Traffic and The Future of Photography

Building traffic is a long term endeavor that may hold the key for continued success in the photography market.

An Unpleasant Truth For Photographers

The recent sale of The Huffington Post to AOL for $315 million dollars underscores an unpleasant truth for us photographers, for us “content producers”. That unpleasant truth is that traffic is valued more than content; that the distribution of our images is, in a significant way, more important than the images themselves. After all, the greatest photo in the world, unseen, will return less revenue, and have less impact, than a mediocre or poor image that is seen by everyone.

Great Content Is A Building Block of Traffic and Distribution

Of course, it isn’t quite as simple as I just indicated above. After all, distribution requires content and great content is a building block of great distribution. But as we have all witnessed, great photography content is significantly easier to produce than ever before, and mediocre and poor content is, well, shall we say abundant?  But the question remains: With the knowledge of how important distribution, and traffic is, how do we photographers proceed?

Where We Want To Go, And Reality

In order to understand where we go from here it is essential that we understand where we want to go. It is also imperative that we have a relatively firm grasp on reality as well. One reality is that the price of photography has been and is continuing to drop.  Another reality is that the competition continues to explode both in the form of stock images and in the form of newcomers to the industry.

Making A Living With Stock Photography, And Building Traffic

In my own case, I want to continue to make a good living creating stock photography. Right now, as far as I can determine, the fastest route to earning money in stock photography is by creating exceptional images and getting them in to distribution through top agencies.  But taking a longer view I think it is important to utilize my content to create my own traffic. And for that endeavor you really do need a long view. After two years of diligent work towards that end, and getting 4,600 well key worded images up on my site, I am generating around a thousand visitors a day. I want at least ten times that number, and I will get it. It will probably take me three to five more years.  One day I will wake up and say to myself, “Man, I am glad I did that!”

Traffic And Success With Photography

The traffic I build will include visitors that will license stock (primarily by being routed to one of my agencies), generate revenue by clicking on ads, purchase photo imprinted merchandise, buy prints and provide me with a market for whatever else I might dream up. Hopefully I can build enough traffic to insure success with my photography over the long term. It used to be that photographers looked at stock photos as a source of retirement income. That view seems to have evaporated. Perhaps traffic will be the new replacement for that strategy. It seems to have worked for Arianna Huffington!

Traffic and A Base For The Future

I believe it will behoove all of us photographers to understand how to build traffic that will help us achieve our goals, and traffic that will provide a base for all the unknown twists and turns in the photography business that no doubt await us in the years ahead.

Online Security-Behind A Stock Photo Concept

Creating concept stock photos about online security, digital asset protection and computer viruses.


Internet and Online Security, Computer Viruses and Identity Theft
Internet and online security is obviously a hot topic and a growing problem as more and more of our lives, financial and otherwise, are conducted through our computers, our mobile phones, our tablets and so forth. The more we conduct business over the Internet the more our fear of problems such as identity theft, asset theft, computer viruses and worms, and the disruption of our financial lives beset us. That, in turn, creates both opportunity and need, the need for products and services that protect our online presence and the opportunity for those who provide such products and services to market themselves as such. 

Digital Asset Protection and Stock Photo Opportunities
This also brings up opportunities for content producers, stock photographers if you will, to create images that can be used for those marketing and advertising efforts. There is obviously a need for images that can serve to promote digital asset protection. But how do you show the concept of “digital asset security” in an image?
How do you create an image with the ambiguity necessary to provide for a large range of applications, but also has both the attributes for specific messages and the visual appeal to capture a viewer’s attention?

Online Protection, Bank Vaults, and Making Icons Your Own
One process I use for coming up with stock photos for popular or needed concepts by looking at the traditional iconic markers that apply. For example, if you are looking for concepts based around security I would begin with things like locks, chains, guards, and, yes, bank vault doors. Next, ask yourself what you can add to that icon that will take it the next step. How can you make it your own and add even more ambiguity and impact and still retain a strong concept specific message? How can you make the safe door of a bank visually compelling and applicable to digital assets, online applications, and Internet security?

Digital Assets, Binary Numbers and Online Security
In this case, for me, binary numbers is one possible answer. I think it is pretty universal that people now know that computers speak with 1s and 0s. Binary numbers are the language of the Internet, of digital assets, and of the online world. By combining two iconic symbols, binary numbers and a steel bank vault door, an image that speaks of online security, Internet theft prevention, and digital asset protection is created.

Binary Numbers, Iconic Visuals and Online Security
By having a mass of binary numbers, 1s and 0s, tumbling past the open door of a bank vault the headline or copy can use the image to describe moving one assets to a secure place, or the siphoning off or loss of such assets with inadequate safeguards. Because the image utilizes familiar iconic visuals a target audience immediately grasps that online security is the subject of the message, and if it is a message they are concerned about they will look further, the desired goal of any stock visual. This photograph of numbers and a bank vault can be used to advertise or promote a wide range of services and products for computer security, for online transactions and even for the secure content of social media and networks.

Digital Asset Protection, Stock Photos, and Maximizing Revenue
Because there are so many potential users of this stock picture of digital asset protection, including the editorial and corporate markets as well as advertising, I believe the revenue potential is best maximized by placing it as a Royalty Free image. I am always faced with my bias towards Rights Managed, and yet in examining my history of stock photo sales I have found that in many cases the right image in RF distribution will out perform an RM image in terms of total revenue.  I certainly hope that is the case here as I have somewhere between two and three days of work tied up in this one photograph…and that doesn’t even take into account the original photography of the bank vault (thought that was done ages ago for a paid assignment). To further insure that I get a sufficient return on my investment I went on to create several more versions of the bank safe for other uses including monetary security (the protection of cash and other liquid assets), and asset loss in general both with and without a “management” element.

Ambiguity, Specificity, and Multiple Concepts: A Stock Photo Strategy That Is Paying Off
This series of “security” images is a good reflection of my approach to stock photography. Find a need, create a visually interesting and compelling image that has the desired qualities of ambiguity and specificity, and place it in the appropriate distribution channels. In the last couple of years I have also payed a lot more attention to creating multiple concepts rather than focusing on just one concept image. This is a strategy that is definitely paying off for me.

Photography, Money and Love

I love coming up with funny stock photo ideas...like Elephants in starting blocks!

Love, Passion and Photography

A friend of mine, fellow photographer Tanya Constantine, left a message for me on my Facebook page in which she lamented that there is too much emphasis on the money aspect of photography, not enough on the love and passion for the art. I was reflecting on that as I drove home from my studio this evening.

The Enjoyment of Creating Stock Images

I spent the day creating stock images, including the elephant in the starting blocks at the top of this blog. I was doing it for the money. But I do love the work as well. I love coming up with ideas, ideas that will amuse and at the same time deliver a message, a commercial message no less. I love the process of putting my images together, the planning, the photography and the Photoshop work. I love finishing an image and just plain enjoying it.

Money As A Measurement

The money, however, is also important, and in several in a couple of ways. Obviously, I want to maintain a certain standard of living, put some away for when I reach the point where I can’t work as much…or even don’t want to work as much. And the money is important in another way too. It is a measure of my abilities, a yardstick by which I can judge my progress. For better or worse, I take pride in the fact that I can make money at photography, and yes, it makes me feel good about myself.

How Can I Make Money With My Photos?

One often hears, or reads, that this photographer or that photographer would do their work whether they were being paid or not. I often wondered if that were true of me. I really don’t know. I do love creating images, but seldom create ones that won’t earn me money.  Even on vacation or traveling I will find myself reaching for my camera when a potential shot catches my attention, and yet I am always wondering if and how I can make money with the shot. I have foregone some pretty cool shots because I couldn’t see how I could make money with them.

Wasted Images

Part of my thinking goes that if I don’t have a market for the image it will be wasted. No one will see it. I have so many images that know one will ever see, some really great ones too. But I don’t have the time, or I suppose, the inclination, to get them online, to enter shows, to make prints (and where would I hang those prints?), to get them in front of an audience.

Sharing Images, And Making Money

Just thinking out loud here. I am interested in why I take the approach I do, but I certainly am not unduly bothered my how I operate. As I said, I do enjoy what I do. I love making my images. I love sharing my images, be they funny elephant pictures, silly cat photos, or businessmen in odd, funny and precarious situations. I to confess though, I really love making money off of my images too.

Can I Make Money With Cafepress.com?

My best selling image on Cafepress.com, funny animals in a Veterinarian's waiting room!

Cafepress.com: Potential and Disappointment

To date one of my biggest disappointments with my whole Internet monetization strategy is my Cafepress.com shop. The potential seems so enormous that I feel I must not give up on it just yet. In this blog post I will share some of my experience, thoughts and strategy in regards to cafepress.com and to print-on-demand opportunities in general.

A Cafepress.com Experiment

I started the Cafepress.com experiment about three years ago, but I have only put a couple of hundred hours into it. It seems like a lot more time because of the drudgery factor! By the time all is said and done it really takes somewhere between 2 and 3 hours per image to get everything sized, cropped, entered, key worded and so forth. But that is the easy part.

My Best Selling Cafepress.com Image

Without actually counting, I think I have about fifty of my funny animal pictures up on my Cafepress.com storefront (I have a “premium” store).  My best selling Cafepress.com image is one of various pets sitting in a veterinarian’s waiting room. Now why a scene featuring a group of miserable animals waiting to see a vet is popular…well, you got me! It sells as greeting cards, on clocks, wall décor (framed prints), T-shirts, mouse pads, clocks (clocks)?)…all kinds of things. Maybe veterinarians are the ones buying these products. But for my best selling, Cafepress.com image to have brought in, what, maybe two hundred and fifty dollars over the last three years? It hardly seems worth the effort!

Cafepress.com Success Stories

Another troubling aspect is that when I search for things like “Cafepress.com Success Stories”, or “How I Made A Fortune With Cafepress.com”, or any other similar phrase I can think of, nothing of substance comes up. Sure, Cafepress.com claims that there are people who make $100,000.00 a year…but as far as I can tell they don’t give any concrete examples. I can find people who share that they made $17.56 last month, or that they are making enough to go out for drinks once-in-a-while, but I cannot find people who are sharing what I consider to be success through their print-on-demand experiences. To me, less than $1,000,00 per month just doesn’t cut it, but I guess success is in the eye of the beholder. Disclaimer: I have spent very little time in Cafepress.com chat rooms or forums. Maybe I am missing something here?

How Much Money Can I Make With Cafepress?

Well, last year I made $802.00 on 469 sales with Cafepress.com. Not a whole lot of return, but to be honest, not a whole lot of effort either. The real effort for Cafepress.com is in driving traffic to your storefront. A lot of people believe they can build a home-based business that will support them using Cafepress.com. I think that the examples of people succeeding at creating a viable business that will support them on Cafepress.com, or I suppose Zazzle or any of the print-on-demand business models, must be extremely rare. Building the quantity of traffic needed to generate significant revenue from a print-on-demand business is extremely difficult and will take years, many years. If any of you reading this know of any examples of people have succeeded at that task in any significant way, please share it with us!

Is Cafepress.com Worth It?

So is cafepress.com worth it? I don’t know the answer to that, but I can speculate. I believe it is a mistake to think that simply putting products up on cafepress.com can bring in any significant money. To be successful on cafepress.com, and I have seen this mentioned time and again in the numerous online articles and forums about how to succeed with Cafepress.com, you have to drive the traffic to your shop. Without a commitment to driving traffic to your storefront, you just won’t make much money. On the other hand, if I am correct about my theories, if I can drive substantial traffic to my cafepress.com storefront, then the income will definitely be worth the few hundred hours invested in putting the images up. The huge potential audience of people who might buy a coffee mug, a print, or an apron from Cafepress.com tantalizes me.  On the other hand, I am beginning to question whether I can ever really tap into that market.  But as I already have a good number of products online, and I am building web traffic anyway, perhaps, in time I will reach the kind of sales that I consider successful. Again, the key to making print on demand work is in building traffic, and the dirty little secret of building traffic is the enormous amount of time it takes.

Skipping Coins For Motion Stock

Capturing a super slow motion video clip of a coin skipping across water for a visual supporting financial and money concepts.
  
Visual Impact for Financial Themes Through Slow Motion Video

In attempting to come up with motion clips of a conceptual nature that would be appropriate for shooting in super slow motion, one of our ideas was to capture a coin, in this case, a silver dollar, being skipped across a body of water. The idea would be that such a video clip could be used to add visual impact to themes that include monetary or investment skill, risk, venture capital, savings and so forth. 

Ambiguity and Versatility In Still and Motion Stock

Hopefully this clip is ambiguous and versatile enough to work with a wide variety of concepts. It has always been interesting to me that one of the traits that makes a stock image work is ambiguity. But it has to be ambiguity in a way that facilitates variety and at the same time, when combined with text or headlines, transforms into a clear, concise and specific concept.  This has worked will with me for still imagery, but I do not yet have enough experience to speak with confidence about the world of motion stock.

A Bare Bones Video Production

Shooting this sliver dollar-skipping clip was a bare bones operation. For the water we filled a black plastic concrete mixing container, purchased at Home Depot, with water. The container was about two-feet by three-feet in size and maybe eight inches deep. We moved in tight enough to fill the frame with water. I placed a large piece of foam core directly behind the water and bounced a 5000-watt tungsten light onto it. We had fill cards on either side of the water with enough room for me to skip the coin. We had a bare-bones operation. The camera and recording was handled by my partner Stephanie Roeser and my intern, Tom Penpark played the role of grip. I had the key part…skipping the coin. Though after about twenty tries on my part, Stephanie took over the coin tossing nailed it on her second try…oh well! We spent about a total of an hour from set-up through capture on this clip, plus a spinning coin falling into the water, a bar of soap hitting the water, and a very intriguing image resulting from shooting compressed air into the water. I haven’t edited any of those ancillary clips yet, but will post them to my site as I do.

GVS 9000 VTR and Efficient Video Capture

Our efficiency in shooting was due in large part to the GVS 9000 VTR hardware and software that we used to capture, store and playback our video. Amazingly, within seconds of a capture we were able to view our clips and convert them on the fly to the Pro Res format that we use to edit in Final Cut Pro. GVS made the process simple and satisfying! We captured the “skip” at 1900 frames per second and play it back at sixty frames per second.  The biggest problem was getting a skip that clearly showed as a coin while having an impact placement that allowed for all of the action (OK…most of it) to be seen.

Success In Motion Stock

Hopefully we have produced an ambiguous, versatile, captivating and yet still specific enough, video clip to make some money with. But whether or not it produces the desired income, we had a blast producing it…and that is half the battle! I am convinced that success in motion stock requires an enjoyment of the process even more than so with still images.

A Roll of the Dice, Motion Stock, and Revelations

A Roll of the Dice and A Slow Motion Revelation

One of the criteria I have for shooting slow motion stock video clips is whether or not the clip offers a revelation, a glimpse, or more, of something we haven’t seen before…an Aha! moment, if you will. Often it is difficult, or impossible, to predict whether an attempt will produce such a result. For example, at one point we decided to shoot a slow motion roll of the dice. The shot was extremely tight and our resulting depth of field only about as deep as the dice themselves. To try and keep the dice in focus we had to drop them from a very short distance. The first drop of the die resulted in a very minimal amount of action…obviously something not worth keeping. We checked the result of our capture anyway to get a sense of what we were up against. It was really cool! At one point one of the die hit, bounced up, and seemed to just hang there spinning in the air. It was a revelation!

Cactus Spines and a Bursting Bubble Video

Another revelation, even more delicious to watch, occurred when we captured a soap bubble slowly drifting down onto the spines of a cactus. I had my doubts about whether, even in slow motion, we could see anything interesting in a bursting bubble. I thought the speed of the bubble was too fast, but I was wrong. The first revelation happened as the bubble settled onto the cactus spines. I thought the bubble would burst as soon as the membrane was pierced. But that didn’t happen. You can literally see the spines poke through the walls of the bubble as it comes to a rest on the cactus skin.  Then came a second revelation. After a pause the membrane bursts outwards to the edges of the sphere, then back again to the center in a spray of liquid collapsing on itself. It kind of reminded me of an interstellar galactic explosion! Who knew!

Slow Motion Video at 1900 Frames Per Second

One of the keys to the success of the endeavor was our ability to shoot, with the Phantom HD camera at a frame rate of 1900 frames per second. Here I have to give a plug to my friends at GVS systems who allowed us to use their GVS 9000 VTR computer. It allowed us to capture the footage, review it in seconds, and convert the files to Pro Res files on the fly. Pretty awesome.

Bursting Bubbles and Bringing In The Bucks

Of course, one never knows what image or clip may turn out to be the one that brings in the bucks, but this clip can illustrate many concepts such as a bursting financial bubble, any sort of risk or impending doom, or even dramatic and sudden change. I even fantasize about using After Effects to put symbolic images on the bubble such as houses or dollar signs. But then, I would have to do a lot of learning to accomplish that...maybe down the road when I have more time. Yeah right!

A Thousand Visitors a Day: Taking Stock

Keeping up with SEO, social media, and creating images can be overwhelming, but in the long run will, I believe, be worth it!

A Thousand Unique Visitors a Day

I reached a sort of milestone last week. For the first time I had over 1000 unique visitors to my site in one day. My site had 1,041 unique visitors to be exact (though it seems that you have to take any of these figures with a grain of salt.).  It took me 26 months from the time I started my web efforts until I reached that thousand mark. But a thousand unique visitors a day is only a small stepping-stone, only a tenth of the traffic I am aiming for.

The Monetization of Web Traffic

What kind of monetization am I getting from this traffic? Two of those visitors yesterday e-mailed me with requests for licensing information on my images. Twenty-seven people reached my site and then went to the agencies carrying the stock photos they had searched for…though what happened then I don’t know.  I sold one coffee mug on cafepress.com. That was good for $1.50 profit. I also sold a meditating-dog T-shirt and made about $2.00. My advertising revenue came in at $7.56  for that day. That was about it.

Long Term Relationships

The “daily” benefits of increased traffic, however, are not as great as those occasional larger connections. I have secured three important long-term relationships by being found easily on the web…and each of those relationships represents a potentially quite significant amount of money. I have also had a smattering of print sales the occasional direct licensing of a stock image and so forth.

Encouragement and Disappointment

Overall, I am both encouraged and disappointed by my progress. Encouraged, tantalized even, by the results of my increased traffic, but disappointed by how much work it has taken, and by the fact that after all this time I have only just reached the thousand mark.

The Social Media Quandary

Then there is what I call the social media quandary. As facebook grows ever more pervasive I feel compelled to explore that avenue of connecting with prospects as well. But is the time well spent? My tactic at this point is to spend a bit of time each day, or nearly each day, and slowly understand how to utilize the medium. For me facebook is more of a way to create a fan base around my animal images than as a way to promote my traditional stock photos.

Creating New Stock Images and Staying Successful

As I have said before, if I had put all the work that I have put into my site into creating new stock images, I would definitely be earning more money at this point. But I still believe that in the long term the rewards for my web efforts will be much greater. An increased web is the best way I can think of to prepare for the changes that are happening, and that will continue to happen in ways we cannot know at this time. Finally, increasing my web traffic at helps gives me a sense of control over my own destiny…something very important in helping me keep a positive attitude that is vital for continuing to take the steps necessary to stay successful.