steady wins the race kind of thing...where one day, maybe three years from now, you stop and think to yourself "Man, I am so glad I did this!". I guess I'll let you know about that in another year or two!

Interview with Photographer Quang-Tuan Luong

Photographer Quang-Tuan-Luong Interview:

Quang-Tuan Luong, Phd., is much more than a world-class photographer. From a technical climber to a mountain guide to a University professor and contributor to the fundamentals of artificial intelligence, Quang-Tuan has found his own way to professional photography. His site, Terragalleria, is the most frequented of any individual photographer's site on the internet and he now earns his living entirely through business brought in through the Internet. A complete bio of Quang-Tuan Luong is available at Terragalleria .

To say you have achieved some impressive traffic figures for your web presence is an understatement. I suspect your heavy traffic is a result of extensive text-rich content coupled with time. What do you think is a realistic amount of time to allow in building up enough traffic to turn a photography web site into a money-making endeavor?

It will easily take several years. There is this rule in the US that you have to show profit 3 our of 5 years in order for the IRS not to classify your business as a hobby, so I when I officially started my photography business (and the website) in 2001, I was anticipating that by 2003, my revenues would surpass photography expenses, which is what happened.  In 2004, traffic (as measured by Webalizer, which overestimates maybe by 2/3 compared to Google Analytics), passed 10,000 daily, and revenues reached the six-figure milestone. So for me it took three years to turn the site into a viable business. 

However, I was not starting from scratch, as I've had a presence on the internet since 1994, under the form of a fairly popular personal site dedicated to climbing and mountaineering - the contents were absorbed into the terragalleria.com site in 2002. Keep also in mind that it was easier, maybe much easier, to build traffic a decade ago. Back then, there were just a few photographers, the most notable of them being Dan Heller, who understood that you could effectively use a website as an effective pull marketing vehicle. Not many understood even SEO basics. You needed technical knowledge to build a site. There were no blogs or ready-made image galleries.  Nowadays even fairly advanced SEO features (some of which I have yet to implement on my own website!) are built-in as a standard issue in a service such as Photoshelter, which, last I checked had more than 50,000 accounts. That's a lot of competition, so I expect it will take longer than three years if you are starting now.

I have noticed that sites such as yours that draw significant numbers of visitors seem to do so from a large number of search terms…I guess you would say a lot of long-tail keyword hits. Is that the key to building traffic?

This sounds accurate. Looking at my Google Analytics statistics for the month of Oct 2010, I see that 300,000 search engines referred visits entered using 130,000 keywords, with the top 1000 most used keywords accounting only for 86,912 of visits. Here is a more detailed breakdown:

1-10: 13,891
1-100: 36,363
1-1000: 86,912
1-5000: 135,700
1-133,000 : 300,000
What other strategies can photographers employ to build their success on the Internet?

You mean other than SEO ? Social media has worked very well for some. For examples: Trey Ratcliff generated a tremendous following with his blog, or Patrick Smith with his Flickr posts, "Thomas Hawk" with both, etc....

How do you divide your time (i.e. between shooting, making prints, administration & Internet work)?

Shooting time has been in the 10-20% range. I don't have a clear breakdown for the office work, but I am spending a considerable amount of time to create high-quality digital files.

Do you get more revenue from fine art prints or stock licensing?

Half a decade ago, revenue from licensing was larger. At one point, a few years ago they became even. This year, I am seeing a sharp decline in licensing, which is now well surpassed by prints. Like everybody, my licensing fees have eroded, but on the other hand, I've steadily raised prices for my prints and so far they continue to sell well, maybe because my reputation as a artist is growing.
 

I see you have Google ads on your site. Is that a significant source of revenue?

I started to use Adsense in 2008 at the urging of friends. I am still unsure whether it is worth it and I am always thinking of leaving the program altogether, but in this climate it's not that easy a decision to drop a source of revenue that adds to diversification and doesn't require any effort on your part. 

Can you share with us the percentage of your income from prints vs. Stock licensing and web advertising on your site?

2005
licenses 48%
prints 35%
personal subscriptions 15%
ads 0%

2010 YTD:
licenses 28%
prints 52%
personal subscriptions 5%
ads 12%

Do you have other sources of photography income?

I'd be tempted to say none, but that would be slightly inaccurate. I have a few hundred images with a small French stock agency.  The agency owner is a real "agent" (unlike the big stock houses) who was willing to help me when I got started, which is the main reason I haven't pulled out the images although they don't generate any significant income.  I think that's pretty much it. So far I have not taught workshops, done consulting or writing,  or sought assignments and/or commercial jobs. This has allowed me to concentrate on making the photographs I wanted to make.

One of the most vexing problems for me is how much to charge for my work. How do you go about pricing yours?

I am certainly not the best businessman around, and I am sure I've lost many licensing opportunities, as I use a simple method and have an inflexible minimum fee, which is fairly high. I check the Getty, Alamy, sometimes Corbis rates as well as the rates I've obtained in the past. Then I try to evaluate the request individually to understand the value they are actually getting from the use, and give them a discount accordingly.

Does it take much work to keep your traffic high, or does traffic beget traffic?

It's true that the more traffic you have, the more people link to you, and probably the more search engines weight you. This creates a positive feedback loop, which makes it very difficult to displace the most trafficked sites. Yet, I am not taking chances. I constantly add new images (at least 2,000 per year),  pages to the site, and often new features as well.

Can you share one of your favorite photos and the story behind it?

On the first day of our ten-day sea kayak trip, we had gotten up at 6am.
After a full day of paddling, we arrived at our
destination, a grassy flat near the mouth of McBride Inlet, at 2am.
By the time we had finished setting up camp, it was 3am. I retreated
to my tent, but didn't feel asleep. I felt excited by possibilities
and energized by the clear sky and the lingering half-light of the
Alaskan summer, that I could sense getting brighter. The world felt so
beautiful and just invited exploration. I wandered around the tidal
flats until I saw this translucent iceberg that was lying more than
a hundred feet away in water. I knew that the water was very shallow,
and that with the fast rate at which the tide was moving back, if I
waited, it would be totally out of the water. So I immediately wadded
into the water with the camera mounted on a tripod, the lupe and dark
cloth around the neck, and a film holder in my pocket. This image
reminds me of the curious state of heightened awareness I found myself
in after being awake for almost 24 hours.

What photography project is currently at the top of your list?

It's been winding down, but I am still working most actively on the National Parks project. 

What advice would you give aspiring photographers?

Shoot what you love, not what you think may sell. I think it is shortsighted to shoot only what you think will sell. First, because you don't know with any degree of certainty what sells and what doesn't. Second, and more important, because, as an artist, what you should be trying to create is raising your profile.  This is done by producing outstanding work, which is awfully difficult if you don't love what you are shooting. By the way, I am taking my own advice. Personally, I never expect all the images I publish on the website to sell. They are there because I find them interesting for some kind of reason.

What advice would you give photographers who want to have more effective web sites?

Have a clear goal and a path to realize it. I see a lot of photographers trying to achieve all sorts of things with their websites: stock licensing, print sales, getting assignments, you name it. Yet when you analyze the components of their sites, you see that none is particularly effective for any of those goals. For instance, since you are a stock shooter, you know that stock is a numbers game. Yet many do not even design in order to maximize traffic.

Facebook is capturing an increasingly greater percentage of web traffic. Are you utilizing Facebook (or any other social media), and/or do you have any opinions on the importance of incorporating a Facebook presence into a photographer's strategy for visibility?

I've been testing the waters but I remain skeptical of the value.  On FB I have only a personal page because I do not like the idea of an artist setting up his own fan page -  although from a SEO point of view it does make so sense. For status updates, I prefer twitter, there seems to be more information and ideas flowing around.

Do you utilize flickr or other photo sharing sites (and if so how)?

No. I would if I had the time.

Do you promote yourself outside of the Internet?

Just a few years ago, I suddenly realized that as a visual artist, you have to exhibit your prints, because, even in this day and age, the print remains an ultimate realization of your work. So although I have a short exhibit history, I've been trying to catch up. Other than that, I've never sent any promo piece or solicitation to anybody so far. Unlike some, I don't really like to promote myself or even to sell. With that respect, my Internet strategy was a good match.

What qualities in you are most responsible for your success as a photographer?

Same as the qualities that were responsible for my success as a scientist: curiosity, persistence, ability to grasp the "big picture" and at the same time take care of details and technicalities.

Where do you want to shoot that you have not yet been to?   

Everywhere (truly, even in the US Midwest!,) but especially in the Himalayas, South America, Africa, and Antarctica.

What is your biggest challenge as a photographer?

To create work which is fresh and meaningful. There is so much great work that has been created in the past and right now, it's difficult to find new ideas. When one tries to shoot with a new style or new techniques just to be different, it often ends up being gimmicky.

What is your biggest challenge as a photography business owner?­

To understand emerging trends in business and technology and take advantage of short windows of opportunity. If I hadn't understood the importance of search engines on the Internet a decade ago, I wouldn't be there today. However, nowadays, everybody is doing SEO. So what's next?

Are you optimistic or pessimistic about your future in photography?

I am optimistic about my future in photography. I feel I still have so much to learn, so much room to grow that the journey is going to be very rewarding. It could be that ten years from now, I will be at a very different place, and doing very different work than what I've been publishing so far.

What I am not necessarily optimistic about is the business of photography. Although the year is not finished yet, at this point it is a given that for the first time in 10 years I will experience a decline in revenue. There are some worrisome economic trends that you know well.  Historically photography has not always supported that many full-time practitioners, and we might return to that situation in the future. But that's OK.  Some of the most enduring and celebrated work in photography didn't sell well at the time it was created.

Twenty Months of SEO and Monetizing Photography

Even with a bad sales report the only reason I might be tempted to jump from a balcony is to make a splash!
Getty, Corbis and Abysmal Sales Reports
My Getty and Corbis royalty reports this month were both abysmal…the lowest in each case in a decade. Now I consider myself a pretty optimistic person, but even for me that is something that makes me sit up and take notice. Am I tempted to jump off a tall building? No…unless there is an inviting swimming pool below. Mitigating factors include the fact that the previous two months at Getty were pretty good for me, and that June found my sales at Blend being very good. But still, my Corbis monthly drop was truly spectacular and my Getty drop was down to half of what is normal for me. Yikes!


Creativity, Action and Depression
Strangely though, I don’t seem to be depressed. Which is really good because depression is the biggest enemy of creativity and action…the two things that we need most in challenging times. In trying to understand why I am not depressed I first realize that I know that my income will rebound…it always has…and that it isn’t time to panic. As I mention, my Blend income is looking good and overall I have been producing some of the best images of my life. I have robust and diverse distribution. Also, I am really glad I started SEO on my website almost two years ago.

Monetizing Imagery, Time and Effort
Ultimately I believe that the best insurance against the demise of the stock industry as we know it is a strong presence on the web in order to monetize our imagery in as many ways as possible. My experience is that it is a painfully slow process…but that it will work. In my recent interview with Rolf Hicker, who is making such an effort work, he points out that what it takes is a huge expenditure of time and effort. That is also borne out by the other people I know who are profiting from the web. Overnight success only comes after years of hard work.


Twenty Months of SEO
Let’s take a look at where I stand after about twenty months of SEO efforts. I started with about one person a week visiting my site. This past week I have had over 600 people a day for at least Monday through Thursday. Not bad…but nowhere near where I want to be. I am earning somewhere around $6.00 per day on click through advertising. In the last year I sold about $1,200.00 dollars worth of prints through Imagekind.com. Not particularly good, but better than the zero dollars I earned before I started this effort. At CaféPress, sales of photo imprinted gifts such as coffee mugs, mouse pads, and other gift items, has reached an average of about one sale a day. I guess can’t quite retire yet! My new “funnyanimalpix” blog is up to a whopping 20 visitors a day. Hey, it has only been about a month now! Most importantly, I am getting around twenty people a day who find an image on my site and then follow the link to the agency that handles that particular image. I have no way to know how many actually license an image at that point…but I know some do because I have occasionally managed to talk to some of them…sometimes when they contact me directly to try and get a better price (which they can’t). Keep in mind that for the above figures, it seems to be that the summer months usually finds a visitor drop-off of 20% for website traffic.

Three to Five Years and Decent Money
From the above it seems reasonable to me that if I can get six thousand visitors a day instead of six hundred, I will be making some decent money…mainly from increased stock sales. I totally believe I will get there, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it takes me three to five years more. In the meantime…hey, at least this industry isn’t boring!

Lol Cats, A New Breed of Art Director, And Strategies For Success

Using key words like "funny animal photos" and cute cat pictures" without research is like gambling...and in the long run gambling is no way to run your business.

Lol Cats, Funny Animal Pictures and Key Words

I want people to find my funny animal pictures, a lot of people. I want to make it really easy for cat lovers and cat owners to find all my funny feline photos (nice alliteration huh?). I have been uploading these photos to my website, key wording them and adding appropriate text. Well, not exactly appropriate as it turns out. I did some research on what may be the most popular site for funny animal pics, icanhasacheeseburger.  Imagine my surprise when I found out that the keyword searches that deliver the most traffic to that site are words like “lol cats”, “lolcats”, and “lolcat”. Those are keywords that I would never have thought of! “Funny Cat Pics”, “Humorous Kitten Photos”, and all the usual suspects are well covered, but the most important words had been entirely left out of my site.

Good Karma and A Pile of Money

There are some pretty big numbers at stake as well. There are over thirty million cat owners in the United States alone. Cats are the number one pet in the U.S., and people spend more money on cat food than on baby food! There are more than 500 million domestic cats in the world, with 33 different breeds. The American cat population reached nearly 68 million in 1996. Did you know that 25% of cat owners blow-dry their cat’s hair after a bath? But I digress! If I can bring a smile to each of those cat owners…that is a lot of good karma (and, OK, could be a rather large pile of money as well). And don’t forget all the people who buy gifts for cat lovers and owners…I want them to find my cat products on CafePress.com.

SEO, Search Terms and Research

No matter which audience you are trying to reach, corporate art buyers, art directors, graphic designers, or wedding clients, if you haven’t researched that audience, what search terms they actually use, there is a very good chance you may be missing the mark. When you study what terms people use for searching, whether for “laugh out loud cats”, or “ethnic business and lifestyle stock photos” or “black cats in front of full moons ”, you are sure to find surprises. If you are serious about drawing traffic, the traffic you want, to your site…do the research!

The Time Is Now

The time to do that research is now. Not only does it take a great deal of time to rise higher in the search rankings, but the longer you wait the harder it is going to be to make that move. The photographer sites that I have encountered that are bringing in a hundred thousand or more unique visitors a month have invariably been the result of not just photographers well-versed in the Internet, but also are sites that are the result of many years of SEO efforts.

LOL Pictures, Google Analytics and The Future

I have to admit, I am as resistant to doing research as anyone…I certainly don’t do enough of it. It isn’t what I want to be doing…I want to be making those lol pictures, not pouring over Wordtracker, Compete.com, or Google Analytics. But on the other hand, if I still want to be making a good living at photography five years from now, it just might be the smartest thing I could be doing.

Genghis Kahn, Mongolian Hordes and Controlling Your Own Destiny

Not having a system to deal with flash memory cards, especially in the heat of battle, cost me most of my images from this Genghis Khan re-enactment. Having my images on my web site brings in additional revenue.

A Mongolian Renaissance Faire
I was with a couple of friends. We were out exploring the countryside surrounding Ulan Bator, the capital of Mongolia. Up ahead, alongside the road, there appeared to be some kind of festival happening, so we rolled on over to check it out. There was a makeshift grandstand, a covered eating area and a few tent structures from which people were selling food and drinks. There were even a few booths with crafts for sale and demonstrations of various kinds. We had stumbled upon the Mongolian equivalent of a Renaissance Faire!

The Mongolian Hordes of Ghenghis Khan
People were beginning to gather at the grandstand so we ambled on over to see what was happening. In the distance we could see dust clouds drifting over the low hills…and then cresting the nearest hill came hundreds of Mongolians on horseback wearing the costumes of the ancient warriors of Genghis Khan! Wearing iron and leather helmets, brandishing swords, lances and bows and arrows , with banners flying in the wind, the Mongolian hordes were truly at the gates!

Transported Back In Time
It was an awesome sight. It was as if we had been transported back in time. Two opposing armies had gathered several hundred yards apart on each side of the grandstand. In the distance we could see a huge catapult and a Yurt marked with the battle standards of the Mongol Emperor. Various individuals would race across the distance displaying extraordinary riding skills, leaning down and plucking spears and other items from the ground while maintaining a full gallop.


An Ancient Battle of Mock Combat
Eventually the two armies advance towards each other and merged in mock combat. The spectacle, a re-creation of an ancient battle, was a celebration of the birthday of the father of Mongolia, Genghis Khan. It was fascinating to watch. Individuals paired off slashing at each other with swords and stabbing with their spears and lances. I watched as two combatants parried with swords while a third horseman, bearing a lance and, undetected, approached from behind and pretended to skewer one of the embattled warriors. As the horses twisted and pranced beneath their riders their hooves kicked up clouds of dust, and slowly the entire battle scene began to disappear into a brown cloud. “This must have been how it really looked”, I thought to myself.

Flash Cards, Fumbling and Lost Images
Being photographers, all of us were busily shooting away. I had an eight-gig card in my camera and about half way through the melee I had filled it up. Not wanting to miss a second of the action, I frantically pulled a fresh card from my pocket, removed the full card, fumbled the new one into the camera, formatted it and got back to shooting. It wasn’t until I was back in my hotel room that evening that I realized that somehow, in all the excitement, I had put the original card back into the camera and formatted it…losing over half of my shots! Aarrgh! It still hurts thinking about it.

The Importance of Having a System
That little episode truly impressed upon me the importance of having a system to help keep track of full cards and empty ones. Of course, it wasn’t the first time I had been “truly impressed” with that sort of thing. Once, on a boat traveling down the Iriwaddy river in Burma , I was shooting Chinese fishing nets during a sunset when…actually, that is another story for another time. Let’s just say that having a system, for dealing with flash cards and sticking to it, can be a very important part of your photography process!

Taking Control of Your Own Destiny
But there is another, I think more important aspect to this story. A few days ago I got a message from my website (my actual e-mail address is not visible to prevent spam “harvesting”). It was from the art director of a French magazine. He wants to use some of those photos from the Genghis Khan re-enactment. I asked him if he had searched Corbis because the images are online with them. He replied that Corbis didn’t work very well in France and that he couldn’t see the thumbnails. WTH (What the heck)? Well, whatever the explanation, the fact remains that my website was important for getting me revenue from images carried by a stock agency. My website allows me to take some measure of control and supplement the reach of the agency as well as to get my non-agency images out to the world. Taking control of your own destiny is going to continue to grow in importance as the world of photography plunges ahead into the unknown territory of the future .

Facebook, Twitter and Optimized Websites For Stock Photos

We all face constant choices in our business such as where to put our time, whether to facebook, whether to Twitter, and whether to use SEO to enhance the value of our websites.

Facebook, Ping Pong and Coffee

I have a confession to make. I haven’t looked at Facebook in two weeks. I don’t miss it (and I don’t think it misses me either). Its funny; I sort of wish I missed it. I like the idea of being more connected with my friends. And yet, when I am reading the writing on the wall (little humor there), it just isn’t that compelling to me. I would much rather be having a spirited game of ping pong with a friend than sharing tidbits over the Internet. I’d rather be having a discussion about, well, anything over a cup of coffee with a friend, than sharing those thoughts via twitter.

Twitter, Tweets and Limits

Now twitter; I use that to let those following me know when I have posted a new blog entry or interview…and hoping that a lot of RT’s generate traffic and grow my audience. Sometimes I peruse twitter looking for the interesting tweet. But the 140 character limit on twitter I find, well, limiting. E-mail or the phone actually makes more sense to me. To me, twitter is a mini-press release. Oh well, maybe I am showing my age.

A Toe In The Water

What does make sense to me in this digital era is optimizing and fully utilizing my web site. Maybe someday it will be different and people will look for photos through facebook...and that is why I think it a good idea to at least have a toe in the water with social media. But right now, today, people are searching for images and finding my site via search engines. They are licensing images, buying prints and merchandise (though not yet in the quantities that I want), and finding me with interesting business proposals. Oh yeah, and I am making ad revenue from the ads on my site (but again, not yet in the quantities that I desire).

Text Heavy Sites, Finding Images, and Advertising

I made a decision that the look of my site was secondary to the optimization of it. It was a difficult decision to make…to create a text-heavy site. I even resisted it for several years. But eventually I came to believe that if someone was looking for an image, for whatever reason, then having them find that image, on my site, was more important than how the site looked. The way to help people get to those images on my site, that they are looking for, is through text. I further came to believe that if they were looking for an image, and found what they were looking for, then having advertising on my site would not deter them. In fact, if they did not find the image they were looking for, then at least they might find something else that interests them in one of the ads. Providing relevant ads is actually doing a service for them.

An Ear To The Ground and an Eye on the Future

I won’t abandon facebook or twitter. I’ll keep my other toe in the video water (the one not in social media), and I will keep my ear to the ground (as opposed to my head in the sand) and an eye on the future trying to understand where the stock photo industry is headed. I am striving to create images that the market wants (whether they know it or not), and to be as creative as I can in order to fulfill both my monetary and artistic needs. I have a deep faith that the world is always going to need good, relevant photos, and that if I can create such images I will be fine; actually, I will be better than fine, I will thrive.

Social Media, An Art Buyer, and Google Image Search

Social media and networking is illustrated in this stock photo by showing the teen-aged girl's network of friends and family in a sphere of portraits.

Social Media and Google Image Search
Upon arriving in my studio this morning there was a message on my voice mail from an art buyer for a large corporation who was inquiring about an image of mine created to illustrate the concepts of social media and social networking. She had found the image doing a Google Image search. Keep in mind this art buyer is very familiar with both Corbis and Getty. Interestingly enough, the social media image in question is with both Getty and Corbis (it is actually a Blend Images photo distributed through many agencies including the “Big Two”), but she found it first on my site! The image, by the way, is one of several I have recently completed to try and service the growing need for photos that deal with social media and such.


Providing Excellent Service Through SEO
My conversation with this art buyer reinforced a few things for me. It offered proof that even experienced art buyers turn to Google to find images…at least occasionally; that helping such prospective clients find your images is a legitimate and important extension of client servicing; and that my program of SEO and online presence is succeeding.


Art Buyers Turn To Google…and License Images
PhotoShelter, in their survey of art directors, art buyers, and designers, clearly indicated that such industry pros do use Google Image search from time to time. Since most of my images are with agencies, and when someone wants to license those images they are automatically taken to the agencies site. I seldom find out if my images are licensed after being found on the Internet. I do know that at this point around twenty people a day are sent to sites of the various agencies from my own site…I just don’t know if they complete the licensing process once they get there. So it is encouraging when I find out, as I did today, that a licensing process is completed.

Good SEO and Online Presence Is An Important Service To Clients
When I called this art buyer back she was effusive in thanking me for making it easy to find the image she was looking for. She volunteered that she would be keeping me in mind for similar imagery as well. She was grateful that I had put the time and effort into SEO, into making her job easier by making my images easier for her to find. Got to love that!


SEO and Online Databases of Images Do Result in Higher Sales
As demonstrated in this case, art buyers (and art directors, designers, animal lovers and other photography enthusiasts and people in need of images) are finding my pictues in those Internet searches, licensing them and purchasing prints and products from me. There is no question that it is working…the questions are how much such activity will increase as my traffic increases, and how quickly will that traffic increase? Originally I figured a year to get to a significant sales volume, but now I am thinking two years…and that is with several hours spent on my site and SEO almost every day! In my experience SEO is a long and laborious process…but one that works and one that someday I will be very glad I undertook!

Funny Animal Pics, Concept Stock Photos And SEO For 2010

This funny animal picture started my Animal Antics collection of anthropomorphic pet pictures for greeting cards, coffee mugs, and other products.


I believe it will be increasingly important to produce creative, conceptual photos that are not competing with all the other images out there.

Funny Animal Pics, Concept Stock Photos, And SEO
What does 2010 have in store for me? More funny animal pics (for my efforts with CaféPress, ImageKind, Greeting Cards, and all those veterinarians and animal groomers that e-mail me seeking to use those photos), More stock photos, particularly concept images, for Blend Images, Superstock, Getty and Corbis; and more interviews and blogging. All of the above will contribute to the most important aspect of my ongoing SEO effort by providing quality content for my website.

Increased Demand, More Money, And Higher Price Points
If nothing else it should be interesting to see where the image industry goes from here. Obviously, as the economy picks up there will be both an increased demand for images and a willingness to spend more money on them, though I don’t think prices will rebound to pre recession levels. But I do expect prices in the microstock arena to increase. There will continue to be plenty of free images and a lot of very low priced ones, but as iStock has done with Vetta, there will be more offerings at higher price points. When RF first arrived on the scene the prices weren’t much higher than microstock levels, but gradually the prices grew until now, in many cases, RF prices are significantly higher than RM!

Traditional Stock, Microstock, and Fading Community
I also think that more and more there will be less separation between micro and traditional stock. After all, it is all stock, just at different price points. The trend started by Veer and Fotolia of offering stock from all categories in one place will continue. The “community” aspects of microstock will begin to fade as micro is absorbed more and more into the folds of the traditional players like Getty and Corbis, and as microstock is dominated more and more by pros and those micro shooters who excel at producing vast quantities of quality images.

Millions of Dollars And Image Theft
Another area to watch will be the anti-theft developments spearheaded by companies like PicScout, LicenseStream, TinEye and C-Registry. The millions, perhaps billions, of dollars that are being lost through copyright infringement and unfulfilled potential license fees, is just too big a piece of the pie to go unclaimed. The question is when, rather than if, image theft will get reigned in…and how much of the increased revenue will find its way into the pockets of photographers as opposed to the pockets of distributors.

Creating Stock Photos, Imprinted Products And SEO
I would probably make more money in the short term by devoting less time to my Internet efforts and SEO, and more to creating stock photos, but I totally believe that in the long term, it will be to my huge advantage to develop both my web presence and to increase my personal branding. Plus, my strategy of creating more silly pet pictures for distribution as photo imprinted products, and for increasing my print sales (through Imagekind), also relies on increased web traffic and high rankings in the search engines.

2010, An Awesome Year
So in the coming year it will be more of what I was doing in 2009. I am totally convinced that 2010 is going to be an awesome year, partly because I intend to make it an awesome year, and partly because, well, 2010 just rolls of the tongue so nicely!

SEO: Opening Doors For Stock And Assignment Photography

 The song and dance of getting photography assignments vrs. optimizing your web site for both assignment and stock photos.

Stock And Assignments
I think about stock photos all the time, but every once-in-a-while I think about assignments. There are a lot of good things about assignments; Money, fresh ideas, subsidized stock, the camaraderie of working with bright, motivated people, did I mention money?  But there are some downsides too. They take a lot of time. There is pressure. There is having to do things that you don't want to be doing. There is the stress of working with idiots (or at least people who think differently than you do).  And, oh yes, there is getting the assignments, the song and dance routine that all of us working pros know so well!

Time, Energy And Money
Those of you who are in the assignment world know of what I am speaking. There is constantly putting books together, putting time, energy and money into figuring out the coolest look, compiling prospect lists, shooting for the book, taking out ads in source books, shipping portfolios, keeping track of portfolios and so forth. Then there are the estimates. It can take an enormous amount of time and effort to put together good, accurate estimates. Unless you are truly exceptional a lot of those estimates will turn out to be, well, if not a waste of time at least a less than optimal use of your time.

Books Open Doors
But like I said, assignments can be good. The last assignment I did brought in $130,000.00 after expenses. I would be open to more of those, particularly because I didn't spend any time seeking that assignment. It just came to me. It came to me because I had written a book on Photoshop (Adobe Masterclass: Photoshop Compositing With John Lund). They say you don't make money off of books, but books open doors for you. I didn't make appreciable money in royalties from my book, but my client said that they hired me because of it. That book opened many doors for me and some of them were quite rewarding!

Art Directors, Art Buyers, And Designers Looking For Me
So I am OK with assignments, when they come, and if they are right for me. But I have no desire to jump through hoops to get them. I prefer to put my energy into my stock photography. Part of that stock effort includes SEO to get more eyeballs onto my images. But effective SEO will bring more than just stock clients. Art directors, art buyers, designers and others who are looking for a photographer with the look and style that I offer will find me. These people will be looking for me as opposed to me struggling to find them and get their attention. How cool is that? Just last week a licensing agent contacted me, all excited about the work I am doing, and exclaimed, “It was so easy to find you!”  It has been a year of heavy SEO now, but it is starting to work.

SEO Opens Doors
Good SEO is like that book. It opens doors. In the short time I have been working on optimizing my site I have had a surprising number of opportunities come my way. Some of them include a contract with a wall décor company, negotiations underway for a line of greeting cards, and a possible calendar deal. I have also executed one assignment and turned a couple of others down.  There is no doubt in my mind that this is just the tip of the iceberg. I believe that it will probably be another year before my SEO really kicks in…at least in a big way. I am totally confident that I will look back and be truly glad that I put the time and effort into making my site come up early in appropriate searches.

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.

Traffic, The New Currency For Photographers

Traffic Is The New Currency
I am not sure if the above phrase is entirely accurate, but it sounds catchy and it does convey my point that traffic is rapidly becoming the most important thing. That is especially true if you are a photographer and are involved in stock photography production. If you want to get an assignment you need to have your work seen. If you want to license stock you need to have your work seen. If you want to sell picture-imprinted products you need to have your work seen. In short, you need traffic.

Traffic Provides Alternative Income Sources
Not only that, but traffic provides you with alternative income sources. If you have traffic you can earn money from advertising. The light bulb for this first came on in my head when my brother told me he was earning $3,000.00 per month from Google Adwords on a couple of trivia sites he created. Now I don't know about you, but for me an extra $3,000.00 a month is nothing to sneeze at!

Someone Is Looking For You
Let's get back to the issue of having your work seen. You can print promo pieces and mail them out, enter contests, send e-mail blasts, make cold calls and all of the rest of the tactics that as photographers we have all employed to drum up work. But if you aren't optimizing your site you are, in effect, leaving a lot of money on the table. Let's say you are an assignment photographer specializing in executive portraits. Wouldn't you want anyone who is in need of your services to know you exist, to find your work? Who is most likely to be searching for "executive portrait photographer"? A motivated buyer! Someone who isn't locked-in to a favorite photographer, someone who has a need, someone who is exactly the person you want to reach, and someone who is looking for you! Can they find you?

More Eyeballs Equals More Money
The same is true, perhaps even more so with stock photography. We all have images that agencies have rejected, images that didn’t happen to fit the requirements of the moment, or didn’t suit a given editor’s sensibilities, but that are still good images and can be earning revenue for you. And even with the images that the agencies are handling, getting more eyeballs on them, and linking buyers to those images on the agencies site, will result in more dollars for you. People, all kinds of people, are out there looking for images. Are they finding yours?

Photography, Creating Content And Drawing Traffic
As a photographer you are already in the business of creating content, and content is the primary tool of drawing traffic. Search Engine Optimization is the process of adding quality content and making sure that Google knows it is there. There are photographers out there who are getting massive amounts of traffic and converting that traffic into income. If they can do it, I can do it, and you can do it.

Long Tailed Keywords And Building Traffic
I have been working on optimizing my site for approximately one year now. I have gone from an average of one person a week in traffic to between four and five hundred visitors a day. Oddly enough, I really haven’t increased my rankings in the search engines; I am just getting more and more long-tailed keyword results. I believe that I am in what is called the “sandbox”.  Apparently Google will sit on your site for up to a year, to make sure the site is legitimate, before moving it up in the rankings. I keep thinking “any day now”, but who knows. At least my traffic is building and is leading to more licensing, more opportunities and to more community. And that isn’t a bad thing!

Odds, Ends And The Long Haul

An Interview, Imagekind and CafePess.
Had a nice interview by Marc Silber Marc Silber Interview go online.
Sold a print on Imagekind this week.  That makes about one print a month since I started this concerted Internet effort, which while is still paltry, it’s a whole lot more than the zero prints I sold before I started the effort. I have doubled my Cafepress.com sales.  OK, doubling isn’t all that impressive when I tell you it has gone from an average of one sale a week, a coffee mug, calendar, or piece of apparel, to two sales a week. I have made a smattering of sales (licensing) of various images and have confirmed that people are going from my site to the agencies that handle my work (Blend Images, Getty, Corbis and Kimball Stock).

Quality Content And A Long Term Project
One thing is for sure, this SEO (search engine optimization) process is a lengthy one. Getting visitors to your site is a long-term project! It is a lot of work too. My twin brother is my web master and very adept at this. He says if you want Google to see your site as an important one, make your site important. That means quality content and lots of it. I now have over 2000 images uploaded, but at the rate I am going it will take several more years to get all of my stock photos online. One possible way to speed the process up is to hire a developer to create a robot that will harvest my Getty, Corbis and Blend images, and put them on my site.  I have a friend who has gone that route and I have to admit there is a certain appeal to it!  But for now I will just continue my snails pace of uploading.

Climbing Traffic And Click Through Ads
Traffic is slowly climbing.  Last week, according to Google Analytics, I averaged over 500 unique visitors a day. That is up from a one visit per week average ten months ago. My click through ad revenue ranges from $20.00 per day to about 32 cents a day (last Thursday). My average seems to have edged up to about $6.00 a day.  Hey, it pays for my coffee habit!

A Balancing Act And Making Images
One thing I constantly wrestle with is where to put my time. Making images and getting them up online is the fastest way to increase my income. On the other hand, I remain convinced that it is extremely important for long term success to increase my ranking with Google, and other search engines, through SEO and online content. It is a constant balancing act. Luckily I find myself enjoying this SEO process (other than the repetitive and sleep inducing meta data entry).

A Photography Blog And Building Community
A key part of my web efforts include writing this photography blog. It has actually turned out to be a fun challenge. I used to be a columnist for Digital Imaging magazine and for Picture magazine.  I would make myself crazy trying to come up with article ideas.  But with the Blog, it is more like sharing things and less like work. My goal and hope is that the blog is entertaining and informative. It is a key component of providing quality content and, I hope, of building community within both the creators and users of stock photography.

Seeing the "Big Picture"

Seeing the big picture

I once read an interview with a man who lived in the Canadian Rockies. He was quoted as saying that "…the mountains are OK, but they sure do block the view". I'm not sure that exactly applies to my following thoughts, but hey, I always liked that quote!

Social media is great. I really like the fact that I can let a lot of people know right away when I have new material up by just sending out a tweet, or making a quick post on Facebook. Looking at the "Big Picture" however, I also realize that it is very easy to get caught up in trying to get a lot of followers, and in general, spending an inordinate amount of time perusing various posts. Some of those posts can be very entertaining, but few are actually valuable to my goals. How many SEO tips does one need to read? In one post it was guaranteed that you could be in the top 10 of search results. I wanted to ask what happened if eleven people followed those tips….

I currently have just over four hundred followers on twitter, and something like 200 "friends" on Facebook. I have seen some tweeters (don't know if I am using appropriate terminology) with something like 100,000+ followers! But even if I were ever to get anywhere near that number of followers, would it be worth the effort? I doubt it. To get the kind of traffic I want to get to my site I really need to come up very early in search results. As big a number as 100,000 followers might sound, I want that number of people, or more, landing on my site each month. Those kinds of numbers can be much more efficiently achieved with providing quality content and optimizing for search engines. Social Media can be a part of that effort, but for me it is all too easy to spend too much time scanning posts. I would be much better served creating a new image, putting it up on my site, and making sure it is well key worded; and that my site is thoroughly optimized for those search engines.

For some, who perhaps are seeking a "True Fan" base, or need a more intimate connection with their "clients", perhaps social media is a more important endeavor. For me, I believe I am better off getting back behind the camera, pushing pixels with Photoshop, and doing what I do best: making images relevant to the market for stock photos. OK, I’m off to create an image (and maybe tweet about it).

Multi-tasking to success

Multi-tasking my way to success

Just finished an article about the creation of my latest concept stock photo. http://www.johnlund.com/Artcl35-conflict.htm I have this theory about one way to be successful in this Internet world as a stock photographer. My idea is to create cool stock images and then to write about them.
As I have mentioned before, the fundamental problem in this new environment of image glut, is getting your work seen. If I take the time and trouble to create a special image then it will behoove me to take the time and trouble to publicize that image. That effort actually will accomplish another objective too; the increasingly important task of branding oneself. By writing about my images I will be increasing their visibility, driving more traffic to my site, and strengthening my own personal brand.

What does it take to be successful in stock photography today? Let’s see, have a ton of good ideas, be a great photographer, know Photoshop like the back of your hand, become an expert at SEO; excel at writing, spend an inordinate amount of time on your website, be a social networking maven, and develop a strong personal brand. OK, so I’ve left a few things out….