Even with its (weak) rear lens and dozens of image editing apps, the iPad isn’t the best work tool for a photographer. The device itself makes poor photos, even the biggest version will quickly fill up with high res images and a workflow that doesn’t include a decent filing system is always going to be a bit poor. But the device, with its big screen and bold colors, is great for looking at photos. It’s great for looking at your own select images and its great, too, for looking at the images of some of the best photographers in the world. It’s no wonder then that the App Store’s Photo and Video category contains apps that allow users to browse the archives of Life Magazine or gawp at the images created by National Geographic photographers.  There’s no reason though that you can’t join those top image-makers and put your photos on other people’s iPads.

That wouldn’t just be very cool. It could also bring real benefits. Put your work in front of photography lovers who might include buyers, and you could find that you’re picking up some new commissions and additional photo sales. There are a number of ways you can spread your photos across Apple’s tablets.

Create a Photo Book with Book Creator

Book Creator from Red Jumper isn’t a specific photography app but it might just prove to be an extremely helpful tool for photographers who want others to see their photo collections — and who might even be willing to pay for them.

The app is a simple book creator that turns files into ePub-formatted documents ready to be submitted to the iBookstore. It’s remarkably simple to use: paste images from the iPad onto a page and add text. There’s some design flexibility but it’s mostly restricted to sizing, positioning, font and text colors, although it’s also possible to spread a single image over two pages, while still placing text in a corner.

In short, it’s a very quick and easy way to turn a collection of pre-curated photos into a photography book that can be sold or distributed for free through the iBookstore.

Place Your Travel Images in Fotopedia Heritage

The challenge with a photography book created by Book Creator will be to tell people it’s around, and persuade them to buy it. The advantage of submitting your images to Fotopedia Heritage is that you can be confident it will be downloaded anyway. The app was created by Jean-Marie Huillot, the former CTO at tech firm NeXT and a close associate of Steve Jobs. He calls it the biggest coffee table book in the world.

The app is a growing collection of 25,000 crowdsourced and crowd-curated images of World Heritage sites. Information about each site is drawn from both UNESCO and Wikipedia, while links to TripAdvisor and Maps make it a valuable travel planning tool.

For travel photographers though, the app can also function as a powerful marketing tool. Credit is provided at the bottom of the image which can link to a Flickr page or a profile page that shows more images.

Submitting your images is straightforward and open to anyone but there’s no guarantee that your image will be accepted. Eligibility for placement in the app depends on several stages of curation that include winning votes from the community.

It’s also worth noting that members can submit images that don’t belong to them, provided they carry creative commons licenses. Place a high quality image in your Flickr stream with a creative commons license and there’s a chance that it will reach Fotopedia Heritage, where it will be automatically tagged and placed alongside explanatory text. (Although only about one image in 50 submitted in this way is accepted.) You might not make any money from the app directly — it’s free — but it might help to spread your work to people who appreciate images and might want to see more of your work from far flung places.

Create Your Own Photo App

Fotopedia Heritage has already become a hugely popular place to look at images from around the world but it’s not a reliable way to spread your photos. The most reliable method is to create your own photo app. A number of photographers have done that, offering collections of their photos both as free apps and as products that carry a price tag. Andre Francois’s Caring, for example, is a photo-documentary about medical care in Brazil that includes interviews with the creator and behind-the-scenes shots. The motivation for giving away the app is likely to be the desire to tell people about the good work done by local doctors but there’s little doubt that the photographer comes across as a serious documentary maker with an important piece of work in his portfolio.

Other photographers use the app as a marketing tool in a way that’s a little more obvious. Photographer Simon Stock’s app is also free and intended both to share his images and to show off his work.

Creating apps like these usually requires some form of investment, and the chances of a real return is likely to be pretty small. If you are thinking of making your own photo app though, you could try using the services of MagBooks. They’ll do all the hard work for you, turning up to 200 pages of text and/or photographs, delivered in PDF format, into an iOS app. The photographer gets to set the download price and MagBooks take a 20 percent cut of any sales. With Apple taking another 30 percent, that leaves 50 percent for the photographer.

It’s an easy form of publishing that might work for books with popular themes such as Grischa Shmitz’s Westbank, a travelogue of her journey from Jerusalem to the flashpoint West Bank village of Bilin, but again it will require some marketing for any of those sales to come in.

Alternatively, you can always code your own iPad photo book from scratch yourself. Blurb offers an explanation of how to do that which isn’t too difficult to follow. Or you could always put your pictures on your flash-free website and let leads use their browsers.

Photography: The U.S. Army/Sgt. Travis Zielinski

It’s now possible for any talented photographer armed with some basic technical knowledge, a consumer DSLR and a reasonable amount of talent, to sell their pictures. But not everyone is doing it. Not all photographers are making their pictures available to buyers and not all of them are making sales. If you’re struggling to find buyers for your pictures, it’s likely that you’re putting one of these common obstacles between the buyer and the sale.

You’re Shooting the Wrong Kind of Image

The biggest obstacle to making a photography sale is the kind of image you’re offering. The type of pictures that photographers like to shoot aren’t always the same as  the photos that buyers want to purchase. The best pictures, for example, tend to tell a story. The scenes they capture should portray more than  singular moments in time; they should also suggest the days and weeks that came before the photographer pulled out his camera, and they predict the way that life will continue afterwards. The art of photography is the skill of turning a captured scene into a complete story —and it’s those kinds of pictures that are the most satisfying to shoot.

Stock buyers though want to tell their own story. That might be a story about the product they’ve been hired to promote or it could be the story described in the article they’re illustrating. The picture they use to tell that story though has to be flexible enough to include different narratives and be laid out with enough room for a designer to add text and additional graphic elements. Creating photos that sell as stock is very different to shooting for the pleasure of creating a beautiful image. Professional stock photographers might get satisfaction from producing a good commercial image but the feeling — and the pictures — are very different to the works they place in their personal portfolios.

Print sales do allow for greater creativity. Buyers of photographic art want the same kinds of aesthetically pleasing works that make the photographers proud and happy. But they’re difficult to sell. BuyaPhoto offers one way of passing prints to buyers but the best method is usually to hit the art fairs. That may deliver a reasonable number of sales, and juried fairs can deliver the kind of kudos that can open gallery doors, but it requires an investment. Selling at fairs often means paying a fee and will certainly mean paying for a tent, for display material and for printing and framing. It’s not as simple as shooting a picture and asking friends if anyone wants to buy it.

No One Knows You’re Selling

Even BuyaPhoto though relies on the photographer to do the marketing. Most of their sales take place on the photographers’ own websites. While vendors at fairs can depend on the event’s organizers to promote the fair widely enough to bring in traffic —the main reason that they’re willing to pay for attendance — photographers usually have to depend on their own marketing skills in order to let people know that their images are available. Those are skills you’re not going to find in any camera manual.

There are a few things you can do to let the world know that the images you’re showing are available for sale and not all of them require giant marketing budgets or a weekend on a photography business workshop. It’s hard to find a photography enthusiast who doesn’t have a Flickr account for example, but it’s no less hard to find a Flickr member who has bothered to mention in their image descriptions that their photos can be bought. Sales are being made on the site, but you stand a much better chance of making one if you let buyers know you’re selling. Doubt is an obstacle too.

And Pro members on Flickr also have stats that reveal a wealth of information about the sources of their traffic and the kinds of images that people are looking for in their stream. Even if you don’t want to shoot subjects that match the keywords, those statistics might suggest which images you want to upload and which sets and collections you should create.

You’re Not Shooting Enough

A Flickr portfolio though should always be carefully chosen. While it might be tempting to simply toss onto the site every spare image on your hard drive and leave it to viewers to choose the ones they like, a Flickr portfolio, like a website portfolio, is a storefront that should only show your most impressive work.

But you still need to be shooting a lot.

Professional wedding photographers will shoot hundreds of images during an event. Stock photographers may produce thousands each month. Even portrait photographers, who shoot fewer images in each session, will still be shooting every day and for several hours each day. And that’s only the photographs they shoot professionally. Every time they pull out their camera and shoot for fun — enthusiast-style — they’re still putting more experience under their belt and improving their technical skills.

The same is true of enthusiasts hoping to make a little extra cash. The more you shoot, the more you’ll learn, the better your pictures will become, and the greater the choice of images you’ll have available for buyers.

You’re Not Spreading Your Photos Wide Enough

And it also helps to push your images through multiple sales channels. Flickr is one easy option. A website is another, and a microstock portfolio is a third. None of those takes a great effort to set  up, although the first will take time and effort to market. But there are also product sites, photo books, home-made exhibitions and a whole host of other ways to deliver your images to buyers. If shooting the wrong images is one giant obstacle then finding as many ways as possible to bring them to market is another.

Professional photographers have the advantage of being able to shoot all the time. They have an incentive to look for ways to market their images. And they have the time to build their portfolios and strengthen their marketing channels. Enthusiasts have passion and many have talent. When they remove the obstacles between their images and their potential buyers, they can also have some sales.

Photography: xposurecreative.co.uk

If clients had better memories, a lot of photographers would be out of business. Couples wouldn’t need wedding albums to remind them of the most important day of their lives and families wouldn’t need portraits to show them what their children looked like aged three, seven or thirteen. They could shut their eyes and recall for themselves the most beautiful scenes they’d experienced. Fortunately, they can’t do that so instead they hire photographers to freeze those moments for them. It’s no surprise then that one of the biggest challenges for photographers looking to keep clients is reminding them that they still exist, that they’re still shooting — and that they’re still happy to photograph for them and for anyone they know. One way to do that is through a regular newsletter.

Delivered once a month, a photographer’s newsletter can maintain relationships, deliver repeat jobs and generate referrals. It waves a greeting to former clients you might have photographed years ago, and prompts them to remember what they loved about working with you.

“A newsletter simply encourages them to keep loving you and to keep sending you referrals,” explains George Dean, a former gymnastic coach who set up a professional photography business after starting a family. “Treating clients right and staying in touch works.”

A Photography Newsletter in Half an Hour

It’s a system that Dean says certainly works for him and he now makes his own newsletter template available to other photographers. For $47 a month, subscribers can receive a fully customizable, two-page 300 DPI Photoshop newsletter file to which they can add their own pictures, testimonials, special events and public thanks for referrals. A short testimonial from a recent client can help build trust, a gallery of recent images will show off your work (and give readers whose images are featured a reason to hold onto the newsletter and show it to others), and some trivia can help to make it more readable. The whole process takes about half an hour, he claims, a large saving on the production times required to produce a unique print version. For an additional fee, it’s also possible to buy an exclusive license, locking competitors out of using the same newsletter in a 15-mile radius, and naming five additional competitors who will be blocked from using the template.

The value of a regular newsletter and its ability to maintain relationships should be familiar to photography businesses, many of which send email newsletters, but according to Dean print newsletters have a unique value. Only about 3 percent of electronic newsletters are actually read, he claims, either because they’re not delivered or because they’re automatically deleted. Email, he argues, has zero perceived value to most people, although an emailed newsletter can be a useful supplement to a print version.

And emails, he notes, can’t be attached to the fridge or left lying around for friends to pick up and read.

It’s Not About Your Studio

But just as email newsletters can be treated as spam, so print newsletters from a photography business, even one the recipient has done business with, can be seen as junk and treated the same way as brochures from Home Depot and offers from loan companies. The key to ensuring that the newsletter doesn’t just stand out but is picked up and read with interest is ensuring that the content is genuinely interesting. Articles should have “fun and entertaining stories” says Dean.

“It’s not about your studio. It’s mainly an entertainment piece that people look forward to every month,” he explains. “It’s not a blatant sales piece…. It’s a powerful sales piece in disguise.”

Content then will be one factor that will influence a newsletter’s ability to generate new work. Another is the nature and number of the people who read it. Newsletters should be sent to everyone you’ve photographed in the past but also the people you want to photograph, as well as vendors who will show it to their own clients and use it to send more work your way. It’s those referrals, as much as the reminders, that are the goal of the newsletter, and Dean does take action to encourage referrals by rewarding people who recommend him to friends and family. He doesn’t use studio credit, which might appear to be too commercial, but instead gives every referee a small gift such as  a gourmet brownie or a generous Starbucks gift card. It’s a mark of appreciation given to a valued friend rather than a commission paid to an affiliate or a semi-employed sales representative.

“Clients love getting them,” he says.

But however good the content in the newsletter, whoever you send it to and however you choose to reward the people who act on it, a newsletter’s result will always depend on the quality of the photos and the feelings that clients hold towards the photographer after their shoot. A newsletter can maintain a connection, but it takes the images and the personality of the photographer to create a connection that the client wants to keep in the first place. Good photography then will always be the most important factor in a newsletter’s success.

And the newsletters do take some time and some effort to produce. Dean stresses that his newsletters aren’t for everyone, and in particular, they’re not for people who aren’t prepared to work on them and invest in them. The $47 fee doesn’t include the cost of postage or the time spent choosing and preparing the images you plan to show in the newsletter, for example. It’s an investment that should pay its way with a steady stream of referrals but like any form of marketing, a newsletter does make its own demands.

One way to deal with those demands is to fit the newsletter into your studio’s regular marketing schedule, alongside renewing print ads or checking AdWords campaigns. Once creating and sending the newsletter becomes part of the routine, it’s less likely that you’ll forget to send an issue too.

That’s important because it’s not just clients who have been known to have problems with their memories.

When her friend Ellis was posted to Iraq, photographer Kim Crenshaw decided to send him a care package. Like others hoping to support troops serving abroad, Kim filled the package with candy, soaps and snacks but as a photographer, she wanted to contribute a little more. She invited the soldier’s wife and son into her studio and photographed them lying on a bed, pretending to sleep. She then had the image screen-printed onto a pillowcase and included the bedding in the care package. The letter of thanks that Kim received from Ellis, in which he described the pleasure of laying his head next to his family at the end of a difficult day in the Middle East, brought tears to her eyes.

It also brought her a write-up in the The Apex Herald,  a newspaper in North Carolina where Kim runs her photography business.

Publicity might not have been the first thing on Kim’s mind as she looked for a creative way to make life a little better for a friend in Iraq, but it’s certainly a valuable result. Kim’s name is now known in her area. It’s also associated with generosity, care, patriotism and charity. When someone in Apex, North Carolina is considering booking a portrait session, they’ll think of her. She’s stolen a march on her competitors, won the kind of recognition that would have cost thousands of dollars in advertising, and picked up a halo that money can’t buy.

The Principles of Publicity

For many businesses, this kind of marketing looks about as reliable as winning the lottery. The media only has a certain amount of space to fill each month. There are no shortage of stories to fill those spaces, and the chances that a reporter or an editor will choose to write about you can look very small. Far better to put the effort into search engine optimization for your website or tweaking your Facebook ad than to spend it writing press releases that are only going to be ignored.

But while there’s no guarantee of success when you send out a press release about your photography business there are principles that, when followed, can increase your chances of seeing your name in print.

Linking your business to charity work helps. The press, especially the local press, loves writing about businesses that are going out of their way to help others. Bringing the public news about those efforts makes the reporters feel that they’re contributing too. And as Kim Crenshaw’s work showed, the more creative and original the contribution, the better.

Kelli Svancarek, a photographer in New Lenox, Illinois, did something similar. She teamed up with a number of local animal charities to offer a 15-minute photography session and a 5-by-7-inch portrait of their pet. In return, the pet owner had to make a $25 donation to the National Animal Welfare Society (NAWS) and buy an item from an animal rescue center’s wish list.

As a marketing technique, it was a smart move. The offer brought Kelli into contact with potential clients. It allowed her to show off her talent and gave her a way to provide samples. It also let her network with a bunch of different animal charities who might all be interested in using her work in the future. (In fact, the idea came after Kelli had already volunteered for the NAWS, shooting portraits of dogs available for adoption.)

It also attracted the attention of the local press. Like Kim Crenshaw, Kelli’s charitable act might have been made with entirely charitable motives, but it’s still strong enough to deliver valuable publicity, right in her market, and with a powerful brand identity.

Link Your Business to Valentine’s Day

Kelli’s story though didn’t appear just as a tale about a local business giving back. The first sentence of the article describes it as a Valentine’s Day story. Linking your business to a topical issue is another way of helping the media — who will then be more willing to help you in return. The press has to write about Valentine’s Day but they need an angle that they haven’t covered in previous years. Give them a press release that provides that new approach, and they’ll grab it.

That topic can be a date in the calendar but it can also be an issue in the news. When that happens, the publicity can spread much further than your local broadsheet. Andy Dare, for example, a travel writer and photographer, happened to find himself near Macchu Picchu recently just as floods and mudslides forced the Peruvian authorities to airlift stranded tourists. His pictures and account won him a write-up in Wanderlust, a UK travel magazine.

You might require a bit of luck to cash in on this kind of national publicity but that’s not always true. It’s also possible to use your photography deliberately to add a new voice to an ongoing debate — and win publicity for your efforts. As America military leaders review the country’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, for example, LA photographer Jeff Sheng, has released the first in a series of volumes of portraits showing gay men and women in the military. It’s a political issue that’s topical and it gives the press an opportunity to offer a new and human angle on a story that they have to cover. It was important enough to win Jeff coverage in The Los Angeles Times.

Winning publicity for your work then isn’t a matter of luck. It takes a good story that fulfills the media’s need to provide information to the public. A charitable act by your photography business can do it, as can a story related to a date on the calendar or an issue that’s already in the news. Nor does the kind of outlet matter as much as you might think. While a local newspaper will have a relatively small readership, if you only serve people in your area, you won’t need to appear anywhere else. And if, like Jeff Sheng, you do have a product that can be sold nationwide, it’s worth remembering that even the big outlets often take the stories from the small ones, letting you turn one small publicity success into another, giant one.

Photography: chotda

The photography books that line the shelves in bookstores and fill your Amazon wish list might all contain wonderful images and beautiful pictures but they also tend to follow a format. The photos focus on a theme, are accompanied by short passages of text, and each photo both stands alone and contributes to an overall impression of the book’s subject.  When you’re looking to create your own photo book, those bestsellers always provide good models to follow. Stray out of the photography section though and you can find plenty of other books that are strong on photography and which reveal a number of different ways of publishing your images.

The easiest method, of course, is the traditional and that’s true even when you head away from the mainstream shelves completely and into self-publishing. Beth Dow, whose Blurb book “In The Garden” won the company’s 2008 Photography.Book.Now competition, says that photography books can take two different approaches. In the first, what she calls the “handmade artist’s book,” every detail is integral to the whole, from the choice of images to the font used in the text. In the second approach, and the one that she chose for her images of British gardens, the aim is simply to show the photos. Sequencing is still vital but white space puts the emphasis on the images rather than on the story the book is trying to tell.

“This is why I chose, for the most part, single image spreads to give a little breathing room around the pictures,” she explained. “Pictures tend to have an effect on each other… . Flipping through a book of landscape photographs feels to me like going for a walk. Each page leads somewhere else, and I start to notice visual patterns.”

Traditional Photography Books with Unique  Niches

The biggest challenge of creating traditional photography books like these though is that they’re difficult to market. When every photographer is doing the same thing, your photos—and your book idea—will have to be exceptional to attract the attention of customers. John Fielder, a photographer who also owned his own publishing company, solves that problem by specializing. He takes photos of Colorado. That gives his books a specific niche and turns his name into a brand for people interested in the landscapes of his state.

As a publisher though, John tended to focus on books that were either unique or which had an environmental aspect associated with an endangered natural resource or which contributed towards the goals of a non-profit. That’s not just because he liked the subject; it also made the books easier to promote. The media attention the books won…

“…reduced the need for paid advertising and support from the publisher… which in my case was me,” he told us. “And it’s easy to get a book into bookstores if there’s publicity.”

Both these kinds of books though—a self-published Blurb book, and a niched photography book on a media-friendly theme—are fairly traditional. They look like photography books. George Ancona’s books though won’t turn up in any bookstore’s photography section even though they’re created by a photographer and rely heavily on images. They’re children’s books in which the pictures and the text work together to inform readers about the topic, whether that’s native Americans, dolphins, bananas or any of the other subjects in the 113-plus books that George has created.

George first draws the books out. Using 3 x 5 file cards, he lays out the 48 pages each of his books contains to get a feel for whether it should be vertical or landscape, colorful or subdued. Once he starts shooting, of course, plans change. The people he meets while creating a book will lead him in new directions. In general though, George usually tries to focus on one person who will take him through the experience and enable him to portray accurately a child from a different culture.

“I’ll forget the book but I’ll always remember the people,” he says.

The result of George’s work is always a book which tells a story and provides explanations, while the images show the topics the text describes. The relationship between words and images is a little like that between the narrator and the film in a National Geographic program.

Photographs as Book Backgrounds

Mo Willems, takes a completely different approach in his Knuffle Bunny books. Although also aimed at children and dependent on images to drive the story forward, in these books the photos play a secondary role. Mo’s background is in illustration and animation rather than photography so after taking pictures of his New York neighborhood, Mo used them as a setting for his hand-drawn characters. He removed air conditioning units and garbage cans, and rebuilt signs with missing letters or numbers to create what he calls “emotional truth” rather than a completely accurate representation of his local streets.

“The images are almost more Photoshop Illustration than photograph by the time I’m done,” he says.

For a photographer, a book like this can be a fairly big challenge. It’s easier for a tech-savvy illustrator to take a picture of a street and turn it into a workable background than it is for a photographer to take good pictures then draw lovable characters onto them. But it’s always possible for a photographer and illustrator to team up to produce a book. The second Knuffle Bunny book, “Knuffle Bunny Too”, used a double page spread of Grand Army Plaza as the background to a scene in which the two girls exchange their fluffy bunnies. Mo felt out of his depth so he called in Tom Drysdale, an old friend and a professor of photography at New York University. They ended up spending the early morning together on the roof of the Brooklyn Public Library. Mo called the time out for the four seconds when the junction was traffic-free while Tom took the shot and tried to stop his 8 x 10 camera from being blown off the roof. It’s the kind of partnership that brings together the creative storytelling of the author with the technical skill of a trained photographer.

The traditional way of creating a photography book is always going to be the most appealing. It’s a channel that puts the images at the center and shows off your talent. But pictures are meant to tell a story so stepping back and allowing them to illustrate the book’s story by accompanying words, as George Ancona’s images do, or by providing the background for an illustrated tale, as Mo Willems’ pictures do, can be another satisfying way of getting your photos onto pages and into stores.

This might be a bad time to be a banker, an investor, a property developer or… well, just about anything really, but a few branches of photography are still bringing in the cash. In fact, some types of photography might even be doing better than ever.

There are no current figures easily available that cover every aspect of photography but it’s a safe bet that the difficulties faced by both the car industry and the advertising industry mean that car photographers are feeling the squeeze at the moment. And while couples are continuing to get married, worries about job stability and income should mean that wedding photographers will need to emphasize their lower-priced packages rather than the deals that deliver everything, all-in with the frills on top. Stock photographers, and in particular microstock photographers though, are one group that do seem to be sitting pretty.

In November 2007, Getty Images predicted that revenues from its iStockPhoto division would reach $262 million by 2012. The microstock site had earned $71.9 million that year and was expecting to make $122 million in 2008. Chief Operating Officer Kelly Thompson, however, recently told Photo District News that iStockPhoto  would clear $200 million this year already.

Fewer Stock Sales, Higher Stock Prices

That suggests that producers of low-stock images are still looking at boom times – good news for the mostly part-timers who create them. But as Dan Heller points out, the statistics hide as much as they reveal. The old microstock model of a dollar an image (and cents for the photographer) is now giving way to higher priced photos. iStockPhoto recently introduced its Vetta Collection, which charges between $20 and $70 for a high quality image submitted by one of its exclusive contributors. Other microstock companies are pushing subscription plans which appear to offer greater value but which in practice result in more money earned from fewer downloads to locked-in buyers. The one-dollar image now tends to apply to the kind of tiny low-res images that compete only with Flickr’s CC-licensed photos.

Microstock companies then might be making more money but it does look like they’re coming from fewer sales. Again, that should be good news for photographers. It means photos are more valuable than they might have thought. Or alternatively, that stock photos are worth exactly what microstock’s critics said they were worth and that the microstock companies have been underselling them for years. Either way, being able to make more money for fewer sales is still good news for microstock photographers.

And tough times have turned out to be surprisingly good too for real estate photographers. That may appear surprising. With house prices a fraction of the amounts they were worth a year ago, Realtors should have fewer incentives to splash out on marketing. In fact, as our previous post pointed out, there is in fact very little correlation between the price of a property and the desire of a Realtor to pay a photographer to shoot it. The difficulty of selling particularly high-priced homes  may even act as a disincentive against making the investment in professional photography.

“Generally, photo shoot prices are more tied to time spent on the job or licensing for different usage than the home price,” real estate photography specialist Larry Lohrman told us. “Realtors selling upper-end homes are more likely to use photos for magazines and fancy brochures than [they will for] lower-end homes. However, upper-end homes can take years to sell and Realtors may lose the listing and never get paid for their marketing (photographer) costs so Realtors are cautious with their marketing dollars.”

In practice, real estate photographers have found that the glut of properties on the market has led Realtors to look for new ways to help their homes stand out – and those methods include professional photography. As a result, real estate photographers have been able to raise their prices. Hopefully, that’s a trend that will continue after the property market recovers when Realtors recognize the value of professionally-shot images.

Star Photos Still Burning Bright

And a third photography niche that doesn’t seem to have been too bothered by the collapse in the economy is celebrity photos. Perhaps most famously, British weekly OK! has just paid $500,000 for what it claims are the last pictures of Michael Jackson alive. He’s on a stretcher and not looking very well. Forbes notes that in comparison to other celebrity shots, that half-million dollar fee is small change. It was less than a year ago that People and Hello! paid between $11 million and $15 million for pictures of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s twins. That might suggest that the celebrity photo market has suffered a horrible collapse but all of the ten most expensive celebrity images are posed shots that show either a star with a baby or a star in her wedding dress. A snap of a very sick-looking singer is always going to be worth much less in terms of extra sales, website traffic and branding for the magazine. It’s not a feel-good image.

As long as an exclusive celebrity picture can sell as many as 500,000 extra copies though (and Forbes claims that the picture of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s oldest son, Shiloh Nouvel, which cost $4.1 million in 2006, moved an extra 800,000 copies), the prices for them will always be big. Movies remained popular even in the Depression, and the same is likely to be true of paparazzi and celebrity pictures even in this recession.

So the picture for photographers who hope to make money during difficult economic times isn’t entirely bleak. The value of the photos you can upload to stock sites is rising even if the number of sales is falling – and that means more money for less work. If you can get your foot in the door of real estate companies, you should be able to catch a niche on the rise, and if you can persuade Hello! to let you take a family portrait of some A-list celebrity, you should certainly have plenty of cash. All you then have to do is figure out where to invest it.

Photography: Pete Prodoehl

Brand yourself an expert and you’ll have already overcome one of the toughest challenges in marketing yourself as a photographer: you’ll have given yourself an edge over the competition and buyers a reason to choose you instead of someone else with a camera. Nor do the benefits end there. Photography knowledge — particularly the kind of strange, specialized photography knowledge that few others understand — is a valuable thing. It can be shared for a fee and, no less importantly, it can be demonstrated to buyers, create a unique brand and win some useful, free publicity.

And marking yourself as an expert isn’t difficult to achieve. The processes themselves require effort and time, but they aren’t impossibly challenging. Anyone can do it; the benefits derive from the fact that so few people actually do.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t any challenges at all though, and the first is to choose what kind of expert you want to be.

How Specialized Is Your Photography Knowledge?

Clearly, the type of expertise that brings the most benefits is one recognized and appreciated by the largest number of people. Scott Kelby’s field of expertise, for example, is digital photography, which is a broad enough topic to make him an expert in the eyes of anyone who puts images on memory cards and manipulates them on monitors.

Lots of people know how to do that and many of them may know how to shoot and edit digital images at least as well as Scott Kelby does, but because Scott has the reputation and the expertise, his images are treated differently to those produced by his competitors. Buyers and clients familiar with his name assume that his products and services are good. Because he’s an expert, they’ve already given him the most valuable thing any marketing effort can win: their trust.

Pick a topic as broad as Scott’s though, and you’ll be facing a large amount of competition. Your knowledge – and your ability to share it – will need to be particularly high if it’s to survive the scrutiny of a large number of critics. The more prominent your position, the greater the number of people who want to take it.

That’s less true when you choose to stand out in a niche. Alan Detrick, for example, is the author of a book on macro photography. But that too is a relatively broad field with no shortage of other experts competing for attention, so Alan brands himself even further by showing that he specializes in a particular kind of macro photography. His website focuses on “garden and landscape photography” and his book is aimed at “gardeners and nature lovers.”

That limits his market. There are fewer potential buyers of garden photography services – or books — than there are buyers of digital photography knowledge. But those who are interested in the topic will consider Alan Detrick an expert, and the top buyers will turn to him first. He’ll also have less competition for the top expert brand.

Alan Detrick though is primarily a macro photographer. It’s likely that he could also create other kinds of macro images if he wanted too, but his main interest is floral. Every photographer has interests that specific. You might enjoy shooting landscape images but it’s likely that you tend to shoot a particular type of landscape, whether that’s a certain kind of location or in a particular kind of style. So you could brand yourself as a landscape photography expert in general – and battle with lots of other landscape photographers – or you could position yourself more easily but more narrowly as an expert on Utah landscapes, abandoned spaces or images taken at twilight.

Four Tools to Make You an Expert

Once you’ve chosen your field, demonstrating your expertise is remarkably simple even if it does require a little hard work. There are four main tools that can move a photographer out of the crowd and up to the head of the pack.

Teaching is always one option. The better the school, the greater the appearance of your expertise but teaching an adult education course or even an online course can deliver expert branding power. It’s unlikely that the instructors at BetterPhoto.com are more (or less) knowledgeable than the average successful professional. But because they’re instructors, they appear more confident and more competent too.

In part though, that comes not just from their teaching but also because many of them are said to have written “how-to” guides, and book-writing is another way to demonstrate expertise. These days that’s easier than ever. While winning a traditional book contract may take some persuasion, it costs nothing but time and effort to produce an ebook, a Blurb book or a print-on-demand book. And you still get the cachet of saying that you’re “the author of…”.

Easier still is to create a blog. While that demands a long-term effort, rather than the one-off investment involved in writing a how-to guide that shares your techniques, blogs do cost nothing to produce and, with advertising, are easier to earn from. Lee Torrens is certainly not one of the highest-earning microstock photographers, for example, but his informative blog Microstock Diaries, has won him a great deal of respect in the industry, just as David Hobby’s Strobist blog has positioned him as an expert on lighting.

And finally, you can write press releases. These take the least effort of all but the expert branding power is also temporary. Offer reporters a story about photography — whether that’s a photographer’s take on a story in the news or something seasonal such as tips for better picture-taking while on vacation – and anyone who sees your quote will assume that the reporter considers you an expert. That means they’ll consider you an expert too and as an added bonus, you’ll also get to say in your marketing material that you’ve appeared the New York Times, or whichever publication ran the story.

Press releases do tend to be a little more hit-and-miss though, and you often have to write plenty of them before you strike a story. Unless, of course, you’re already an expert.

Photography: burtonwood+holmes

It sounds about as modern and up-to-date as silver-gelatin prints and watching the birdy. In the age of social networking and pay-per-click advertising, the idea of sending marketing material via the post office feels like a trip back to the 1950s, the time when mailboxes first started filling up with unwanted bits of paper.

And yet, as any trip to your own mailbox will tell you, businesses still do it. In fact, Americans receive a total of about 4 million tons of junk mail every year. That’s an awful lot of overflowing recycle bins but if businesses are still filling envelopes, then there’s a good chance it still works. According to the Direct Marketing Association, an advocacy group, more than $173 billion was spent on direct marketing in the United States in 2007, generating over $2 trillion in incremental sales. Eighty percent of advertising material is at least scanned before being binned, the organization says.

At Least Paper Junk Arrives

The association’s definition of direct marketing is likely to be pretty broad to incorporate those sorts of figures – and its idea of “scanning” might well include a glance to affirm you’re not throwing out the gas bill — but it is easy to understand the appeal. Eight out of ten mailbox leaflets might be seen but spam filters knock out around ninety percent of marketing material sent by email. At least paper junk reaches its destination.

Direct marketing firms are also much better at targeting than in the past. DirectMail.com, a company which used to be known as the DM Group and which has been in business for 35 years, now has a “geoselector” that allows businesses to build a list of recipients by location and lifestyle, and even to see pictures, a “personality tree,” and a detailed profile of the sort of people they’re aiming at.

And the product range is broad too. Direct mail companies will print and deliver door hangers, rack cards and calendars in additional to the traditional catalogs and flyers.

But is this an approach a photography business should take?

In theory there’s no reason why not. The flexibility of today’s list builders make it possible for photographers to identify businesses that might need photography services, young families considering portraits and even new graduates in the first years after college who might be thinking of hiring a wedding photographer.

The costing isn’t unattractive either. To send 1,000 postcards using DirectMail.com will cost a little over $400. With an average response rate that ranges from 0.25 percent to 1 percent, a wedding photographer could reasonably expect to pick up between 2.5 and ten jobs from that mailout.

Or to put it another way, direct marketing can let a photographer buy a job for between $160 and $40. For work that can cost several thousand dollars, that might not be a bad deal and it might well be more effective than a newspaper listing or even pay-per-click advertising.

Make your Junk Mail Valuable

Those response rates are a typical figure supplied to us by DirectMail.com, but when it comes to direct marketing, photographers might well have an advantage. One of the rules for handing out anything for free – even ads – is to make the freebie valuable. It’s hard for a plumber to make a postcard valuable, but photographers sell postcards. A photography marketing piece that included a beautiful image is much more likely to kept, stuck to the fridge and eventually acted on than a leaflet with a phone number and a drawing of a blocked sink.

The fact that it’s also possible to focus a list on a specific area means that the photographer could even make sure that the image had local appeal. Instead of just showing a photo of a wedding couple, for example, the photographer could make a local landmark the focal point of the image with the couple providing an additional romantic touch. Recipients could be tempted to hold on to the image because it’s pleasant to look at – exactly what a photographer is supposed to do – while couples could find the romantic addition inspiring enough to make contact.

And if a business holds on to your calendars because the receptionist likes the pictures, there’s a good chance that their own marketing people will understand the benefits of producing their own professionally-shot calendars for their clients.

Of course, direct marketing like this isn’t for everyone. Junk mail is, after all, very annoying and while you might pick up one job for every 100 postcards you send out, it’s possible that you’ll alienate the other 99 recipients. Other marketing methods can also be at least as effective without any of the drawbacks. Craigslist, for example, is free, annoys no one and according to photographers we’ve spoken to can deliver a budget wedding booking for every ten to fifteen listings.

But it always pays to diversify your marketing streams and for photographers targeting businesses in particular, a trip back to the world of print and paper might be one effective way of getting your foot in the door.

If you think that selling photos through an art gallery is difficult, spare a thought for buyers. Although a few have the budget to pay four-figure sums and more for photographs they like, there’s a much bigger pool of photography lovers who’d like to pay a smaller sum for an attractive photograph that would just look good on their landing wall.

There’s an even bigger group who would like to buy photo-based calendars that don’t show the usual fluffy kittens and ball-of-fur dogs that chain stores stock up on towards the end of every year.

More importantly, many buyers would also like to buy those photographs from living artists whose works they appreciate – and those artists would very much like to sell to them.

Blogging for Photo Artists

RedBubble was created to try to bring these two demands together. Launched in early 2007, the site aims to deliver for aspiring artists what blogging has done for aspiring writers and what YouTube has done for aspiring directors… with one exception: it wants the artists to get paid too.

The site is free to join and anyone can upload images, making them available for sale as prints, posters, calendars and cards, and on t-shirts too. RedBubble sets a fee to print each item and artists are then free to set their own mark-ups above the cost price.

So far, so familiar. Zazzle too allows artists to offer their works on products that range from plimsolls to mouse pads. Unlike that site though, RedBubble steers clear of big brands in order to focus on individual creators, while Etsy, which has a similar feel, tends to be more craft-oriented.

Judging by the result of its first couple of years in business, the service seems to be working. More than 90,000 contributors have already joined the site and after generating more than $1.2 million in sales in the first year, RedBubble looks likely to double that this year. Around 40 percent of those sales have been of photography products, not including t-shirt sales.

“We… don’t see ourselves as just a print-on-demand service but as an art site which means that we don’t promote things like mouse pads or a service of getting your dog’s photo on a mug,” co-founder and executive chairman Martin Hosking told us. “Right now we are growing so rapidly because we have really tried to deliver on the needs of living artists and allowing them to reach a global audience.”

Calendars are the best sellers, Martin says, because they combine accessibility with a high quality art product, but cards and framed prints also sell well.

$2.4 million Divided into 90,000 Equals…

A tougher question though is how well they sell, and what a photographer has to do to generate those sales. If the site is generating $2.4 million a year in sales and has 90,000 contributors, each artist is earning on average… less than $27 per year. Clearly, no one is going to get rich on that but equally clearly, the sales aren’t averaged out. Not all of the contributors will be active and while some may be making good  money, many are presumably making very little, if any, money at all.

In part, that’s likely to be down to their own marketing skill. While RedBubble handles search engine optimization, offers widgets that can be embedded in blogs and social media sites, and has active PR offices, as usual, the real marketing work is left to each seller.

“Our best sellers are making a reasonable part time living,” says Martin. “This is obviously growing and if they combine this with sales off RedBubble they can do OK.

“It is not, however, as simple as simply putting up your work then letting it sell itself. If you want to do well you will need to find multiple ways to promote yourself both within RedBubble and in other forums.”

Martin points to the Aussie Exotics sports car photography calendar as one example of a product that has sold “many hundreds” of copies. The photographer contacted sites directly to promote it, he says, winning a glowing recommendation from at least one site. Other photographers though, Martin concedes, are not as good at marketing themselves so the site offers a sales blog and a sales forum to help them learn the basics and pick up some new ideas. Those suggestions might include the importance of describing the works on offer so that buyers can put them in context and understand what they’re buying. Themed calendars also sell much better than calendars with a random collection of attractive images, and the images themselves have to be high-resolution so that they print at top quality.

Like non-commercial sites such as Flickr though, RedBubble also has groups that allow contributors to swap tips among themselves and arrange local meet-ups, a factor that has helped to contribute to the site’s rapid growth.

“People want to get together with each other (both online and offline),” says Martin. “They are motivated not only by the sales but the overall experience of sharing.”

So if you decide not to put in the effort at marketing and find that you don’t make any sales, at least you’ll make some new friends. And maybe one of them will be looking for a new picture for the landing wall.

Photography: edwinsail

You know all the old standards. You know that you can walk into a bookstore and see calendars filled with photos of fluffy kittens and baby Dobermans. You know that you can browse a gallery and – assuming you don’t die of envy first – see beautiful photographs, framed, matted and available for sale at eyewatering sums. And you know that you can browse a stock site and see image after image of jumping families and headset-wearing backroom staff.

You might even know that with a well-managed Flickr stream, you could be selling licenses and offloading prints to the buyers who cruise the site.

But here are five places you probably didn’t know that you could sell your pictures:

Etsy

The trouble with handicraft sites like Zazzle and Etsy is that they don’t really do any marketing. Instead, they supply the shop window and the selling infrastructure, and rely on the sellers to bring in the buyers themselves.

Often then, they don’t work.

In part, that’s because when anyone can open a store, the quality of the site as a whole tends to suffer, putting buyers off. And in part, it’s because marketing a Zazzle page requires special skills and knowledge that only a few handicrafters possess.

Etsy though does things a little differently. It charges sellers a fee, which puts off chancers, and it enables buyers and sellers to browse and chat. We’ve come across at least one amateur who made her first photography sale on the site. Market carefully and it might just happen to you too.

Subscription Sites

Most photographers are accustomed to selling one image at one price at one time. Stock companies though try to chain their clients to their outlets by selling subscriptions. In effect, they give their buyers a large discount in return for advance payment, ensuring that they won’t go anywhere else in the future.

It’s a model that some artists are using to sell their works directly too.
Vlad Gerasimov, a Russian designer, makes high quality versions of his wallpapers available for $19.99 a year or $29.99 for life. These include his photographic series of Siberian wooden houses.

He told us that he’s sold more than 11,000 subscriptions, and that’s without spending a penny on advertising.

You’d need to create good, original images to do this, and you’ll have to network like mad to become well-known. But if your photos are interesting enough, you could find that you’re locking in plenty of buyers and packing away lots of money too.

Twitter

Twitter might be a lot of fun and a great place to network, but it’s also becoming a valuable marketing tool. That’s especially true of each Twitter page’s background which allows twitterers to create a sidebar packed with URLs and product information.

Designer Natalie Jost is cashing in on that opportunity by allowing twitterers to use her textures as their background designs for free. If they want to use them for any other purpose though, they have to pay.

That’s a clever marketing ploy that photographer can learn from, even if they don’t want to give away their images for nothing. Create a series of images formatted for Twitter – complete with space for sidebar – and you’ll have a new product line.

You’ll also have the ideal marketing tool to spread the word too.

Tourist Stops

Postcards can be as tricky a sale as calendars and posters. Stores tend to buy from their regular suppliers, the profits from each are tiny and the competition is fierce. Some places though are easier to break into and sell from than others.

We’ve spoken to at least one amateur photographer who was able to place his photos at tourist sites that he visited frequently. If there are places near you that have a steady stream of visitors – and especially if it’s the kind of place that tourists bring their own cameras to – then there’s an opportunity waiting to be plucked.

Again, you’ll need great images of course, and you’ll have to be able to persuade the sellers that that your images really will sell but the fact that you’re local gives you a big advantage. You know the best places to shoot, the times of day that have the best light and the times of year that produce the best colors.

You’ll also be able to update your collection frequently, and offer a complete range of site-oriented products that could range from postcards to posters, and from books to t-shirts.

All you need is the right images and the right places.

Colleges

One career choice chosen by many photographers looking for the security of a regular salary while still keeping their hands on their camera is to teach. The top photographers teach at universities and on professional courses but there are plenty of further education centers which demand few qualifications and while they won’t pay very much, they will give you an audience of eager photography enthusiasts.

You won’t be able to sell directly to your students – colleges tend to look down on teachers hawking their goods in class – but it’s likely that many of your students will want to see your images and buy your Blurb books, if only to get a feel for the sort of images you take.

Strictly speaking, it might be against the rules but if someone is going to buy your book anyway out of curiosity, is it really so bad if you order it yourself and give them a discount?

Those are just five unusual ways of selling images that we know of. Put them into practice, and you might find that they become the new standard.

Photography: grewlike

There are lots of different ways to make money from your images. You can license their use and see them appear in ads or on websites. You can shoot them on commission and hand out bumper albums to beaming wedding couples. And you can photograph for the media and see your images accompanying news reports and articles to name just three.

Those are all enjoyable and rewarding but they’re not as satisfying as selling your photos as prints. When someone buys a framed copy of one of your pictures they’re not making a comment on the usefulness of your image – Does it suit the sales message? Does it spark a memory? Does it capture the story? – they’re passing judgment on the quality of your photography. Only beautiful pictures sell as prints and there’s no clearer indication that your photograph is beautiful than that someone is prepared to pay to own it.

Offering Prints is Easy, Selling Them is Hard

That’s one of the reasons it’s so hard to sell prints. There’s no shortage of beautiful pictures available – even if everyone’s idea of beauty is different – but there is a limited number of people prepared to buy photography, and a limited amount of wall space on which to display it.

Nor is there a lack of channels to put those prints into the hands of buyers. As FotoLibra, with its 1,000-plus different licensing prices shows, stock photography is complex and challenging. Taking orders for prints however is very simple. Even Flickr allows viewers to order images through Qoop while PhotoBiz includes a complete printing, ordering and payment system.

It’s no surprise then that with so many images available, it’s so difficult to make a sale. Josh McCulloch, a professional photographer whose revenue streams include commissions, stock, prints and postcards, reports that prints make up the smallest part of his income.

There are ways to make things at least a little easier. Farmboy Fine Arts, for example, acts like a conventional stock site but instead of accepting images of smiling call center clerks and families jumping in fields, it looks for artistic photographs that could be used to decorate hotel restaurants and spas. The images are sold as prints and the photographer receives a royalty for each use but it’s likely to have fewer customers than stock companies so contributors could be in for a long wait before they make their first – and subsequent – sales.

And when an image is sold to a corporation, there is still a sense that it’s serving a purpose rather than being bought for its beauty alone. (Farmboy Fine Arts does also place images in homes but most of its work is done for institutions rather than for private clients.)

Sales for Crafty Photographers

One alternative which markets to individuals is Etsy.com, a craft site which charges contributors a usage fee. The costs keep the quality high – only people with reasonably good products are likely to contribute — and ensures that artists and craftspeople work hard to make a return on their investment.

And they do need to work hard because with more than 76,000 photographs available for sale on Etsy, the competition is fierce here too. Etsy though makes the sales a little easier by allowing buyers and sellers to meet in the forums. Although that’s not quite as effective as being able to walk up to a shopper in your own gallery and ask if they need any help, it does allow contributors to build relationships that might lead to deals. It’s a system that some photographers have found effective enough to generate their very first print sales.

Building those sorts of relationships online is difficult and time-consuming. A conversation that can drag on for weeks in a forum could last just a few minutes had it been held face-to-face. That’s one of the things that makes art fairs so attractive to photographers – that and the fact that you can be certain that people visiting are the sort who tend to buy art and that they’re likely to be in a mood to do so.

The challenge at art fairs though is being accepted in the first place. Photography is often one of the most over-subscribed art forms submitted to acceptance committees (jewelry-making is the other) and acceptance rates of just one in nine are not unusual. Exhibitors also have to invest in display material such as a tent and container bins, they must ensure that their images are protected from the sticky fingers of browsers, include enough framed examples to encourage buying, and offer photos in a range of different prices to suit buyers of every budget. All of that requires an up-front investment.

But with sales that reach four figures a distinct possibility, you wouldn’t need to exhibit in more than a handful of fairs each year to generate some very useful extra cash.

And perhaps the best benefit of selling at art fairs is that winning prizes at juried events can help to attract the attention of gallery owners. This is always going to be the best way to sell prints. Gallery owners don’t just provide a venue and marketing power. They can also offer career advice, pricing suggestions and allow the photographer time to do what he or she does best: create images.

Being accepted by a gallery is probably the hardest way to sell images though. Gallery owners tend to prefer photographers to make appointments than drop in and they’ll expect to see a resume and an artist’s statement as well as a record of previous shows even if many of them are group exhibitions. It’s the name and history that sells at galleries as much as the images themselves.

When you’re looking to sell your images as prints, the biggest and most important challenge is always going to be to create beautiful photographs. After that, the work begins.

Photography: Janet Towbin

The biggest challenge for any photographer hoping to sell their images isn’t understanding lighting, f-stops or composition.

It’s understanding the market.

You can read up about lighting, play with your camera settings and re-frame shots until you create the effect you want. The image on the screen will tell you right away how you’re doing. If the lighting’s off, the shadows will be too dark or the background too bright. If your focus is wrong, you’ll be bothered by the blur. And if the composition isn’t balanced, you’ll see what you need to change to create the harmony you’re looking for.

Then it’s just a matter of doing the same thing until you’re ready to move on to the next technique.

But the market doesn’t tell you anything.

Put up an image for sale, hear nothing and you’ll have no idea why. You won’t know if the image is wrong for the market, if you’re marketing it in the wrong way to the wrong people or if there’s just something wrong with the pictures you’re shooting.

It’s only when you make a sale that you actually make contact with the market. At that point, it’s vital to collect all the information you can to increase the chances that that sale will happen again – and soon.

Learning What Sold your Photo

The first thing you learn is what sold. That’s not just the image itself but the different elements that make up the image. Every photo contains a number of different parts and if you can identify which of those attracted the buyer the most — the subject of the photo; the style; the price – you should find it easier to repeat the trick and continue making sales.

The simplest solution is to ask the buyer what he liked about the photo, but that’s not always possible. The only alternative is to look at the other images the buyer would have seen and pay attention to the differences. If the buyer was faced with two images showing a similar scene, then the differences in the photo he bought can tell you a great deal about what your market is looking for in an image.

You also have an opportunity to learn about your customers. You could be selling your images to a range of different kinds of buyers. Many of the images sold on Flickr, for example, are bought by Web designers and publishers. On Etsy, a site for arts and crafts, you’re more likely to find small art-lovers looking for attractive items to decorate their homes.

Those are big differences but even small differences in buyer demographics can have a large effect on your marketing and your sales. Young, trendy buyers and design houses tend to want different images – and look for them in different places – in comparison to older couples who might just want a nice photo for their condo.

Again, you can’t always ask your buyers to complete a survey each time they make a purchase – which is why sites like Facebook, which are filled with demographic details, are so valuable – but you can chat with them and ask them how they plan to use your image. All of that information can help make sure that you put your pictures where your buyers are most likely to be.

Where are your Buyers from?

A third piece of information you can pick up from a sale is how your buyers found you.

Flickr’s stats can reveal which search terms that people who found your images were using, and help you to optimize your tags to catch more of them.

Your server stats can tell you which sites buyers were looking at before they reached yours.

And even looking at the metadata on Web pages that have used your images can provide you with some information about the terms the buyer thinks best suit your photos.

If you can see that you’re getting a lot of views and sales from people who click a link on a site on a related topic, for example, it might be worth talking to the publisher about running an ad on those pages.

And the easiest piece of information you can learn from a sale is where your customers bought the image from… but that’s no less valuable for being easy to discover.

There are lots of different platforms that let photographers sell their images. You can set up your own website, upload your photos to stock sites, create an optimized Flickr stream, place them on products and use any one of a gazillion other methods to move your photos.

You’ll probably do more than one of them.

And you’ll probably also find that most of your sales come from just one or two of the strongest streams. Microstock photographer, Lee Torrens, for example, uploads his photos to half a dozen sites but finds that iStockPhoto outperforms the others.

Spread your images around to maximize your options but when you know which outlets deliver the best, you can focus your marketing efforts to make them more efficient.

Every time you make a sale, you make money. But you also uncover intelligence about your market that could be worth far more than the cash you earn for the print or the license. Don’t leave that money behind.

Photography: brookenovak

If you want to make a lot of money doing anything, including photography, there’s one very easy strategy: eliminate the competition. It’s certainly an approach that’s done wonders for Microsoft, and a monopoly on a section of the photography market can do wonders for any photographer too.

Of course, unless you already have enough money to buy up anyone who gets in your way, that’s not going to be an easy strategy to follow, which is why it usually makes sense to skip around the competition by focusing on a narrow niche.

But even that’s not an approach that everyone can take. If you like shooting landscapes, children, portraits, pets, events or any of the other specializations targeted by… well, just about every other photographer, you’re always going to struggle to stand out, get noticed and make your sales.

Competition though does bring with it certain advantages. The most obvious is that if a part of the market is crowded there’s usually a good reason. Photographers focus on shooting weddings because the money can be relatively good and there’s a fairly steady supply of work. Landscapes might be hard to sell, but at least they’re fun to create.

Copying your Competitors

The advantages of working in a crowded field can extend beyond a signal that the market’s big or the production enjoyable though. It can also help new entrants become competitive fast.

Browse the images on a microstock site, for example, and the first thing you’ll notice is that there are an awful lot of them available and that many of them are very good. But you’ll also be able to see how many times they’ve been viewed and how many licenses those images have sold. That can be very revealing and it’s why even top microstock photographers have been known to copy each other’s work.

When you can see what sells, why create something original and run the risk that it won’t make money?

One of the benefits of competition then is that the market testing has already been done and the results — often — plain for everyone to see. If you can’t always beat the competition, you can easily join them.

That applies to marketing too. Any photographer considering building a commercial website — which is any photographer considering at least a partly commercial future — will spend time looking at the websites of photographers who have launched before them. Today, when so many companies offer ready-made photography templates, that might not sound like an issue but being able to look at the packages on offer and the prices the photographers are charging can save a great deal of time and money spent calculating price points and offers. Even Flickr, not a commercial site but a photo-sharing site through which a great deal of commerce is done, is filled with examples of photostreams optimized for easy browsing and linked to stock portfolios and commercial spaces.

All of those marketing methods are examples of valuable knowledge handed out freely by the competition.

Helping your Competitors

And perhaps one of the biggest advantages of competitors is that they can give you a helping hand up the ladder. That’s traditionally done by the use of assistantships. In return for a helping hand, top photographers will pass on some of their knowledge to aspiring snappers… and hope that by the time they’re ready to compete, their former students have either moved on to a different geographic area or are still too inexperienced to infringe on their own client base. (Although at least one photographer has pointed out that while they might teach an assistant everything the assistant knows, they won’t teach them everything they know.)

Today, there are other methods too. An endorsement from a top Flickr photographer like Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir can help any Flickr member stand out and win additional views, and even acting as a moderator on a group run by a well-known professional like David Bean can show that you know your specialty and that you’re not part of the crowd (like the average group member).

Of course, there is another benefit that working in an atmosphere filled with other photographers can bring: it keeps you sharp, which is what competition is supposed to do anyway. That requires effort, which might not sound like fun, but the goal for any photographer is always going to be not just to make money, but to take better pictures.

The alternative is to end up like Microsoft, and make products that are progressively worse.

Photography: Vlad Gerasimov (VladStudio.com)

Wouldn’t it be great to shoot a picture that you love, have thousands of people pay to own a copy and know that they’re going to see it, appreciate it and enjoy it several times a day… before coming back to pick up another one?

That’s not likely to happen through gallery representation, and even regular stock buyers are unlikely to give an image a second thought once it’s served its purpose. Turn your photo into a desktop wallpaper however, and you can be sure that it’s going to be unmissable. Create the sort of payment plan that lets buyers build a collection of your artwork and you can be sure that your creations will continue to be appreciated, even as they’re covered in icons and windows.

Wallpapers Bring More Joy, More Money

That’s not going to be easy. Toss “free wallpaper” into Google and you’ll be shown more than 31 million results, including plenty of sites offering tens of thousands of images for nothing. But when so much is free, quality is valuable and stands out. For image-makers with talent who can build a following prepared to pay for their work, that creates an opportunity.

Vlad Gerasimov, for example, is a Siberian designer and amateur photographer who offers wallpapers through his website VladStudio.com. He began his career while a student, creating interface designs for his brother’s software company – a job that forced him to get to grips with Photoshop. After nine years, he says he’s still learning how to use the graphics program, but in that time he’s also managed to migrate from graphic design to focus almost exclusively on wallpapers, work that he says brings him both more joy and more money.

Vlad’s original designs were naïve, childlike images created entirely on Photoshop. Although they’re offered for sale as posters and even t-shirts on sites like Zazzle, more than 90 percent of his sales come from his website — a sales channel he’s never invested a penny in advertising, relying instead on links and a javascript program that lets online publishers show his latest wallpaper on their sites for free.

Recently however Vlad has started a new project that swaps the sketching for photography and which provides a lesson for any photographer interested in selling their images as computer decorations. Drawing on camera skills that he describes as “advanced amateur,” Vlad is recording the old houses of his home town before they disappear completely, and offering the images from his website as desktop wallpapers.

“The city I live in, Irkutsk, has a lot of wooden houses more than 100 years old,” he explained to us. “I could see how they degrade over the years, because the city does not have enough money (or will) to keep them all in good  shape. I wanted to take photos of them before they become history. The idea is quite simple – to show the ‘sad’ beauty of old wooden architecture.”

Dark is Good

The images themselves are as good as you would expect from someone with a photographic eye and an understanding of light, composition and technique. They capture the texture of the old wood and provide a gloomy sense of their slow disappearance. Part of that feeling comes from the images’ dark colors, one of Vlad’s rules for creating successful wallpaper. Other guidelines include going easy on the details so that the image doesn’t appear too busy, leaving empty space for icons and placing the most important parts of the composition in the center of the screen so that the image can be cropped for different screen sizes. Vlad’s Siberian Wooden Houses project now consists of more than 70 different images which are presented as photographic prints in the center of a textured background. They can be downloaded in more 24 different desktop sizes as well as in formats suitable for mobile phones. His original images, he says, are 3840 x 2400 pixels but he has been asked to produce dual 2560 x 1600 wallpapers which would be 5120 pixels wide.

While the layout and format of the images are important, it’s in his business model that Vlad provides a particularly interesting example. Although he provides free low quality downloads, Vlad also runs a subscription program that offers membership from $8.99 for three months to $29.99 for life. Paying members can help themselves to high-quality, signature-free images and Photoshop source files. Payments are one-time and not self-renewing, a policy Vlad borrowed from DigitalBlasphemy.com.

“I evaluated many ideas (pay per download, pay for member gallery access, recurrent payments, etc),” Vlad said. “I chose what I  considered to be most fair. That is, I looked at my website as a usual visitor, and decided that this is the way I would buy it.”

It’s an approach that seems to work. VladStudio.com now has around 11,000 registered members.

Perhaps the best example Vlad provides though is of someone who has found a way to do work that he enjoys — and earn from it. Creating the Siberian Wooden Houses Project has, he says, been “a fun and relaxed process,” helped by the fact that although membership to his site might be time-limited, he only adds new wallpapers as they’re ready rather than according to a fixed production schedule. That laid back approach might well be the most important reason for his success.

“[A]nyone can make a good photo these days,” he says. “You will have luck selling photos that tell a good story and make people happier… Most importantly, love what you do. If you do not, all else fails.”

Photography: Rick Sforza, USAF

It’s the high point of their lives, the culmination of years of training, an opportunity to show off their talent and a chance to win the respect – and envy — of peers.

And it’s not bad for the athletes either.

More than 21,600 accredited journalists are covering the Olympic games in Beijing, including 5,600 press reporters and photographers. The International Olympic Committee alone has sent “an elite team” of 24 photographers to China. They are expected to take 70,000 pictures of which 25,000 will join the Olympic database.

Of course, unless you’re reading this in China, your images won’t be among them.

But the Olympics can still be an opportunity for photographers, even for those watching the games at home.

Learning from the Olympics

The first opportunity lies in the lessons that can be learned in the stream of images pouring back from China. The New York Times is just one publication offering a slideshow of attractive images from Beijing. Marc Aspland, an award-winning photographer, is also writing a blog for the London Times, and the images of medal-holders beaming across the front page can provide important examples of how even a simple image can tell a story – and even when it’s always a picture of Michael Phelps.

But the other opportunity lies in the chance of grabbing publicity. Paul Hartunian, a publicity expert, suggests that business owners who want to become well-known need only produce a story idea that the media wants to cover and send it in as a press release. A reporter will get in touch and reward the entrepreneur with a story that at the very least will mention their business and at the most will sing its praises. Either way, they’ll gain exposure more valuable than advertising — and for no fee at all.

When a major event like the Olympics rolls around, the press are going to be hungry for stories about the games. That’s especially true of the local press who will need to rely on pooled images and photos from wire services to report what’s happening.

Create your own Photo Olympics

A photographer who can provide a local spin on an Olympic story then stands a great chance of winning publicity.

One option is to create an event. Michelle Sheppard, a photographer teacher at Algonquin Regional High School in Northborough, Massachusetts, created a lesson plan that she called the “Photo Olympics.” She might not have done it with the goal of winning publicity but the title was catchy enough to win her coverage at TeachingPhoto.com. A photographer who organized a Photo Olympics competition of their own and told the local press about it could well find themselves picking up some useful coverage, especially if they also got local kids involved.

Or you could track down some previous competitors in your area and do a photo story about them. 69 News in Cincinnati covered a group of former athletes who were doing little more than signing autographs in a bar the day before the games opened.

When the local press is prepared to spend time on stories like this before the Olympics, you shouldn’t have to pitch too hard to find buyers for a photo story about a local former athlete, a hopeful young swimmer or a gym training the medal-winners of the future.

And finally, you could organize an exhibition of Olympic-themed images. For sports photographers in particular, there will be no greater chance to cash in on the public’s interest in a theme. That’s why exhibitions like these have been popping up in places from Accra to Ethiopia. Get together with other artists or mount an exhibition of your own but if you can think of a way to link your images to the Olympics – and find a place to show them – then getting coverage for your show should only be a matter of writing a press release and faxing it to the media.

Clearly, nothing is going to beat joining the throng of photographers standing at the finish line of the 100 meter dash in Beijing. There’s always going to be a difference between capturing the fastest runner in the world and showing your photo of the fastest twelve-year old in Goleta. But for photographers who didn’t make it to Beijing, the biggest sports event in the world can still be a chance to come away a winner.

Photography: burtonwood + holmes

For many photographers, the ultimate goal is see their images not on websites or even in magazines but on walls. And ideally, those walls will be in galleries, and carry next to each photograph a label, a large price tag, and a red dot indicating that the image has been sold.

Of course, that’s not easy. Galleries are choosy and the art market is small. Getting shown involves lots of phone calls, a rich portfolio and an ability to cope with rejection. But there are alternatives for photographers who want both to create art and generate income from it.

Art fairs take place around the country and invite applications from anyone who considers themselves an artist and has a selection of works to sell. Applicants may have to go through a selection process — places are always limited even if the entry criteria aren’t — but that just means that the quality of the other works on offer would be high and that you’d be in good company.

The Evergreen Fine Arts Festival in Colorado, for example, receives up to 500 applications for the 110 booths available. Jewelers and photographers, however, make up almost half of those applicants and only one in nine photographers is accepted.

“It’s not really rejection,” explains Shawn Janecek, the Festival Coordinator, “the artists are all very good; it’s a space thing. They have to rate really high.”

For artists who are accepted though, the rewards can be substantial. A post-show survey of artists who took part in the Napa Valley Wine and Crafts Faire last year found that the average take was between $1,500 and $2,000 but photographers have reported sales as high as $10,000 from a single fair. Set against those revenues though are the cost of travel, the expenses involved in producing the images, and the stall fees which tend to be in the region of $150 (although they can go as low as $35 and as high as $1,000 or more).

Exhibitors also need a tent with a display wall and bins to allow buyers to browse their work. Some photos will need to be framed, and the matting and mounting must be strong enough to cope with thousands of sticky fingers poring over them in the course of a few days.

The most important requirement for a photographer considering offering works at art fairs though is a good selection of images. Shawn Janacek notes that the jury at the Evergreen Fine Arts Festival looks for variety so that the fair offers its visitors a wide range of different subjects.

“[I]f everyone had landscapes or animals it would be very boring, so we look at all the entries and pick the best in different venues, portals, landscapes, European cities, digital-enhanced, animal, black and white, large pieces, small pieces,” she says. “We look for everything and then choose.”

For contributors to the Napa Valley Wine and Crafts Faire, things are a little easier. According to Craig Smith, a spokesman for the event, all things wine and wine-related usually do well.

The images then will need to match both the fair and the market so it’s worth taking the time to understand exactly what the event is trying to do and who it’s aimed at. In practice, that’s easier to research than it sounds. Exhibitors are unlikely to travel too far in the hope of earning a couple of thousand dollars, minus expenses, so they’re likely to be local artists targeting local events that they already know relatively well.

One strategy that does seem to be universal though is having a good spread of prices. Making sure that your stall offers high-priced framed prints as well as low-cost items that fit any budget will mean that you’re not sitting around all day hoping to make just one big sale.

“Some folks bring multiple-sized prints and postcards so they can capture the person wanting to spend only $20 as well as the one spending $600,” says Craig Smith.

And then there’s the prize money. Juried events, like the Evergreen Fine Arts Festival, in which artists’ works are judged by a panel may also have cash prizes. While that’s not something you’d want to count on, the kudos of having a work named “Best in Show” can certainly provide a powerful boost to a sales price and to an artist’s reputation.

Most importantly, it shows that you can sell images — and that incidentally, is exactly what gallery owners are looking for too. Instead of hitting the phones and trying to make appointments to show off your portfolio then, you might be better off submitting applications to local art fairs, selling some works, pocketing some cash… and then showing gallery owners what will happen when your work is on their walls too.

Photography: blhphotography

The advantage of the digital age is that anyone with talent can now market themselves as a photographer. The disadvantage is that with so many photographers to choose from, buyers and clients have to make some difficult decisions. When they’re looking at portfolio after portfolio, each filled with professional-quality images and each indicating clearly that the photographer has all the right technical skills, how should the client make a choice?

One option is to look beyond the images to the person who took them, a criterion that’s particularly important in wedding photography when the photographer has to blend in, deal with nerves and emotions, and get the shot without affecting the day.

“More and more photographers are realizing the importance of uniqueness and personality in booking clients willing to pay top dollar,” explains Ron Dawson, owner of Cinematic Studios, a company that creates promotional videos for the photography industry. “It’s important for the photographer to sell the photogra-pher, vs. just the photogra-phy.”

For Ron Dawson, that means shooting a short video clip of the photographer at work that the photographer can then place on his website or, with Ron’s help, use for viral marketing on networking sites, iPods and blogs. The clips last between three and four minutes and cost from $1,500 to $5,500. (“Most photographers who hire us go with a package in the $2,500 to $3,000 range,” Ron says.)

“Just Act Naturally”

To create that four minutes of footage takes about five hours of shooting, a timescale that might sound familiar to photographers who spend a huge amount of time to get just a handful of sellable images. The video might be shot by Ron himself, or more likely by one of the videographers he outsources to in almost a dozen metropolitan areas around the country. Whoever does the filming will have had to show that they understand depth of field, lighting and movement, and can tell stories too. Ron often uses wedding and event videographers to shoot the photographers because, he says, this is what they’re used to doing with their wedding clients anyway.

The video itself rarely shows any of the photographer’s images, focusing instead on the photographer’s personality, how they interact with the client and how they behave on the job.

” A potential client can view the photographer’s online portfolio if they want to see their work,” Ron explains. “Only a video can show the client what the photographer is like.”

Not for Retiring Types

To get the most out of the video, Ron recommends that the photographer acts naturally, a suggestion that at the very least will help photographers to understand how subjects behave when they tell them to do the same thing. Fun photographers can show how enjoyable their shoots are; personable photographers will get to show off how easily they connect with their subjects. And photographers who are “quiet,” “reserved” and “extremely introverted” probably shouldn’t get a video, Ron recommends.

That sounds a bit harsh if personality really is important for winning jobs but it’s easy to understand that a video showing a photographer doing nothing but moving lights and saying “thank you” is hardly going to make for a gripping film. Those photographers then, could use a blog to let their personality come through (Ron does) and highlight the personal work in their portfolio to indicate to clients what they think and what interests them in a photo.

Ron’s idea that it’s the photographer who wins the jobs as much as the photography is an important one, and it draws on the marketing knowledge he picked up during his studies at UC Berkeley’s business school as well his work as Chief of Operations at Screenplay Systems (a movie industry software company) and as Business Marketing Manager for Intuit’s Quicken division. But perhaps the most valuable lesson that any photographer – even quiet ones who don’t want to spend several thousand dollars on a video clip – can take away from Cinematic Studios is the way Ron markets his own business.  In addition to shooting photographers, his company is also the official videographer for WPPI/RangeFinder, Pictage, and PDN’s PhotoPlus Expo. Other clients include GraphiStudios, Bella Pictures and Shoot dot Edit, all of which are part of the photography industry.

“I chose the photography industry firstly because I was already very familiar with it as an event videographer. Second, when I first attended WPPI last year to produce their recap video, I saw how big the market was. Everything from mom and pop studios to large multinational corporations fall into the category. Lastly, I relate well to photographers as a fellow visual artist myself,” Ron says.

Most importantly though he also adds: “I wanted to focus on a specific industry because companies that specialize in an area will be the first ones that come to the mind of potential clients in that area.”

That might not be the sort of marketing help that Ron usually supplies, but the value of copying that sort of niche targeting could well be worth at least as much as a short video clip.

There are all sorts of ways of selling and promoting your images on the Web these days. With microstock and niche stock sites, professional sites and photo sharing sites, it feels like photographers are spoiled for choice when it comes to ways of putting their images into the hands of potential buyers.

It’s always impressive then when someone spots an opportunity for a whole new way of promoting photography online.

Meg Maglach though seems to have done just that.

Determined to reduce her carbon footprint by sending e-cards for the holidays instead of paper cards, Meg searched the Web for images that would be spiritually uplifting and suitable for everyone.

All e-Cards are Dull
She didn’t find any. What she discovered instead were cards that were cartoonish, dull and embarrassing. And if she did find good photos they were on greetings that couldn’t be personalized.

“It occurred to me that what I was really looking for didn’t exist in any meaningful way,” she recalled. “And not just for the random holiday, but for anytime — fine art e-cards with a unique presentation and the ability to customize with quotes, music, fonts, borders, etc.”

That realization led Meg to make two decisions. She decided not to send any e-cards that year; and she chose too to create a site that would let people choose high quality images, personalize them in the way they wanted and send them as greetings. With photos supplied by her husband, a professional photographer, as her foundation, she put together a business plan and found investors.

That was in 2005. Today, HarmonyWishes is a year old and has just started accepting submissions from any photographer who wants to promote their photos. The pictures demanded are eclectic but should be “positive” and suitable for a service that Meg describes as “the prayer flag of e-card sites.”

“A HarmonyWishes image embodies too many things to be narrowly categorized,” says Meg. “It is uplifting, hopeful, spiritual, positive… Or a private moment… Or a celebration… Or a tearful moment. You know it when you see it.”

The best way to understand the sort of images that HarmonyWishes is looking for then is to browse the site and get a feel for the type of photos on offer.

Spread your URL, Make Sales
And then choose carefully. HarmonyWishes only accepts six images per quarter from each artist and removes photos that have been on the site for more than a year (although those photos can be resubmitted later.) That means photographers would have no more than 24 photos available at any one time.

“So artists need to be selective and send their best stuff,” Meg warns. “We are not a dumping ground for their stock portfolio!”

The benefits to the photographer are fairly simple. The site itself is another place to show off your work to potential buyers, and the URL to your own site that’s included with each card sent means that you can distribute samples widely while drawing potential buyers in to your own store. Meg points out that in addition to members of the public spreading images around on the photographer’s behalf, photographers can also send the cards to their own potential clients and even use them as event or gallery announcements.

Delfino Cornali, for example, a painter whose works are also offered on HarmonyWishes, states on his home page that his images can be sent as e-cards and links back to the site. He also provides a page where people who would have received a card can buy the original of the image they were sent.

There’s no limit on the number of cards that people can issue but HarmonyWishes does charge an annual subscription fee of $19.95 — both to photographers and to users.

That might sound a little steep to photographers who have grown used to being able to put their images on display for free, as well as to those already paying fees to sites like PhotoShelter and Flickr. That’s especially true when you only get to display 24 images at a time. But it would only take one print sale a year to justify the price, and twenty bucks is a small price to pay for the sort of distribution that HarmonyWishes might be able to bring to your best — or at least your most serene — photos.

And it might just inspire you to spot another unexplored niche in photography promotion and build your own website.

(HarmonyWishes is giving away 100 free one-year subscriptions to readers of Photopreneur. To request your free membership, simply contact Meg at harmonywishes@gmail.com, and mention that you saw the offer here.)

Sometimes it’s the quietest — and cheapest — marketing channels that can be the most effective. Craigslist has no whiz-bang graphics — or any graphics at all, in fact. Its search engine is less effective than its olde worlde Yahoo!-style directory listing, and its pages consist of little more than classified postings placed by anyone offering a service, a product or anything else.

Yet the site is still making media moguls cry into their breakfast as they watch some of the most lucrative real estate on their pages shrink to the size of a column inch.

For people selling cars, cameras and pet-sitting services Craigslist has proven itself to be powerful, popular and universal.

And it works for photographers too.

Although there’s no dedicated category for professional image-makers, hit the “creative” link under the “services” section in just about any local listing and you can always find a fair selection of photographers marketing their services.

It appears that those ads get results.

Get a Booking a Month
Herb Hernandez, who uses Craigslist New York to pitch for a range of different kinds of photography jobs, reports that his results have been “generally good” winning him commissions for small businesses, independent designers, product webstores and even print work as well as the more predictable headshots and new models. Chelsea Kuhn, who advertises her wedding photography on Montana’s Craigslist, says that the site has brought her seven bookings since she started using it in October — a fair return for a free channel.

The jobs themselves though are rarely top-notch. Craigslist advertisers are unlikely to find themselves receiving a call from a photo editor at Vanity Fair or being asked by Time to pack a bag for Afghanistan. Chelsea describes the customers she picks up through the site as “the affordable community, not high-end.” That might suggest that it’s worth creating a low-cost package for people with limited budgets and using Craigslist as one of your main marketing outlets for that particular service. At a rate of around a job a month, the site could still bring in some extra — and reliable — revenue even if they aren’t your highest-paying jobs.

But the advertising, although cost-free, isn’t completely effort-free. Craigslist’s popularity means that ads can sink down the site surprisingly fast and because users are unlikely to dig too deeply into the pages, they have to be renewed frequently to keep them high and visible. Herb Hernandez places a new ad every day; Chelsea Kuhn, perhaps because she faces less competition in Montana, finds that every other day is sufficient — giving her a conversion rate of around ten to fifteen postings for each job.

Ads you Can Cut and Paste
Fortunately, that doesn’t mean sitting and thinking up the copy for a new ad every day. Herb might simply paste a flyer onto his page (although he also suggests learning a little HTML so that you can change the formatting of the text), and Chelsea recommends using exactly the same wording for each post.

That advice is probably best to follow only when you know you’ve got copy that produces results, something that can take a little time to figure out. Text from your marketing material could work fine but even a simple message can do the job if your skills are backed up. Chelsea’s pitch, with its triple question marks and the odd typo, is far less polished than her Photobiz website. Intentional or not, it does suggest that she’s offering a no-frills — and therefore low-cost — service while the sample images she’s pasted into the ad show that she’ll still be delivering professional quality wedding photos.

The use of sample images is likely to be particularly effective as they show leads exactly what they might receive without even having to click. A link to a website though can be useful too but there is the risk that a site that’s too slick might appear to price you out of Craigslist’s market. You might find then that it’s worthwhile setting up a simple site just for your Craigslist leads. The samples would show what you can do while still keeping these lower budget packages separate from your mid-level offerings.

And while wedding photography seems to be the most popular type of photography offered on Craigslist, there’s no reason why you couldn’t also mix up your ads so that you’re offering a range of different types of services throughout the week.

Again, you’d still be posting the same ad for each service so once you have your copy and samples figured out, it would just be a matter of spending a few minutes every couple of days to renew your ads.

You wouldn’t want to use Craigslist as your only marketing channel but it can a good replacement for paid classifieds — and one that pays too!

Photography: Kelly Bates

When we first heard about Moo cards, we got pretty excited. They were funky and neat, and they provided a useful bridge between the practical marketing power of business cards and the creativity that all photographers want to inject into their work.

It seems that we weren’t the only ones who felt that Moo were onto a good thing. The company appears to have been going from strength to strength, bringing out all sorts of new products, linking up with sites like Flickr, Facebook and Vox, and — most important of all — winning the appreciation of photographers everywhere.

The most popular use of Moo for photographers appears to be turning minicards into business cards. That makes sense. The cards’ miniature size means that they stand out and get noticed while the ability to put images on the front means that photographers can use them to spread their images around easily.

“Not only are they a great conversation starter, but they stand out amongst the sea of typical business cards that everyone and their mother seem to have these days,” says Matt Ensminger, who hands them out to potential clients, friends, family and other image-makers. “Not only do they offer you a chance to carry a miniature portfolio with you, they set you apart and create a lasting first impression.”

While everyone seems to agree that it’s the miniature size that helps to attract attention — a decision inspired in part by the desire to fit as many cards as possible onto one printed sheet — clearly, it’s what’s on the card that matters most.

So what can you do to make sure that your Moo cards are taken, treasured… and acted on?

Pictures on the Front, Text on the Back
It helps to use a number of different photos rather than just one so that takers can choose the image they like the most (as opposed to the picture that you like the most.) Interestingly though, perhaps the most important thing you can do is pay at least as much attention to the back of the cards as you do to the front.

“Make sure you lay out the back of your cards properly,” suggests Kelly Bates, a hobby photographer who has been shooting for four years and has sold a couple of images in that time. “Use your real full name, not your screen name. Make sure the people you give them out to have a way to contact you, whether it’s an email address or your phone number.”

Kelly, in fact, goes a little further and on her current set of Moo cards includes her Flickr address to bring people into her 100 Strangers project.

Giving Away your Art
That’s an approach that Rei Dishon, an Israel artist, used to great effect recently at an exhibition in the town of Biella in Italy, where he had completed a residency. Calling his show “The Big Picture” and using a budget of just 100 Euros, he printed 600 Moo cards depicting various images of the town, and hung them from the ceiling of the gallery.

The idea was to give the residents of the town a new perspective on their territory — and a novel approach to art.

Photography: Rei Dishon

“Moo was a nice unfamiliar, medium that delivered the most impact for a low budget,” Rei told us. “I could have blown up a couple of images but I wanted to create something for the locals. They’re not rich and they know art the traditional way — and I wanted to share.”

The sharing came with an unusual twist. Visitors to the gallery were able to enjoy the images they saw but they were also free to take any pictures they liked with them. That came as a surprise to many, and few took cards unless Rei happened to be in the gallery reminding them that they could do so. In the end, a third of his exhibition was left in the homes of the local people for which it had been intended.

All of the cards though carried a link to the exhibition’s Flickr page where everyone could see all of the pictures… including the images that had already been moved to fridge doors, wallets and noticeboards.

That’s an approach that any photographer could replicate, and it makes a neat link between physical cards that are shared and given out once, and a permanent portfolio that everyone can enjoy.

Moo cards might be small — a strength in itself — but used carefully, they can have a pretty powerful effect.

It’s an odd sort of paradox. The easier it is to show images online, the greater the demand to see them in print. It’s as though photographers have come to feel that while anyone can upload an image, only a real photographer gets to see his or her photos on paper. That’s true even if they printed the book themselves.

Today it’s possible to use Qoop to turn images placed on Flickr, Facebook, Photobucket and Webshots into one neat volume. Or we can sign up to Blurb and create printed books that anyone can order for a profit from the company’s online store.

But those aren’t the only dedicated options available for people who like to touch their photos as well as admire them.

A Brand for Beautiful Books
Albelli is part of the Albumprinter group founded in Amsterdam in 2001, and was the company’s first attempt to create a global photo book brand. The name is a contraction of “album” and “bellissimo” and betrays the brand’s continental origins — and its desire to be associated with traditional European craftsmanship even for a product as new as photo books.

According to Joris Keijzer, Albumprinter’s CEO, Albelli differs from Qoop and Blurb both in the way customers use it, and in its goals. While Qoop is best used for images that have already been uploaded and Blurb takes photos from hard drives, Albelli’s system works equally well wherever the images have been stored. More importantly, the books are aimed at families who want to enjoy their albums rather than at professionals looking to show off their portfolios or sell their images.

“At Albelli, we focus on giving families the tools to conserve their stories and share them in book form,” Joris told us.

It’s no surprise then that the most common topics to feature in the one million photo books and calendars that Albelli has produced in the last twelve months have been vacations, children and special occasions such as weddings and anniversaries. The books themselves are rarely sold but are either kept in the family or given as gifts.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t be possible to sell a book printed by Albelli, and with printing prices starting at $12.95 per book, adding a small mark-up while still keeping the sales price affordable is simple enough. But Blurb still gives a greater range of options for commercial photographers and its online print-on-demand store — a service that Albelli lacks — means that the only risk is the time spent doing the marketing. Albelli users who want to sell their books would have to make a large capital outlay, then hope that the books don’t stay in boxes in the garage.

Tell us a Story
While Albelli takes a different approach to photo books then — one that puts the emphasis on the pleasure of looking at pictures rather than the satisfaction of selling them — the company is still attempting to fill a desire for printed rather than digital images.

“Online photo sharing is great for certain moments, but having a format in which to communicate your story and your life requires something completely different – and tangible,” explains Joris. “I can also tell you from personal experience – my kids love to go over their photo books over and over again, even though they can view the same pictures on our computer as well. It’s very easy to overlook the importance of tangibility, but that is really one of the most appealing aspects.”

And whether you’re printing a book to enjoy or to sell, the principles that go into a successful photo book remain the same. Eileen Gittins, Blurb’s founder and CEO, has talked of the importance of white space and narrative in the arrangement of the images. Joris offers the same advice and recommends using a series of images to show how change has taken place over time.

It’s a strategy, he says, that can be used even for the simplest of books.

“Rather than concentrating on how to take great pictures, start thinking about how to tell a great story,” he says. “For example, a great book can be made by taking a series of images demonstrating how something has evolved, and [by using] a spread in the book to show that evolution in six to eight pictures. For a book about a vacation, one can start taking pictures at the time of preparation – the packing of the suitcases, loading the car or taxi, etc – and continuing throughout the trip. This turns the book into a much more interesting, true story more than just taking a collection of unrelated pictures of the scenery at the destination.”

It’s unlikely that Albelli is going to make photographers a great deal of money. That’s not its goal. But it does offer the opportunity create to low-cost photo books that turn your separate images into a story. That’s a skill worth practicing — and one that can generate revenues in the future.

We like niches. With entry into paid photography now as simple as buying a decent DSLR (as well as a willingness to practice, an understanding of the market and, of course, a love of the art), selling images has never been more competitive.

Creating your own specialty — or specialties, because you can have more than one niche — lets you stand out from the crowd. It positions you as an expert and helps you to win the lion’s share of the demand for those types of photographs.

We’ve put together a list of 21 niches that you’ve probably never considered. We’re not saying that there’s a market for these items — you can look into that yourself. Nor are we saying that each or any of these niches would suit you.

What we are saying is that attaching your name to a small, specific area can help make your marketing a great deal easier. If none of these niches suits you, try taking just a short step sideways to see if the next niche along matches you better.

1. Your Street
Street photography isn’t so much a niche as a genre, but while there are plenty of photographers taking pictures of streets, no one knows your street better than you. Or your neighborhood. Lots of people in your area would want beautiful photographs of places they consider their own, and there’s no shortage of local stores likely to want to stock your postcards, books and calendars. At the very least, you’d get to be a local hero.

2. Cakes
Just as you can restrict street photography to one street, so you can confine food photography to one type of food. Cakes are a good place to start. You’ll need to get the techniques right to stop them melting under the lights, and find the best shots to make them look the most tempting. Once you’ve got that figured out, you should be seen as a reliable source of dessert imagery. And the post-shoot eating will be fun too.

3. Parks
One alternative to shooting a street is to head to your park. There are all sorts of subjects to photograph there, from Frisbee throwers to frisky squirrels. Again, as long as there’s a demand for these sorts of images, you can generate income by positioning yourself as a reliable supplier.

4. Success
A niche doesn’t have to be a subject — a mood can work too. Smiling faces are pretty popular on stock sites but images that express success might sell well too. How many ways can you think of to shoot a winner?

5. Construction
Ideally, a niche should be small enough to have few competitors but broad enough to have lots of buyers. One way to increases the chances of enjoying that fortunate situation is to base your images on a word with multiple meanings. Images of construction, for example, could be perfect for the building industry but they could also fit anyone looking for photographs that depict growth and development. That’s one specialty with plenty of different buyers.

6. Technology
There’s always going to be demand for images of the latest gadgets, and with new products coming out all the time, there should also be a steady stream of clients wanting the pictures taken. Branding yourself in this niche wouldn’t be easy, but if you can make it work, the commissions should be regular.

7. Butterflies
Actually, we could have said any animal species but butterflies are colorful, pretty and if you can get them to sit still, fun to photograph. You’d probably want to steer clear of cats, dogs and other furry friends that are found everywhere — there are just too many freebies around to make the sales easy. Again though, if you can become known as an expert in photographing a particular type of creature, whether that’s a butterfly or a wildebeest, you should land those jobs whenever they crop up.

8. Children Playing
Like shots of the street, lots of people take pictures of children so specialize in one thing that children like to do. That could be enjoying parties or being with family. Playing is general enough to give you flexibility but still narrow enough to make you look special. It’s all about taking a new approach to a subject that’s already in demand.

9. Minorities
Together, of course, minorities make up a majority but companies like GoGo Images are carving out a niche for themselves by focusing on ethnic groups. Pick yours, and shoot.

10. Seniors
Or specialize by age. If there’s a market for images of children, there might well be a way of selling photograph of senior citizens. Again, you could specialize further by only taking pictures of old folk doing young things.

11. Mustangs…
…or any other model of car. Car photographers are common; people who understand and are crazy about one particular type of car are special. You can be special too.

12. Infra-red Photography
A technique can be a type of niche as well. Infra-red photography will require some unique tools to create a particular effect but if you can master them — and understand where to sell them — you can master that market.

13. Water
Sometimes, something you see around you every day can be a niche. Martin Waugh, for example, has made a career out of photographing water sculptures. What could you do with water that he hasn’t?

14. Sand
Perhaps you could toss in a handful of sand. If a photographer has taken the lead with a technique on one medium, try applying that technique to a different medium. The pool might be full, but as far as we know, the sand pit is empty.

15. Reflections
You don’t have to beat your head against the wall to come up with niche ideas. You could just try something different with a popular subject. Everyone likes taking pictures of reflections. What can you do with a reflection that no one has thought of?

16. Leaves
You could do the same thing with leaves. Backlighting to expose the veins is a bit old hat, but coloring them, arranging them or printing on them could all give you your own unique touch.

17. Blue
Having a signature color could work too. The artist Yves Klein did it with blue. You could choose your own tone to mark your period — and to mark your work out from others’.

18. Student Bands
You can think of this as “children playing” for grown-ups if you like. People tend to break naturally into groups, whether those are groups of baseball players, Goths or musicians. Pick one group — student bands would do — check whether there’s a market for those sorts of images, and find your subjects.

19. Church Groups
Church groups, for example, could work very well too. And the best thing about these sorts of niches is that they come with built in referral networks. Win one gig, and you should find that lots more come in quickly.

20. Psychedelia
Being nuts isn’t usually a good career choice but when you take a wild approach to your photographs, you can give them a very unique look. Chuck Anderson’s mixture of photographs and multi-colored Photoshopping, for example, has won him commissions from clients as big as Nike and Nokia.

21. Theater
And you can also specialize in certain kinds of venues. Theaters tend to need pictures of their plays to include in programs and publicity material. Fairs could work too, as well as parades, beach events and anywhere else you like to go on the weekend.

Whichever niche you choose to specialize in, whether it’s one of our suggestions or an idea of your own, take the time to check out the market and master the skills. Get it right and it should get you a name and a steady income stream.

[tags] photography niche [/tags]

Photography: BostonBill

When you can sell an image license to someone you’ve never met who’s living in a country you’ve never heard of so that he can use it in a publication you’ll never see, it’s easy to forget that the traditional way of doing business has always been to sell to the people around you.

That hasn’t changed. Walk through your town center and you’ll still find businesses whose catchment area barely stretches more than fifty miles. Your own ability to sell much further afield makes you lucky.

But that doesn’t mean that you should turn your back on your local market.

In fact, those local businesses themselves could well be valuable opportunities for expanding your photography venture. We’ve already seen how Jeremy Mason McGraw teamed up with a local framer to help organize his own art show. That partnership allowed him to lower his costs and provided an opportunity for both sides to put their products in front of a targeted — and local — audience.

A framing store might be a good place to start when you’re looking for ways to team up with local businesses then but in general, the best places to look are likely to be those whose products are both temporary and valuable.

Hand out Wedding Gifts
A beauty salon, for example, will spend hours getting a bride ready for her big day — and charge a fair amount of money for it. The photographer will spend more hours photographing her. The couple get the photographer’s images to put in the album, and the photographer gets another sample to add to his portfolio and show potential clients.

The stylist and the cosmetician? They get a happy memory and a check.

Ask the bride if you can also provide her portrait to the people who made her look beautiful, and she’s unlikely to refuse. Those service providers will then display your image prominently and show it to others as a sample of what they can do. In the process, they’d also be showing what you can do to other people in the area who are looking for a photographer for the same sort of event.

You might be able to do the same thing for any part of a wedding that doesn’t last beyond the night. Caterers and banqueting halls close deals based on the tastings and the atmosphere but they also pull out albums showing what the food will look like when it’s laid out and how the hall will appear full of people.

If those were your images they were showing — and your name and contact details appeared clearly on each of them — you’d have a bunch of important local businesses doing your marketing for you. All you’d have to do is get in touch with the caterer and the hall after the wedding and ask if they’d like some professional photos for their own portfolios.

Weddings are an obvious choice because you’ll already be taking the shots. All you have to do is share them. But the principle should work for any local business whose work disappears as soon as its sold.

What a Designer Can Do for You
Interior designers, for example, can’t take leads to the homes of past clients to show off their work. Like banquet halls, to win business they’re dependent on photos that depict what they’ve done in the past.

There are a couple of challenges here though — and they apply to many local businesses: the designer will have to ask the client if you can take the picture; and you’ll need your own incentive to form the partnership.

In the case of an interior designer, you could form a partnership first by offering to supply exclusive prints as part of the design (and in a similar way to Farmboy Fine Arts.) When the designer asks if he could bring in the photographer who supplied the photograph on the wall to record the design, there’s a good chance the client will agree — at the very least, in order to meet you.

And again, when the designer shows off that image, you’d be improving your chances of making more print sales.

There’s no harm in focusing your energy on online marketing. The market beyond a half-hour drive of your home is always going to be bigger than the one in your town. But there’s something to be said for being a local supplier too — and teaming up with other members of the community to make it happen.

[tags] local photography marketing [/tags]

Log into Amazon at the moment, and on the front page, you won’t just find the usual list of recommended products that you probably don’t want. You’ll also see a homely-style photograph of a cake in the shape of a Kindle.

We don’t know if Amazon paid for that photograph (although we suspect it didn’t). We are sure though that the site that supplied it is now seeing its server costs fly through the roof as a portion of the gazillions of people who see Amazon’s home page every day click the link above Jeff Bezos’ signature.

In terms of exposure, getting your image and a link on Amazon’s home page is like being chosen as Book of the Month by Oprah. It’s a guaranteed winner.

But you can’t wait for that to happen to you if you want to use Amazon as a way of earning income through photography. Nor do you have to sign up to the company’s affiliate system and plaster Amazon’s ads all over your Web pages (although there’s nothing wrong with that.)

There are plenty of other ways to pick up cash as a photographer with the help of the world’s largest online retailer.

Sell your Photography Book on Amazon
Probably the easiest way to make money with Amazon is create your own photography book and place it on the site that millions of people turn to first when they’re looking for a printed volume. Amazon’s Advantage program lets anyone sell their books, music or DVDs and even offers a print-on-demand service through CreateSpace so that you don’t have to splash out on inventory that just fills up your garage.

We like the way Blurb lets photographers create and sell books, but it’s worth comparing Blurb to CreateSpace to see which lets you build the better product and offer it in the best way. You might even find that it pays to use two different self-publishing systems depending on your marketing stream.

You could even take this further and create a DVD that teaches how to shoot photographs in your particular niche and sell it in the same way. If other photography enthusiasts often ask how they can shoot photos like yours, that should be a good sign that you’ll have a market.

Of course, it’s not enough to create your product and place it on Amazon. If you’re going to sell it, you’ll need to promote it too…

Use the Reviews
One very easy way to do that is to become one of Amazon’s reviewers.

Anyone can contribute their opinion of any product sold on Amazon. That means that you can leave messages under sales pages for any cameras, lenses and lighting equipment you use. You can let people know what you think about various photography books and photographers. You can even offer tips and advice about the sort of items the buyer is thinking of purchasing.

And if you also include a link to your website each time you do that, you’ll be creating a road to a sales page that lots of targeted buyers are going to travel down.

You could certainly just link to your home page and let the site do its job but you could also create a special landing page for Amazon’s shoppers to promote particular services or products — even photography items that you’re selling on Amazon.

When a site the size of Amazon hands out free space on its Web pages, it’s just a waste for any entrepreneur — and especially a photopreneur — not to use it.

Update your Amazon Blog
Another tool that Amazon offers its sellers is a blog on the sales page. That might sound a little strange. Few people are going to log in to an Amazon sales page to read your latest thoughts. They might do it to read Dan Patterson’s latest thoughts but they’re less likely to do it to read the postings of a photographer they hadn’t heard of until just a few minutes before.

You can still use the blog though by adding a few brief articles that reinforce your image as a skilled photographer with good images and information to offer a buyer.

If you already have helpful posts you can take from your website, you won’t even have to do any extra work.

Steer Clear of Prints
One strategy you’d probably want to avoid though is trying to sell your prints through Amazon. Search for photographic prints on the site and you should find that you’re faced with a pretty meager choice, most of them placed there by large retailers.

Whether that’s because people just don’t want to buy art on Amazon or because photographers just aren’t doing it is hard to say. It’s possible that eBay simply does better. But it does look likely that you’d have a hard sell.

If you’re looking to shift your images on Amazon then, your best bet is to use one of the many methods of putting them on the pages of a book… then market it like mad.

[tags] sell images on amazon [/tags]

Photography by: Kalandrakas

Usually, the debate about free products in photography centers on the use of Creative Commons licenses. Amateurs love them because they get their images distributed across the Web and beyond. Professionals, for the most part, hate them because they lower the price of images to a level they can’t compete against and let buyers get used to finding photos for nothing.

Used very carefully, our position is that Creative Commons licenses can be a helpful way to publicize work and bring buyers in to see photos for which you charge. But photos aren’t the only thing that photographers can give away for free. In fact, free samples, bonuses and giveaways have been part of marketing almost as long as stores have been organizing sales. There are a number of things that photographers can give away to boost the apparent value of their products and win more sales.

Give Away a Service
These days, photographers aren’t only employed to take images. They might also be employed to retouch them, print them and for wedding photographers, perhaps even arrange them in an album. All of those things might be offered for free (provided the extra cost still makes the job worthwhile).

The best strategy though is always to give away something that costs you little, is valuable to the client, and brings you benefits too.

One of the best options might be to give a wedding client a year’s free membership on Flickr and offer to place the images you’ve shot on the site.

Although “wedding” is one of the most popular tags on Flickr, most of those photos have been placed on the site by clients… which means that the photographer is rarely credited. Placing the images yourself would ensure that you get the credit, let the client share their photos with family and friends, and save them time.

It would cost you around $25 and a little bit of extra work, which should be more than covered by the value of the marketing.

Buy One, Get One Free
Giving away two products for the price of one is a classic marketing strategy but it comes with a risk. It makes the product look cheap and lets the buyer feel that there are plenty of them around. You lose a sense of exclusivity.

When you’re selling prints, offering two for one might work but there’s another approach you can take.

You can give away a smaller version of the print you’ve sold.

If a buyer likes a photograph that you’ve created enough to pay for a print to hang on their living room wall, they won’t complain when you give them a postcard-sized version to pin up in their office or a card to give to a friend. Make sure your name and URL are clearly printed somewhere on the photo and when that image is used outside the home, you’ll be spreading your name around for no more than the cost of the print.

Give Away a License
Giving away the same image works because the buyer can’t do anything with the second image but share it. No one is going to want to put the same picture up twice in the same room. They’ll either put it in a different place where other people can see it, or they’ll pass it on. Either way, you both benefit.

When you give away a second license to use an image, you are giving away something valuable with no discernible benefit… unless you choose the images for the second license that you give away carefully.

This might be a good strategy to use when you’re trying to break into a new field of photography. Tell a buyer that in addition to purchasing a license to use the image they want, they’ll also receive permission to use a photo from your collection of flowers or pets or whatever it may be, and you’ll start to spread your name around as a photographer in that niche.

Those second licenses should come with strict conditions that ensure that you receive credit and if they’re being used online, a link back to your portfolio too. And they should be limited so that you don’t give away too many licenses.

The fact that you’re making the offer to people who you know actually use images increases the chances that your photos will appear outside your portfolio where more buyers can see them. While it’s also possible that many of your buyers won’t actually take up the offer if they don’t need the photo, just making it available should make your sale look more attractive.

Free bonuses have always been popular with marketers and especially online. With a little creativity, they can be popular with photographers too.

[tags] freemium [/tags]

It’s probably the most powerful strategy any photographer can choose. Decide to specialize in a particular type of photography and you can reduce the competition, build a brand and focus your marketing.

You’ll find it much easier to land — and keep — buyers and you’ll grow into an expert not just on your field of photography but, no less importantly, on marketing to buyers within that field.

We’ve already seen a number of successful photographers who have chosen this route. Sean Davey has built a career out of photographing surfers. Jeremy Mason McGraw stays in luxury hotels as he jets around the world as a travel photographer. And Andreas Reinhold has been taking his camera to car shows only a little longer than he’s been selling his images to auto magazines.

But the choice of niche is always going to be vital. Choosing the wrong subject to sell can be as costly a mistake as a shop loading up on the wrong inventory. Here are the things you should consider when closing in on a niche.

How Much is This Niche Worth?
The most obvious place to start is with the value of the images. Because different photographic subjects are used in different ways, the prices photographer can charge can vary too. Andreas Reinhold’s work, for example, tends to appear in magazines while Sean Davey has also been commissioned to conduct commercial shoots for clients as big as Red Bull. Those sorts of jobs can clearly bring in a lot more revenue.

As you’re looking at a niche then, look too at how those sorts of images tend to be used by buyers. That should give you a good idea of the range of prices those pictures might be able to earn.

Choose a niche whose only use is in an actor’s portfolio, for example, and you’ll know exactly how much you can expect to make from your images.

How Big is the Market?
The size of the market will clearly be important too but that’s only part of the information you need to know. The benefit of choosing a niche is that you’re competing against fewer photographers so in addition to understanding the size of the market, you’ll also need to have an idea of how many photographers are contributing their images to it.

You won’t be able to pick up exact figures of course, and these days every field is likely to feel at least a little crowded, but you can get an impression, especially when you really narrow things down.

Consider specializing in photographs of skateboarders, for example, and you’ll be able to make a list of every skateboard magazine as well as the main companies selling skateboard gear that might need photos. You might also be able to identify the main photographers supplying those images to see how broadly buyers are able to source them.

How Much Work is Involved in the Photography?
Just as images in different markets might be used in different ways, so they require different amounts of work too. Choose to specialize in macro-photography of flowers, for example, and you’ll need some special lenses but finding subjects should be easy. Specialize in images of whales on the other hand, and getting out to the water and keeping your camera dry will mean solving some special logistical problems and spending lots of money on fancy gear.

All of that extra work has to be considered in the amount you charge, while buying the equipment up front is also an extra risk.

In general, you can reckon that the more work and expense is involved in shooting the images for your niche, the few competitors you’ll have and the higher the returns — but you’ll also find that any losses could be higher too.

How Much Do you Love your Niche?
Image values and the size of the competition are all important but when it comes to choosing your specialty, nothing is more vital than how much you love the subject. Sean Davey, for example, grew up surfing, and Jeremy Mason McGraw worked on a cruise ship before he became a travel photographer.

Because photography is always a competitive place to earn income, the best strategy is always to shoot what you love the most, then look for ways to sell the image. If you’re not successful at least you’ll have had a good time.

(And if you can learn to love a niche that pays well too, you’ll get the best of both worlds.)

Photography: Lili Vieira de Carvalho

In this blog, we’ve come across people who have exhibited their work in a number of different ways. Brandy asked a café owner to display her photography and sold an image on the first day they went up. Jeremy Mason McGraw persuaded a friend to open her home for an exhibition and found himself invited to a number of other shows as a result.

Both of those approaches require a little creativity. But there is an alternative way of having your own exhibition.

You can show your work in a traditional gallery — one that specializes in art and photography and whose business is to sell the work of artists like yourself.

We’re not saying that’s going to be easy. But it is possible and it does bring some huge advantages.

Big Sales and Bigger Bragging Rights
The first advantage, of course, is the prestige. The difference between showing your images in a high street gallery and displaying it in a friend’s home is like the difference between self-publishing and landing a contract from Random House.

Winning an exhibition at any professional gallery adds a very impressive line to your resume and gives you some huge bragging rights.

The other advantage though is the marketing. Gallery owners don’t just provide a space to show your work, they also bring buyers in to look at it. Any decent gallery owner will maintain a list of local art buyers, understand what they want and have different ways of notifying them about an exhibition. While the artist might be free to spread the word too, you should be able to rely on the gallery owner to provide the bulk of the market.

That is, after all, what you’re paying them for… and that’s where the disadvantages begin. Private galleries tend to charge around 50 percent of the sale price for artworks, which sounds like quite a large cut. Of course, without their help and their contacts, it’s unlikely that you would have made the sale at all.

The biggest disadvantage of approaching galleries though is the competition and the selectivity. Gallery owners won’t accept the work of every artist who walks through the door. That’s not because they’re mean, snobbish or don’t want to sit in a gallery all day filled with bad art. It comes down to those contacts again.

The gallery’s buyers have to trust the gallery owner to show them works that they’ll find interesting. If the gallery owner continually calls them to see mediocre works, they’ll stop coming. And if they’re invited to see works that are good but which they don’t want to buy, then neither the artist nor the gallery owner will make any money.

It’s not you, it’s the Market
The Kirchman Gallery in Johnson City, Texas, for example, is an art gallery that shows paintings, drawings and sculpture as well as photography. Susan Kirchman, the gallery’s owner and a retired photography teacher and artist herself, says that she receives around 50 enquiries from photographers each year. She accepts just three.

Like many gallery owners, Susan expects to see an impressive portfolio of around 20 well-chosen works, but she also wants to see an artist’s statement and resume. The statement doesn’t have to be long — less than 300 words is often enough — but it should be sufficient to communicate your approach to your art.

“I want to know what inspires the artist and how they relate to the work,” Susan says.

The resume though is a little tougher. An impressive resume for an artist looking for an exhibition doesn’t have to include a long list of solo shows but it should include juried shows in which a board of experts have selected the works.

In addition, it pays to check the gallery’s website and call ahead to arrange a time to show your images.

“The gallery owner is selling your credibility as well as your work,” Susan explains. “You have to work hard to build that resume with many group shows before approaching a gallery, and then it should be with all of your paperwork in order… and follow that particular gallery’s rules as far as how they want to see work. Never walk in off the street and expect to show something without an appointment.”

Of course, even doing all of those things won’t guarantee a show. Placing art in galleries is still just another way of selling a product and if there isn’t a market for your work, the gallery owner won’t accept it. Susan notes that her buyers in Texas aren’t looking for edgy works that people might snap up in, say, New York. They want items that they can live with.

Getting your work in an art gallery isn’t just about producing the right photos then. It’s about finding the right gallery for your art too.

For any photographer today, an online portfolio has become as standard a marketing tool as a stack of business cards and a long list of happy clients. Even Leroy French, a veteran underwater photographer who has been shooting for more than fifty years, told us that today much of his work comes in through his website.

Creating that online presence doesn’t have to be difficult. There are plenty of tools to help any photographer get his or her images on the Web from a well-chosen Flickr stream to an account at PhotoShelter or a gallery powered by SlideShow Pro.

Photographers who really want their work to stand out though need to think a little more creatively, and that’s what Canadian photographer Sacha Dean Biyan has done with his award-winning commercial site, Eccentris. It’s an approach that reveals much about what a photography site needs to do and who it needs to do it for.

Sacha first took up professional photography in his early thirties, turning his back on a career as an aeronautical engineer. His commercial clients have included Sony Music, Adidas and the Gap, and his images have appeared in GQ, Marie Claire and Vogue. He has also exhibited his art internationally, won the German Art Director’s Guild gold award and a number of his photographs were auctioned in a benefit for Amnesty International.

A Little Technology, a Lot of Artistry
That combination of a technical background and artistic creation is visible in Sacha’s commercial site.

Built in the late nineties by Firstborn Multimedia, the site took three years to create and incorporates not just big, high-resolution images but also clever animation and CD-quality sound. The result is that Eccentris is now ranked by Yahoo! as one of the most popular fashion photography sites on the Web and receives over two million hits each month.

“I wanted to create something original, a sensory experience rather than just another portfolio website,” Sacha explained to us by email. “We wanted to use high quality audio and visual elements for maximum effect unlike anything else that had been done on the web.”

The price for such a rich multimedia portfolio though is steep. Eccentris drags through all but the fastest connections and the latest computers, and is best viewed on top-quality widescreen monitors that can show off the pictures to their best effect. The navigation too is difficult and requires some intuition. The site is demanding, not friendly.

Not surprisingly, that’s led to criticism from many viewers who argue that a site should be as light as possible and accessible to anyone.

For Sacha though, that argument misses the point. His site, he says, wasn’t conceived for the average photography-lover but for the sort of people who are likely to commission a fashion shoot or buy one of his photos.

“The target audience was the art directors and other creatives in the field who were all equipped with fast computers and big screens and high-speed connections,” says Sacha. “[It] was never intended to attract a mainstream audience, although (for good or bad) it has, mostly out of curiosity I presume.”

Photography: Sacha Dean Biyan

Interestingly, although Sacha’s images might best be seen on big monitors, they can also be viewed on screens small enough to fit in pockets. In addition to a low bandwidth version of his site, Sacha has created a mobile version of Eccentris, specifically designed for the iPhone — the first mobile device which was able to display his analog photos at a quality Sacha liked.

From Widescreen to Pocket Screen

It’s a trend that that he thinks will continue. Mobile platforms, Sacha predicts, will become increasingly important, forcing photographers to format their images at two extremes: the widescreen monitors used in design studios; and the small screens found on pocket-sized gadgets.

Having both options available means that a photographer can get his work seen by buyers in their offices and still display them while out networking.

“The mobile site serves a very specific purpose: to be convenient and accessible anywhere, and to make my work look decent on such a small screen. It succeeds on all levels on the iPhone,” Sacha says. “I’m not sure if we picked up any additional work because of our mobile site because that is really difficult to quantify but when I meet a potential client at a party or in the street, it’s really convenient when I can show them my portfolio from an iPhone.”

The problem though, is that just when you’ve created the perfect technological solution, the technology changes. Eccentris was launched six years ago and Sacha is now in the process of completing the concept for Eccentris II. That will be more like a video game, Sacha hints, designed for widescreens, with real-time user interaction and very intensive audio and video content. Sasha concedes that the site is likely to be sluggish even on broadband but he’s prepared for the criticism.

While people are waiting, they could always watch the low-tech version on their iPhones.

Photography: Sacha Dean Biyan

Photography: PsychoRatDog

Not everyone likes microstock sites. In fact, lots of professionals, both buyers and photographers, say very rude things about it.

They argue that microstock underprices images, devalues the market and makes it harder for professionals to earn a living. They also complain about the quality of the photos on offer.

We’re not convinced. Although we see microstock as just one way for amateur photographers to get paid for their photos, we don’t think it’s a bad thing at all. We like its open access. We like the fact that dedicated, talented photographers can make a good living out of it. And while microstock will affect stock photography, we don’t think it’s going to destroy it.

If Microstock Sites are for Low-Budget Buyers, Free Sites are for…
That’s because the Internet has broadened the market and increased demand. Stock can’t meet that demand; microstock can.

There will still be a market for the sort of top-end stock images that companies like Getty sell for large sums of cash. Large advertising companies tend to buy from Getty; small Internet publishers buy from iStock. While there will be some overlap, we do think that there’s room for both types of market and both types of product.

So what about free stock sites?

There’s a fair selection of these sorts of sites too, from MorgueFile.com, which “is dedicated in the proposition of free thought and exchange” to stock.xchng, a subsidiary of Jupiter Images which uses its free images to promote its microstock offerings.

What they all have in common is that they let publishers find photographs for free.

There are, presumably, two kinds of pay-off for photographers: the satisfaction that comes with someone finding your photo useful; and the marketing benefits of spreading your name across the Web so that buyers with budgets can seek you out.

In fact, both of those benefits are dubious.

Seeing your photo on someone else’s website or product is always flattering. But if they’re making money from it, you should be making money from it. And when it comes to promoting the names and sample images of photographers, stock sites are perhaps the weakest option available.

MorgueFile merely asks photo users “that you credit the photographer when possible.” Stock.xchng points out that “in some cases you may need to notify the photographers about using the photos and sometimes you need to credit them.”

As rewards for giving away valuable images, neither of those is particularly promising.

And then there’s the company. Although it may be possible to find quality photos on free sites, you’re more likely to see your image offered alongside the sort of shots that microstock rejects. That’s not likely to do your branding power much good at all. You want your name shown with excellent photos not mediocre to poor ones.

Spot the difference between the free shots and the microstock photos on Stockxpert.com in this screenshot from stock.xchng.

When You Should Give Your Photos Away
Free stock sites might have had a use once. Before it was possible to sell your images multiple times at a price that Internet publishers were willing to pay, putting samples in front of buyers could have generated further sales.

These days though, those sorts of images — and those sorts of buyers — have shifted to microstock sites.

But that doesn’t mean that providing free samples no longer brings any benefits at all.

It can work… on Flickr.

As the responses to our post on getting paid for Flickr photos show, photographers are selling their images on Flickr. But most photo users still search for Creative Commons-licensed images first. It should be possible then to follow stock.xchng’s model by providing lower-quality photos for free but offering higher quality photos for a fee.

Frankly, we can’t see any reason for photographers to give away their images through free stock sites any more. Microstock has made it possible to sell them and Flickr has made it possible to market them.

You can see stock.xchng here and morguefile here. And let us know what you think of free stock sites.

[tags] free stockphotos, free stockphoto sites [/tags]

This is a Guest post by Andrew Gibson of Magical Places Fine Art Photography

So, you’ve taken some nice photos and added them to Imagekind or iStockphoto, and now you’re wondering how to promote them. The obvious answer is to make your own website or blog to promote your work.

Blogs are very easy to put together, just go to Blogger or WordPress to sign up for some free webspace and get started. But what if you want more than what a blog can offer? Then you need to put together your own website.

If you don’t know how to this yourself, one option is to pay someone to do it. Another is to do what my friend Christian did and use Clikpic, a relatively quick way to put together a nice professional looking site. Take a look at the websites of Eugene Donohoe and Tom Forrest for more examples.

Blogs and site building solutions like Clikpic use templates, so if you want your website to look unique (and don’t want to pay someone to build it) then you’re going to have to learn to do it yourself. This takes time but can be very rewarding. Web Design From Scratch is a great place to start learning. Take a look at my website, Magical Places Fine Art Photography, to see what can be done with some basic knowledge.

Now, if you’re into large-scale thinking and want to take on the big boys, you can take it a step further and do what Jason Wickens of Fotoviva did. After selling a few photos through microstock sites he decided that he wanted to sell some fine art prints. He runs his own web design company and he told me that he saw no reason why he shouldn’t create his own website to sell his photos.

That way he not only gets to keep all the profit but has the satisfaction of creating and growing his own business.

So, what does it take to create your own, all-inclusive, photo-selling website?

With any new business venture it’s important to stand out from the crowd in some way, to not only be different but better. One way that Fotoviva does this is through the excellence of the site’s design.

A programming friend helped Jason build the shopping part of the site and it took around three months, working in his spare time, to get it up and running. Of course, not all of us are web professionals but these services can be hired, relatively cheaply, from sites like elance.com.

SEO (search engine optimisation) is also essential, so that a website can rank highly in search engines like Google. This takes time, especially in a competitive market like photography. Jason told me that he has been learning about SEO techniques and that Fotoviva is performing well for it’s main keywords.

Once Fotoviva was up and running the next step was to invite other photographers to sell their work. Adding the work of more photographers means the site can grow exponentially. Not only are there more photos to choose from but as the photographers promote their work on Fotoviva this will bring more traffic and more customers. Then, as revenue increases, some of that money can be used for advertising and promotion.

I asked Jason at what point he realised the potential of adding other photographer’s work to Fotoviva:

‘I realised there were some exceptional photographers out there who did not have the time or understanding of how to sell their images online. With a pre-built shop ready to sell their work it seemed like an ideal solution for them. It also helps to increase the collection with art being so subjective “one man’s gold is another man’s poison”.’

So, where is the business going? There’s a relatively small amount of photos on Fotoviva at the moment, but unlike a lot of websites that sell photography, all the images are high quality. Jason intends to keep expanding and developing. At the moment there are over 170 photos available to buy at Fotoviva, and he’s looking to add to the photo collection. He has the following advice for potential contributors:

‘We are always looking to expand the photo collection to help customers find the image they want. Prospective contributors need to think if their work can match or exceed the work we already have. It needs to be art for walls rather than stock photography. The general rule would be ‘would someone want this picture on their walls?’ Potential photographic contributors should use the contact form and supply a link to their portfolio.’

Fotoviva is a great example of someone setting up their own website to sell their photography. What ideas do you have? One of them could be a winner.

Read my interview with Jason here.

Photography: scarlatti2004

McDonalds is famous for selling burgers too big to eat. It also pours soda into cups the size of buckets.

Customers might not need such large portions but by buying extra they feel that they’re getting much higher value for their purchase.

The company earns much higher profits by adding just a little more to each sale.

That’s upselling — the strategy of selling more to a customer than they intended to buy — and it’s a marketing technique that photographers can make use of too.

You don’t have to blow your images up to wall-size (although offering larger prints could certainly be one way to upsell your photos). There are plenty of other ways that you can offer your clients more and let you make more money from each of them.

Offer Additional Products
Photographers might earn income by creating images, but images can be delivered in all sorts of ways. A wedding photography package, for example, might include an album full of prints at a set price but a CD full of images might cost a little more.

And you don’t have to stop there. Maya Kovacheva, a Toronto-based wedding photographer, for example, also offers thank you cards for an addition $3-4 each depending on size. Having made the wedding sale, she gives herself an additional opportunity to generate a little extra income from the contract before saying goodbye to the client.

Portrait photographers can do something similar by offering digital images in different sizes suitable for Facebook and MySpace, as well as for email signatures, business cards and even passport photos.

Solve Storage Problems
Thank you cards and different sizes are all ways of delivering a photo product. But clients also have to store their images. That represents another opportunity for photographers who want to upsell.

Many photographers already market their prints in exclusive — and expensive — albums but you could do the same thing with online galleries (you could even offer to create a Flickr page for your client). Or identify the most attractive photos and suggest that the client buys it in a larger size and an attractive frame.

Create Joint Ventures
Those frames you could buy yourself and sell at a profit. But you could also set up a joint venture with a local framing business. That would remove the risk that you won’t make a sale, save storage space at your own business and give your client a wider choice of frames that would even include custom-made models.

You’d need to negotiate a discounted rate with the framer to make the deal attractive to the client (point out that you’ll be supplying a lot of business in the future), and you’d need to agree your own commission too, of course.

Framers aren’t the only people that make natural joint venture partners for photographers. Many of the photographer at LookBetterOnline.com, a service that provides portraits for online daters (and which is always looking out for portrait photographers), offer hair and make-up services before the shoot. That doesn’t just make their service more attractive than their competitors’, it also gives them an opportunity to earn a commission and make a little extra income.

Refer A Friend
And finally, the best way of getting more money from each sale might be to take a different approach altogether. Instead of looking for a way to get more money from your clients, you could give them money back in return for giving you completely new clients. Magic Eye Photography, for example, a UK-based photo company, offers a 10 percent rebate in return for referred bookings made within four weeks of a client placing an order. Peter Yamasaki, who works in California, has a more complicated system. He gives the referred client a discount and the referee a complementary print. Overachieving clients who bring five friends get a free session.

However you decide to do it, if you can offer your clients a little more value, you should be able to squeeze a lot more out of the contract.

Tell us how you upsell your photography services.

We were contacted recently by the people at Moo. They were thinking of creating a special offer for Photopreneur’s readers and asked if we were interested.

We were ambivalent.

Photopreneur exists to help photographers make money, not to help photo services make money from photographers. But we asked Moo to come up with a special offer and told them that if we thought it could help photographers, we’d run it.This is what they said:

We gave it some thought and figured that your readers are the type to want to send highly personalized Holiday Greetings to friends, family or clients. We are therefore offering your readers an exclusive opportunity to buy 4 packs of MOO Uploader Postcards for the price of 3!

To make use Moo’s offer, you’ll need to enter the promotion code TY6FYG, order four packs of postcards before 30th November and use the uploader to place your own images. Each photographer can only use the offer once.

You Should Be Sending Cards To Clients

It was the bit about sending personalized holiday greetings to clients that attracted our attention though.

There’s an old saw about the price of finding new clients costing four times (or more) as much as the price of keeping old clients. But for photographers, jobs are often one-offs. A couple that has hired you to shoot a wedding isn’t going to hire you the following month to shoot another one.

But they might hire you a year later to shoot the pregnancy pictures. And then the christening. And then the children’s photos. And so on.

It’s very easy for photographers to see clients as single jobs, but it might be better to think of them in the same way that insurance brokers think of their clients: as lifelong customers.

The Holidays Are A Fantastic Marketing Opportunity

That means reminding your clients that you’re still around. It means staying in touch with them even in the long periods when you’re not shooting for them.

Holidays are the best time to do that.

You’ll never have a better excuse to send out a mailshot, with a sample, to all of your clients, past and present. At any other time of year, that mailshot would look like junk mail. At Christmas and New Year, it looks like a heartfelt greeting full of warm wishes for the season. Which, of course, it is… as well as being an effective piece of marketing.

You don’t have to limit yourself to the holiday season though. Clients’ birthdays and anniversaries offer the same opportunity. You’ll certainly know the anniversary date of your wedding photography clients. Send them best wishes on that day, and you’ll be giving them a reminder of the event itself.

And that brings us back to Moo’s offer. Moo is now offering greeting cards but at $19.99 for a pack of ten. Those might be fine for family and friends but as a business tool, they could be expensive for photographers with long client lists. The special offer that they’ve created gives you 80 postcards for $60.

If just one of those cards acts as a reminder to a previous client looking for a photographer, and gives you a job, the set will more than pay for itself. And even if it doesn’t result in a job immediately, seasonal greetings can also increase the chance of referrals and of landing other jobs in the future.

Whether you choose to use Moo’s cards or not, sending client greeting cards should be part of your marketing plan.

Take a look at Moo’s website here and see how other photographers use Moo at the company’s Flickr group.

[tags] moo, moo cards [/tags]

Photography: TopTechWriter.US

Taking marketable images is hard enough. Marketing them is even harder.

You might know everything there is to learn about lighting, technique and composition. You might have a perfect understanding of which pictures sell and which pictures don’t. But if you’re hoping to sell your images from your website and have no idea how to persuade people to buy them — or even how they might like to buy them — none of that knowledge and talent will help you to make money.There are a number of approaches you can take when you’re looking to sell photos from your own website.

1. Sell Prints

Prints are the most obvious product for a photographer to sell from a website. They’re simply a way for an admirer to own a copy of a photograph, and require no more effort than taking the money, printing the image and putting it in the mail.

Zenfolio is just one of many services that make it easy for photographers to build websites from which they can sell prints.

And that should give you an idea of the problem. With so many people offering prints, the chance that users will buy yours, however good they might be, are fairly small.While you can hope to sell a few prints to random visitors, this approach is best taken when you already have people who admire your work and want to own it.

Bill Schwab, for example, a landscape photographer whose works are available through several galleries, offers limited edition prints to members of his Internet mailing list. Not only does that enable him to sell prints online, it also rewards his admirers for following his work — and because the works are rare, increases their value and take-up rate.

One strategy then, might be to collect emails of people who view your site, and offer members exclusive prints of your work.

Screenshot from billschwab.com

2. Sell Books

Prints can be expensive. Even if you keep the price low, you might still be asking buyers to part with twenty or 30 dollars to own just one image. Put the photos together in a book and you can demand the same amount of money for a great deal more.

That sounds like a better offer. And books have another advantage too: there’s always room on the bookshelf for another photography book; walls have limited room to hang prints.

But books face a similar problem to prints. Although fewer photographers offer them than offer prints, they’re still most likely to be sold to people who know your work. It helps too if you can find a way to suggest that your book is in demand.

Chris Harris, a nature photographer in British Columbia, does that by listing his speaking and signing schedules on his site. You don’t need to be a best-seller to do that. If you can persuade venues or local groups to host you, you can add them to your site and make an impression.

Screenshot from ChrisHarris.com

3. Market to a Niche

Screenshot from: landscapephotography.com.au

In all of the examples we’ve seen so far, the main selling point has been the photographer’s name. For most users though, the name will mean little. They’re more likely to be interested in a particular genre.

Mark Gray, an Australian landscape photographer, focuses his website on what he shoots, not who is doing the shooting. He’s also lucky enough to have an URL that sums it up nicely (www.landscapephotography.com.au), and although his name does appear in the logo, the word “landscape” is much more dominant.

It’s unlikely you’ll be able to get childphotos.com but you might be able to get [yourtown]childphotos.com, lower your name and focus your marketing on what you shoot.

And of course, you should market it carefully on a well-designed site. Mark has found that own skills as a designer and Web expert are at least as important as his chosen genre when marketing online. His advice?

[S]tep back and take a look at your own strengths outside of photography. Hopefully by utilizing those strengths you can help increase your exposure and brand recognition.

For me it was my background in website design and search engine optimization that enabled me to create an eye-catching website to showcase my work [that] also ranked highly in the three major search engines. This has resulted in a large global audience viewing my work on a visually pleasing platform.

4. Sell Stock

The advantage of selling through a stock site is that you can concentrate on the shooting and leave the marketing to the company. Of course, you pay for that when the stock company takes the lion’s share of the licensing fee and sets the price for you.

Mick Maziarz has taken a different approach. He sells his own photos as stock through his own websites. (Screenshot from www.sportsstockphotography.com)

Cleverly though, Mark focuses each site on just one niche each. These include sports photography, lifestyle and his most popular genre, Park City, Utah. That makes it very easy for buyers who need specific images to find exactly what they need without searching through a general stock site. Mark told us:

My biggest piece of advice regarding selling stock images from a website would be to specialize. In general, the tighter you specialize, the better.

If you follow that strategy, you might well find that not only are you able to sell your own stock, but that you build a loyal customer base too.

Selling from your own site isn’t easy. It will always be easier to upload to a stock site or put your photos for sale somewhere that already has browsers. But if you get the approach — and your marketing — right, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t work for you.

Tell us how you sell your images through your own website.

Photography: David Davies

It’s the first step for any budding photography business. It’s the task that every photographer has to accomplish if they’re going to sell pictures and earn from their images.And it looks like the toughest one of all.You have to get people to see your photos.Here are 12 creative ways to do it…

1. Stick Them in your Email
You’ve seen these sorts of emails before. You might even have passed them on before. If the subject is weird, wacky, funny or interesting, people will pass them on to friends to share the giggle.

And if you’ve got the URL of your photography website embedded in the picture, they’ll stop by to see more.

Obviously, this isn’t going to work for every picture. Sunsets aren’t going to cut it, however beautiful; it’s the subject that counts, not the technique. And you can only send them to friends, not to everyone on your contact list. You don’t want to be accused of spamming. But once people receive the photo, they’ll pass them on to their friends. And when those friends they reach your photography site, your photos should be good enough to keep them there.

2. Print them on Products and Give them Away
You can put your photos on just about anything these days from magnets to mousepads. You can sell those products once you’ve done that, but you could also put your Web address on them and give them some of them away. (Yes, this will cost money, so if you want that money back, you’ll need to make sure that you have proven systems in place to turn your new visitors into buyers).

Where you give your products and who you give them to will be crucial. Put a landscape image with an environmental slogan on a bumper sticker, for example, and give it out at green events, and you can expect your site to sell landscape posters and animal prints. Put a picture on a mousepad and offer it as a freebie to stores selling business computers and you might be able to offer stock images.

However you choose to make the sales, the gifts will get you seen.

3. Put up Wallpaper
One sort of freebie that’s easy to give away — and costs much less than a mousepad to produce — is wallpaper. The challenge is that there are so many of these things floating around the Web, including giant databases stuffed with them.

While you can often submit photo to wallpaper websites, there’s no guarantee that they’ll keep your marketing details on the image when they release it. A better bet then is to target specific websites. If you like photographing cats, for example, offer wallpapers (or screensavers) to your favorite feline site. If you shoot cars, make them available to an automobile website. Include the site’s own logo and URL together with yours and you’ll seal the deal while targeting a niche market.

4. Talk to Galleries
For most photographers, getting their photos seen in a gallery is the ultimate prize. Nothing brings greater respect — and few things bring higher prices.

Unless you’re already known though, touting your pictures to gallery owners is rarely fun. That’s because you have to offer more than just good images (although you’ll certainly need to offer that).

You’ll have to bring buyers too.

If there are people in your area who buy your photos on eBay or from your website, ask them if they’d like to see an exhibition. If you can find enough people willing to buy your art in person, gallery owners will listen… and you’ll get a chance at showing your photos to the public too.

5. Have a Cup of Coffee
And if you don’t have buyers yet, try coffee shops. Lots of café’s today are happy to host artworks on their walls in return for a temporary upgrade in their interior design. You’ll even be able to stick a price tag next to the print.

Café owners are much more approachable than gallery owners and you won’t have to persuade them that you can sell. You might not get the ego boost that comes with a gallery exhibition, but you’ll get seen and that’s a start.

Photography: bmann

6. Chat on Flickr
Of course, you can always put your photos on Flickr. But it doesn’t matter how good your photostream is if no one knows you’re there. Marketing on Flickr is pretty simple but requires a unique approach.You have to network.You have to leave comments on other people’s photos, join groups and chat in the forums. Do that and you won’t just have good photos on Flickr. You won’t just have new photography-loving friends either. You’ll have new photography-loving friends who like looking at your wonderful pictures… and telling you how wonderful they are

.7. Attend Art Fairs
Now, why didn’t you think of that? Probably because you saw the word “art” and thought “That’s not me…”

Wrong. That can be you. Photography is an art and your photos can be shown at your local art fairs. All you have to do is find out which shows are taking place in your area, give the organizers a call and ask them how to exhibit. It might cost you a little, but no more than a few sales will cover.

8. Do the SEO
Yes, it’s boring. Yes, it takes time. Yes, it has about as much to do with photography as taking the dog out in the morning has to do with exercise. But it gets results.

Optimize your photography site, get links around the Web and selected keywords riding high on Google and you’ll get people looking at your photos. And that’s where the pleasure will be.

9. Create a Design Team
It’s not always easy dreaming up new ways to show off your photos — especially when you don’t have a marketing budget, a studio, a gallery or even a website with more viewers than you and your cat.

So find someone who can dream up ideas for you.

Designers, both interior and graphic, have imagination but lack images. Get in touch with a designer near you and suggest that he or she offers your prints to their clients. You’ll get seen, and if you get bought, you’ll get a fee too.

10. Join a Wedding Team
It’s not only designers that need good photos though. Wedding planners do too. While it’s up to wedding planners to organize the big day, no one expects them to take the pictures as well. Ask a wedding planner in your area to look at your portfolio and, more importantly, show it to clients. They might have their own system in place already, but if your photos offer something unique, you could attract their interest and pick up some new buyers.

11. Hold Charity Exhibitions
If you’re still dreaming of your first gallery exhibition, but don’t want to face the gallery owners, try talking to a non-profit. If you can shoot a collection of images that relate to the group’s theme, they could be interested in organizing a show for you. You’ll get a venue and a show while they handle the marketing and the publicity. You won’t make money from the show itself but you can hand out cards and programs.

12. Submit your Band Photos to a Fan Site
Music fans will snap up any images of their idols. Put them on your own site and you’ll have to bring people in to see them. Send a few of them to a fan site, with your attribution and link big and clear, and you’ll make someone else do the marketing work while you pick up the views… and the rewards too.

Putting your images in front of people might be the first step in building a photography business, but it’s not as difficult as it loos. There are lots of ways to show your images — you just need to be ready to turn them into cash once you’ve done it.

Read our 52 Ways to Monetize your Photos and tell us how you show off your images.

[tags] photography marketing, getting photos seen [/tags]

Photography: flattop341

Want to power up your photography site? Want to see your portfolio getting more traffic than LA in rush hour? Want your search engine optimization to give your photo sales a miraculous rebirth?Well, here’s the good news…

Getting visitors see the photos on your website is exactly like learning to ride a Harley-Davidson.

Okay, maybe not exactly. There are a few small differences, of course. It’s a lot quieter, you don’t need to grow a beard or buy a leather jacket, and unless you’ve got the office window open, you’re not likely to feel a breeze blowing through your hair.

But with the right attitude and a little mental reframing, promoting the photos that appear on your website or blog can feel a lot like a trip across country with nowhere to go and all the time in the world to get there.

Here’s why…

Explore the Online Photography World’s Back Alleys
It starts with choosing your route. Optimizing a photo site for search engines usually means seeding the Web with links that lead back to your own page. But with big sites choosy about who they link to, owners of sites that have yet to hit top gear need to head for the less popular regions of the Web.

And like small towns, it’s possible to stumble into all sorts of surprises there: witty blogs about photography topics that are usually deadly serious. Websites stuffed with insider information you can’t learn anywhere else. Tips and tricks you would never have discovered but which you’re now dying to try out.

It’s like driving around without a map, skipping past the ghost towns and being ready to stop off at any picturesque place that catches your eye… then leaving a link.

Enjoy Levitating your PageRank
Of course, trying to place links on small sites — the sort of places populated by readers measured in the hundreds rather than the hundreds of thousands — can be slow going. That’s why you need to enjoy the ride rather than the destination.

Instead of setting goals that involve hitting page two of Google’s search results for “landscape photography” say or “wedding photography” by the end of the month and page one by the end of three months, set a goal that involves nothing more stressful than enjoying building your site and adding photos to it.

It doesn’t sound like much but it’s a strategy that too many owners of photography websites ignore. They focus on the result and when they achieve it, they want more. It’s no longer enough to be in the top three of one keyword. They want to be in the top three of a dozen keywords.

The result isn’t just a sense of dissatisfaction that never goes away. That continuous desire can make them go away from their site when they never achieve everything they want.

It makes much more sense to simply enjoy moving forward, talking to other site owners, bloggers and photographers, answering comments from readers and soaking up the praise from people who enjoy looking at your images or reading your content.

Find your SEO Photo Nirvana
But even if you can lean back and enjoy the ride, you will find your page rank going somewhere. So how do you know when you’ve arrived? When can you be satisfied with the results of your search engine optimization?

The answer is to avoid the question. As long as your site is growing, your users are enjoying your photos and you’re having fun producing it, you’ll have found your online Nirvana.

And that could be the time to start a new cycle with a whole new website focusing on a different photography niche.

Take a break from shooting and read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance or tell us how you cope with optimizing your photography website.

[tags] photo seo [/tags]

Photography: i.m.indraneel

When you’re trying to sell your images on the Web — or even just get them seen — you really need to take every advantage you can get. There’s a gazillion other sites screaming for browsers’ attention and even when people are searching for photography, most will find it easier to head to a photo-sharing site than search for a photographer’s website.

Unless someone tells them where to go to look at a great image.

And that’s the advantage that photographers have over other website owners.

Images are Worth More for Stumblers
According to Matt Jones of BloggingFingers.com, the best way to become a top social bookmarker isn’t to recommend lots and lots of articles. (He recommended over 1,200 on StumbleUpon and still didn’t make it into the top 50; others who recommended less did.)

The best way to get a thumbs up from other social bookmarkers, he says, is to recommend photos and videos.

That creates a giant opportunity for photographers who want to get their photos in front of the public. Thousands of people are active on sites like StumbleUpon and Digg, and looking for online content that will improve their own standing on the sites. If you can offer them the sort of photos that will do the job, you can expect a surge in visitors to your site — and with the right monetization strategies in place, a surge in income too.

Two out of the top five stories on StumbleUpon recently were photography collections.

Shooting for Stumblers and Diggers
So what sort of photos are social bookmarkers looking for?

A quick look at StumbleUpon suggests that a collection of unusual images can reach the front page, but so can a standard collection of beautiful photographs. One recent glance at StumbleUpon’s home page for example, for example, showed some well-taken but not particularly exceptional landscape photographs and shots from “lost” ancient cities.

Images that score high on Digg, however, tend to be able to take an “amazing” somewhere in the title. Color photos from World War I have been doing well recently.

Diggers like golden oldies.

This isn’t a scientific survey, but it might be accurate to say that while Diggers like the exceptional, Stumblers like photos that are either good… or interesting.

What to Do with your Widget
If that impression is accurate, it’s probably easier to get StumbledUpon than Dugg. (Unless you’ve got some old, color War of Independence photos stashed away somewhere). Simply take good photographs like those that were StumbledUpon at Outdoor-Photos.com, and you’re in with a shout.

But you’ll still have to be noticed. The easiest way to do that is to make sure that the photos you show online carry the social bookmarking widgets. Without a Digg button or a StumbleUpon icon, it’s going to be hard for people to recommend your photos.

Where you put those widgets might matter too. For content writers, the most common place to put Digg links is at the bottom of posts. Ads in that position tend to perform poorly but that’s where the eyes of people who finish the post will be looking. Instead of the waste of space it used to be, the bottom of Web pages have now become filled with bookmarking icons.

When a user has finished looking at a photograph though, the eye could be anywhere. It might pay then to make the links more visible and place them next to the photo instead of beneath it. To find out which position works best on your site, try alternating the positions of the links on the same photo over a period of about a week and compare the results.

Good, bookmarkable photos and optimized links are the minimum you can do to take advantage of social bookmarkers’ need for images. The maximum you can do is join the sites and network. If you can make friends on these sites, let them know when you’ve put up a new collection and get the most active bookmarkers to do the recommending, you should find that your new friends get a higher status… and your photos get plenty of views.

[tags] photo stumbles, web 2.0 photos, photos on digg [/tags]

Photography: Corazon girl

Jonathan Fields, a writer at FreelanceSwitch.com, a site for freelance anythings, has a great story about a marketing opportunity he came across in a pumpkin patch recently. Visiting with his children, he wanted to take pictures of them frolicking in the field. Not being a photographer though, he had nothing on hand but a friend’s camera phone. Fortunately, a woman with a Nikon D2000 offered to shoot him together with his daughter, and email him the image.The woman, it turned out, was a professional portrait photographer. The photo was waiting in his inbox when he got home, together with a link to her website.So simple. So effective. So how can you do the same thing?Go Where The People Are… And Don’t Pitch
The photographer’s approach worked for two reasons: she went to where lots of people who wanted pictures were likely to be; and she didn’t make a hard sell. Instead she simply created a sample that cost her nothing but time, and left the potential client with a good feeling and a debt they might want to repay.

Both of those things are easy to copy, and you don’t have to hang out in a pumpkin patch and wait until Halloween to do them.

Playgrounds Are Full Of Children Too
Playgrounds, for example, are always filled with children running around and having fun. They’re also filled with bored parents who want photos of them.

It’s best to turn up on weekends and late afternoons — peak times for play — so pack your camera, take a kid if you can get hold of one, and run off a few shots.

And while you’re there, ask other parents if they’d like some photos of their children on the swings too. You’ll be getting the little ones when they’re naturally happy so it should be a relatively easy children’s shoot.

Win At The Sports Ground
Sports grounds can offer exactly the same opportunity as playgrounds. Many parks turn over part of their green space each weekend to organized children’s sports so take your camera and watch the game.

Unless you’ve got a kid on the field though, don’t shoot until you’ve started chatting to a parent on the sidelines and offered them an image. It won’t be long before they’re pointing out which one is theirs… and you’re writing down their contact details.

You Can Shoot Adults Too
Of course, you don’t have to limit this sort of marketing to children’s photography. Adults are fair game too, you just have to prepare well and pick your locations a little more carefully.

Take your camera to a bar where business people hang out, for example, and your gear will give you a good talking point. Take pictures of the people you meet and send them the image with a link to your site. Just make sure that you have Web pages that explain the importance of good business portraits or that show off your corporate photography first.

The Bride And Groom Aren’t The Only Couple At The Wedding
For event photographers, it’s even easier. Most weddings will contain couples who aren’t married now but might be in a year or two’s time. As you’re shooting the tables keep an eye out for pairs, snap them together and run off special prints with your contact details on the back. Ask your client to pass them on and they’ll be getting a free couple portrait while you do some no-cost marketing to people who could need your services soon.

Snap Your Meal
Food photographers could even use this approach in a restaurant. Order a meal and when the dish is delivered take a picture. When you tell the waiter what a great meal you’ve had, offer him a copy for the restaurant’s publicity material.

Again if your website has samples of your food photography, you’ll be leaving an impression on a part of your market.

Photography: ciao-chow

As long as you follow the principle of identifying someone who could use your images and finding a way to leave them a sample in a way that feels like a favor, you’ll be in with a great shot at increasing your sales.Read Jonathan Fields’ article here and tell us if you’ve ever tried this form of marketing.

Photography: Roger Smith

You might be the greatest photographer in the world. You could have a hard drive stuffed with images that Bill Gates wants on Corbis and Spielberg wants on his office walls. You could have the potential to go down in photographic history alongside Man Ray, Ansel Adams and Henri Cartier-Bresson.

But if no one but you, your family and your cat ever see your photos, how are we going to know?

Taking photos might be the fun side of photography but if you want the applause — and the income — you have to put them in front of people too.

Everyone’s on Flickr
Flickr has certainly made that a lot easier. Anyone can upload images and as long as you keep them public, anyone can see them too.

But that doesn’t mean they will.

Flickr isn’t just a photo-sharing site, it’s also a networking site. If you want people to see the photos you’ve uploaded, you have to network. Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir, probably Flickr’s most successful member, told us in a recent interview:

You can’t just put your pictures up and leave them there. You have to drag people back to your photostream.

That means joining — and being active in — groups. It means leaving comments on other people’s photos. And it means building up a list of contacts so that your images will appear on their home page when they log in. It means giving to Flickr more than your Pro membership fee and copies of your photo files.

You have to give your time, your advice and your friendship too.

Give Your Images Away
Networking will give you a base of people who enjoy seeing — and commenting on — your images. Making a few of your photos available for free will get them seen by the photo users who search Flickr every day looking for photos for their blogs, websites and other publications.

Those with consciences, such as The Economist, only search for photos published under Creative Commons licenses. (You don’t really want your photos seen by the other type of users.) If you don’t have any photos available for free use then, they’ll receive much less exposure in search results.

You should keep your best photos copyrighted so that you can earn from the licenses, but lower quality images should be available as bait to bring people looking for the subjects you’ve photographed into your photostream.

Market Your Website
Flickr, of course, is just one place to display images. You can also put photos on your website but the marketing is a little harder. Everyone knows about Flickr. No one will know about your site unless you tell them.

But the same principles apply to marketing a website that apply to promoting your Flickr stream. Although there are all sorts of ways to bring traffic to a site, photographers are a pretty curious bunch and they’re always keen to look at each other’s work. Joining forums and discussion boards, leaving comments on other people’s sites and especially focusing on conversations related to your photography niche will help to build you connections and get you eyes on your images.

Here’s Mud in Your Eye
And what happens next?

Of course, you won’t get anywhere without good photos. And you won’t get anywhere if no one sees those photos. But you won’t earn a dime if you can’t turn those views into income.

There are all sorts of ways to create those conversions, and that’s the sort of thing we like to talk about here. They might include photography books, licenses, wallpaper, advertising and cards to name just a few. (You can find a much longer list here.)

But to be a successful photographer who earns from their hobby, all of those things have to work together: good photos, an efficient monetization system and plenty of views too.

Check out our post on creating niche websites and tell us how you put your photos in front of viewers.

Photo of an old postcard showing the 1911 Scottish National Exhibition by Sherlock77 (James)

In a previous post, we talked about using publicity to generate interest in your photography work. The benefits are clear:

• Press coverage is cheaper than advertising
• Appearing in the media gives you a reputation that no advertising budget can ever buy
• You can pick up sales immediately after your media appearance, and enjoy long-term recognition too

And all it takes is a well-written press release that gives the media a genuine story. One of the most reliable ways to create that story is to put on an event…

The Media Likes to Provide a Service — Like Reporting Exhibitions
That’s easy for any photographer to do, even if they’re not a professional. A photographic exhibition can be an event, and because the media — especially the local media — likes to think of itself as providing a service, there’s a good chance that they’ll report it.

Of course, holding an exhibition of your photos doesn’t have to mean persuading a gallery owner to put up your photos. You can organize your own show and hold it in a friendly café, your garage or even an open area in the park if you can lay your hands on some stands. The press release would simply tell the media where and when the exhibition will take place and why it’s important.

You should also make it clear that images are available for the media to reproduce: they’d get a great picture story; you’d get your photo in the press.

Give to Charity, Get Fame
If you’re lucky, that will be enough to get a write-up in a newspaper and bring people to see and buy your photos. But you can increase the odds of winning publicity by turning your exhibition into a charity event. You can do that by charging a small fee, auctioning prints, promising to donate a share of the day’s take or even by shooting on a theme, such as your town’s homeless or the wildlife in a local nature reserve.

Having the media announce your exhibition for you is very powerful. But you shouldn’t rely on it. If you’re holding an exhibition, you will need to market it yourself. That’s become a lot easier too. EventsBot lets you email details of events such as exhibitions. It can be used to sell tickets as well — useful if you’re hoping to raise funds for charity — but you can use it for free events too.

To get round the problem of building up a large mailing list or being accused of spamming, try sending the EventsBot invitation to people you know and asking them to forward it to five of their friends. Again, you’ll find that easier if it’s a charity event. Everyone likes to feel they’re doing their bit for a good cause — even if it’s only forwarding an email.

You don’t have to work hard to get your first — or your next — photography exhibition. You can organize it yourself, promote it yourself, sell tickets, support a charity of your choice… and get famous in the process.

Check out EventsBot here and tell us how you put on your first photography exhibition.

[tags] photo event marketing, eventsbot [/tags]

For most photographers, selling images has always meant going through a middleman. That could be an agent who sets up assignments or a stock company that handles the sales and passes back a share of the price. The advantage is that the photographer can focus on the picture-making while the company handles the deals, but there’s a disadvantage too: the middleman takes a big cut of the income.

Put up your own photography website though and you can, in theory at least, cut out the middleman altogether.

Create a Niche Site, Not a Stock Site
The challenge for a photographer selling images directly is that you have to compete with the big boys. Stock sites will always be able to offer more photos than an independent photographer can but while that means lots of choice, it also brings a problem for the buyer: looking for the right photo to buy.

Yuri Arcurs, for example, told us that half the photos he sells go to people who have bought from him in the past. Buyers don’t want to waste time trawling through hundreds of images on a stock site, so they go directly to his portfolio where they know they’ll find the sort of quality they need.

A photographer hoping to sell from a website then has to be able to offer the same sort of reliable service: he or she has to supply niched, high-quality images.

Those niches don’t have to be tiny. They can be as broad as “business” photos or “car” photos. The market would be smaller than that of a stock site offering images on every topic imaginable, but the marketing would be easier and a photographer only needs to conquer one niche to develop a steady source of income.

From a Niche Site to a Nice Little Business
Once you’ve picked your niche, building the site shouldn’t be difficult either. Although you can certainly hire a programmer to do all the codework for you — which would give you a unique look, a relatively large bill but only a small headache — these days there’s a plethora of tools that can help any photographer put up a commercial image site in a snap.

ImageDisplayWorks, for example, offers a bunch of different templates, and while it’s really set up for event photography, there’s no reason why it couldn’t handle any sort of images for any sort of market.

PixSmart is an Australian business that also lets photographers put their images online ready to sell. Although many of its customers are also event photographers, other specialists are using the software to market their photos too.

And SlideShowPro isn’t a website template, but it can be a very useful and creative way to show off your images on your own unique site. You’ll have to build the ecommerce section around the gallery but you’ll get a much more attractive look.

Charge Stock Prices, Not Micro-Stock Prices
Once you’ve built the site and uploaded your images, don’t undervalue them. Just because some companies hand out images for a buck a piece or less, doesn’t mean you have to do the same thing to compete.

The price of an image depends on its use and its perceived value. Someone buying an image directly from a photographer has already saved the time spent searching on a stock site. He can also keep some of the middleman’s take. But the rest should end up in your pocket.

Check out Corey Pearce’s image store built with PixSmart and Kevin Kubota’s store built with ImageDispayWorks tell us how you market images on your website.

[tags] imagedisplayworks, pixsmart, slideshopro, sell photos from niche sites [/tags]

Hobbyists pull out their cameras on the weekends. Pros keep a camera with them wherever they go. But almost everyone these days keeps a phone with them, and many of those phones come with built-in lenses that, if not exactly top-quality, are often good enough to do the job.

But can that job pay money?

Here are 17 ways to make the images you shoot on your camera phone good enough to pay cash:

1. Stick to High Quality
Camera phones usually come with different resolution settings. Do we really need to recommend that you use the highest possible option? Sure, you’ll be able to take fewer shots but a handful of good images will always pay more than a bunch of grainy ones.

2. Use the Flash
As we pointed out in a previous post, camera phones aren’t great at handling low light. Turning on the flash might shorten your battery power but it will protect your images from underexposure and make them more marketable.

3. Be Odd!
The advantage that a camera phone has over conventional cameras isn’t just that it’s always close by; it’s also that it’s much more flexible. It’s easy to hold above your head, around corners and at strange angles. Those unique shots could be just what a buyer is looking for.

4. Shoot Celebrities
The market for shots of celebrities is one of the biggest and highest-earning in the world. With magazines like Heat paying around $400 for a snap, it’s no wonder that tabloids are being swamped with shots of stars. To make your image stand out, don’t just shoot when you see a celeb, wait for the kiss, the lean-forward or the mouth full of pie. Then send it to Scoopt.

5. Become a Bounty Hunter
Many of the images shot on camera phones are opportunistic — you have to be in the right place at the right time. SpyMedia.com though offers bounties for particular images. These might range from five bucks for shots of Halloween costumes to $100 for photos of Starbucks’ new tangerine frappuccino. Pick your target and pack your phone.

6. Demonstrate!
One way to avoid relying on luck when shooting with a camera phone is to go where the action is. Demonstrations are always good options. Small ones are rarely well covered and even when photographers are present, a close-up of a witty banner or a painted face can trump a professional shot and find a market.

7. Watch Sports Events
The same is true of sports events. Photographers with long lenses will always have the upper hand when it comes to capturing the quarterback, but if you’re in the crowd, you’ll be able to shoot the atmosphere: the hot-dogs, the crowds and the trash under the seats. Those can make good stock images if nothing else.

8. Take in a Concert
And if we’re talking of fun, try a concert too. Again, camera phones aren’t the best at shooting close-ups of the singer, but they can capture the fans, the groupies and the scene around the stage door.

9. Develop Contacts
Taking a good picture with a camera phone isn’t too hard (after a bit of practice); selling it can be. Your best bet is to develop a relationship with a photo editor at your local newspaper, music magazine or other niche outlet. Pitching to someone you know is always easier than making a cold call.

10. Win a Competition
There are a number of competitions offering prizes for camera phone images. The London Times, for example, is offering vacations and phones for people producing great images that match assignments. Strictly speaking, you won’t be selling your images for cash, but the prizes are worth money and the exposure could lead to sales too.

11. Become a Location Scout
Snapped a shot of a beautiful location? Put it online, geo-tag it and charge people to find out where it is. Pitch your service to wealthy couples looking for discrete honeymoon locations or travelers looking for exotic spots and you could have a whole new market.

12. Take a Pic a Day
Daily pics on blogs get clicks. They might not get sales but the traffic is worth money, either in advertising or as a market for your commercial images.

13. Shoot Your Business Every Day
If you’re not a professional photographer, take your camera phone to work and take regular snaps behind the scenes. Again, these images are unlikely to end up on a gallery wall, but they will bring in potential customers and give you product sales.

14. Follow the Blogs
Another way to avoid hoping to be in the right place and ready to take the right shots is to know what sort of images the world wants to see. If bloggers keep talking about the iPhone, for example, being one of the first to snap someone talking on theirs could land you a sale.

15. Go Easy on the Photoshopping
While many of the weaknesses of camera phones can be fixed with a little post-production, it’s a good idea to go easy on the editing. The biggest market for camera phone images is still news desks and they like to know how far the image is from the scene you saw. A little sharpening is fine; superimposition isn’t.

16. Promote your Photos on Flickr
Perhaps the biggest challenge with camera phone imagery is getting them seen. Flickr helps here but the images have to be well tagged so that buyers can find them. Get original, good quality shots and you’ll be in with a good shout of making a sale.

17. Shoot Often
And finally, the best advice is the one that applies to all types of photography: take lots of pictures and market the best.

Check out the Times camera phone competition here and tell us about your experiences shooting with your mobile.

Photo of Pihlajasaari changing rooms by Pirkka2

[tags] camera phone pictures, sell camera phone photos [/tags]

Mention marketing these days, and most people assume you’re talking about AdWords, pagerank, search engine optimization, and so on. One thing that doesn’t come to mind when you think about marketing is postcards.

In fact, they are one of the best ways for both professional and amateur photographers to market themselves and sell some photos. Postcards have always been a very effective way of promoting photographers’ products and skills, and they’re also an opportunity to land new gigs. Today’s postcards make both those uses even easier.

What can Moo do for you?

It all starts with Moo. There’s nothing particularly outrageous about them but their mini-cards are a very neat version of business cards while their note cards are hard to miss.

Moo has partnered with Flickr and Fotolia to make it incredibly easy to use your own images on your cards and for buyers to pay to use your images on their cards.

So how can you make money with Moo?

The easiest method is simply to create boxes of cards (or stickers) and sell them. When Moo made its deal with Fotolia, they went for boxes of four pre-selected subjects: flowers, skies, puppies and kittens.

They chose the four themes based on what they perceived to be the most marketable.

Julie Wohlberg of Fotolia told us. (Who’d have though skies would be so popular?) That’s just four topics though, so how about creating some of your own? If puppies sell, maybe rabbits will too. Or beaches. Or cars. Or babies. Or anything else you’ve got hidden on your hard drive. Put a box together then put them in front of punters.

More interestingly, Julie also added that:

Moo users can… link to Fotolia to license images for packs that they design themselves.

You can create packs of cards, print them with Moo and sell them for a profit through stores or your own website. Or you can even put images on Fotolia and send buyers from your website to the micro-stock site so that they can create their own card packs using your images.

Of course, you could even go door-to-door around local businesses with card samples and ask the owners if they’d like some for their companies. You could create a box full of food images, for example, tour local restaurants and suggest that you could photograph their dishes and leave space for the restaurant’s name and phone number. That would be hard work, but who said marketing was easy?

ModernPostcard.com — Direct Mail Marketing Today

More traditional than Moo is ModernPostcard.com. In some ways, this is good, old-fashioned direct mail marketing. The simplest thing to do is to put your images on the cards, toss in some catchy sales copy, select a geographic region and demographic, then ask ModernPostcard to send the cards out.

That will cost you money but one or two extra wedding gigs is likely to be enough to cover the cost.

The geo-targeting would even make it very easy to make your images match your sales location. A wedding photographer, for example, could be sure to use local landmarks in the couple shots.

Alternatively, you could offer the service yourself to other business owners. You could set yourself up as a direct marketing business, outsourcing everything to ModernPostcard but the images that appear on the cards. Those would be exclusive and cost a premium. As far as the client is concerned, they’re getting a one-stop marketing shop. As far as you’re concerned, you’re just selling photos.

Online advertising might be attracting all the attention these days, but there’s still plenty of life left in postcards; and plenty of money too.

Read more about Moo here and here.

[tags] photography postcard marketing, moo, modernpostcard.com [/tags]

Before you can sell your photos online, buyers first have to see them. That means putting up a website, creating an attractive portfolio and building traffic that comes and looks at your images. And hopefully places orders too.

Protect Yourself Against Google’s Image Thieves
But one of the most popular ways that users search for pictures is also one of the most overlooked. Google Images indexes over a billion photos and has long been one of the first stops for anyone looking for an image.

Unfortunately, many of those people are hoping to steal photos rather than buy them.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use Google Images to market your pictures though. It just means you have to protect them as well as optimize them. To ignore the service simply because there are sharks out there would be a huge waste of a valuable opportunity.

Start with the protection. Any image you want to optimize for marketing on Google Images — in fact, any image you want to market online — has to have a big ugly watermark on it. As we’ve pointed out before, that’s not a foolproof method of protecting your photos but it will stop people from simply right-clicking and saving your images on their computers. That alone will cut out a large chunk of the threat.

Use the Watermark to Drive Sales
But here’s the opportunity. Instead of using a watermark that simply says “Property of John Smith” or whatever it may be, use a watermark that says “Image For Sale.” Someone who wants to use the image and is prepared to pay for it, would click to find out how much it costs. On the image page itself, you could either list your prices or suggest that the buyer gets in touch.

Obviously only a small proportion of the people who see your image will click and ask to buy, but the numbers alone could make it worthwhile, especially if your images are optimized to bring in large amounts of users.

That’s not hard to do. Some of the techniques used to drive images higher in search results are the same as those used to put Web pages in high positions: have lots of links leading in and put keywords in title tags and in the body copy, for example. But large images (those with more than 10,000 square pixels) tend to rank higher than small images, and keywords close to the image can also affect the photo’s tendency to turn up in search results.

Keywords Can Be a Clue to Market Size
Of course, relevant keywords should also be included in the file name, alt tag and image-title tag.

The importance of keywords can also give you a clue to marketability. Search terms that are particularly popular might suggest a large market — and that therefore you should be shooting images on those topics rather than for terms that are rarely sought. It might be worth picking one popular topic, optimizing some images for it and seeing if you generate any sales.

Google Images might not be the most obvious place for photographers to sell their images, but with so many people using it, it’s also too big to be overlooked. With the right strategies and the right care, it might just bring in the right amount of sales too

It’s an unpleasant job, but every stock photographer has to do it. Once you’ve taken the shots and battled the uploading system, you then have to toss in all the keywords you can think of so that buyers can find your photos easily. It’s a process that can take time and a large thesaurus… and still leave you with the nagging worry that you’ve left out exactly the right term that will bring in the sales.

Yvan Cohen, a founder of OnAsia Digital Services, the Bangkok-based photo services company behind software tool Image Keyworder, explains:

“It’s hard to underestimate the importance of accurate keywording in terms of making images accessible in a searchable archive. As image databases expand, many photographers complain that their work is getting ‘lost’ in an ocean of images. The more relevant [the] keywords… the higher the likelihood it will be returned accurately in a search; thereby increasing the chances of a sale.”

For most photographers, that means thinking up a bunch of terms then searching the keyword lists of similar images to see if they’ve left any out. (Yvan criticizes this method as “hit-and-miss and much less comprehensive” than his automated tool, but concedes that Getty and Corbis are both good references when researching how other images are keyworded).

Experience helps too. Andres Rodriguez, a top-selling, Colombian microstock photographer, has the dual problem of keywording each of the 500 or so images he uploads each month and doing it in a foreign language. Asked how he found keywording, he told us:

At first it was difficult especially since English is not my first language, [but] I feel more confident now that I’ve done it 6,000 times.

Andres, who sells about 30,000 licenses a month, described his keyword workflow as first typing keywords that come to mind, then checking terms he’s used similar images in the past. He then looks at three or four images from other people to double check that no important terms have been left out, and once satisfied with his list, he saves it as a template to prevent him from having to repeat the work in the future.

Both Image Keyworder, which depends on a searchable thesaurus, and scans of the keyword lists on other images though depend on guessing the terms a buyer might use when looking for an image. A more accurate way to see what terms people are actually using could be to ask Google. The search engine’s AdWords program lets advertisers see lists of related keywords ranked in order of search volume. Although these are searches for information rather than for images, they can provide a helpful insight into how people actually search… and should turn up popular phrases you wouldn’t otherwise have thought of.

Photo by Stephentrepeneur.

[tags] photo keywording, stock photo keywording [/tags]

Most photographers — whether amateur or professional — have hard drives stuffed full of images. And most photographers think that (almost) all of those images are wonderful, perfectly shot and could carry four- and five-figure price tags if they could just find the buyers. It’s not always easy to tell whether a photo is going to be a big seller, but here are 11 signs that you could be onto a good thing.

1. It Looks Like A Top-Seller
Yes, every good image looks like a top-seller but you don’t have to guess. Surf to microstock sites like Fotolia and iStock and you can see which images are winning the most downloads. If your photo looks like one of those, there’s a good chance it will sell like one of those.

2. You Get Big Wows From Lots Of People Who Don’t Know You
Photographers at sites like Flickr can be a very friendly bunch. If you praise their images, they’ll praise yours. (Which is actually a good way of driving traffic to your Flickr pages.) But when you show an image on Flickr and get a giant list of comments that far exceeds your usual round of applause, you’ve probably done something a bit special… and you need to get that image to buyers.

3. You’ve Shot A Rare Subject
Check out many portfolios and you’ll soon find that you’re looking at the same sorts of images over and over again. With such a large supply of well-photographed mountains, beaches and beautiful women available for sale, it’s inevitable that the prices are going to be low and sales of each are going to be few. Shoot something unique, such as rainfall in the Gobi Desert or a cat biting a dog, and you should find you’ve got a market that’s prepared to pay a lot more.

4. You’ve Shot A Business Topic
The number one selling topic on microstock sites is business. And ideally, business shots that contain models. There’s no guarantee that people in suits will get you giant sales, but if you’ve got a top-quality image like that, you’re at least halfway there.

5. You’ve Seen Similar Images On Websites And In Magazines
Reviewing the top-sellers on stock sites will tell you how close you are to producing a similar image but you don’t have to look that far to see commercial photos. If your photo looks like one you’ve seen in an ad or a magazine — and if you can imagine text running next to it or a company logo somewhere on the page — there’s a good chance buyers will too.

6. It Contains A Celebrity Doing Something Naughty
Paparazzi photos are some of the highest-priced images in the world. Although they always rely on the photographer being in the right place at the right time — and often too on the celebrity being indiscreet to the point of being dumb — if you’re lucky enough to shoot a star falling out of a club, you’ve got a top-seller.

7. It Tells A Story
Every good photo should tell a story, even the simplest of images shot at a press conference, on the street or anywhere else. Forget about capturing an image; capture a piece of narrative and you should be able to pick up a fat check or three.

8. It Captures The Zeitgeist
And the best stories are contemporary. A photo of three people talking on iPhones or standing bare-footed at airport security tell the sort of story that describes our times. There’s always a market for those kinds of images.

9. It’s Won Prizes
Competition judges aren’t buyers but they know a good photo when they see one. A prize-winning photo might not be commercial but it is likely to be good enough to sell as prints or posters.

10. The Money Comes In Quick
There might be a lot of images out there but when a top-quality photo arrives, buyers notice… and they notice fast. If your image start selling downloads quickly or generates offers, you can expect those sales to keep coming.

11. You Know It… You Just Know It
You might believe that all your images are wonderful but when you take a truly fantastic photo, you get that feeling in belly that tells you you’ve done something special. There’s no better sign that you’ve shot a winner.

[tags] best selling photos [/tags]

Building an online portfolio is now the first step in marketing photography skills. Yes, you’ll still need a big, physical book filled with well-chosen images but these days, a buyer’s first contact with a photographer’s talent is more likely to be online than in their office.

So what should you consider as you’re putting your online portfolio together?

1. Who’s Your Audience?
One of the most common mistakes — especially among photographers who do a range of different jobs — is to think of photography buyers as a homogeneous mass. In fact, clients can range from singles looking for better dating site profiles to schools looking for team photos to magazine art directors searching for cover shots. Each of those types of clients will be hoping to see different things in the portfolio — and they’ll expect to see them displayed in different ways. Clickbooq, for example, a website creation service for professional photographers, lets its customers choose between portfolios aimed at businesses and those aimed at consumers.

“The business target most likely has large monitors, which was why we developed the top-down version for larger screens. The consumer audience may have smaller monitors or be on laptops, which is better suited for the left-hand version,” explains Jennifer Wu, a company spokesperson. “Research your audience and tailor your site to fit their needs.”

2. Choose The Right Images — And The Right Number Of Images
Choosing the best pictures to put in your portfolio might look like the toughest decision you’ll have to make, but deciding which pictures to leave out is likely to be even harder. The result, as any browse through a Flickr-based portfolio will show, is hundreds of images in which the outstanding shots are hidden by the mediocre photos.

One option is simply to be disciplined. Make sure that each image displays a skill, a technique or a subject that you like to photograph. And make sure too that the whole gallery tells a story.

An alternative though is to create different sets of images with each set showing off one particular theme. “I recommend breaking photos into smaller groups and organizing them by theme, recency, or what-have-you,” Todd Dominey, creator of SlideShowPro told us. “A gallery of smaller albums — to me anyway — is more engaging and easier to navigate than one album full of images, which would feel like more work to browse than smaller clusters.”

3. Write The Captions Carefully
It would be great to be able to say that the image can speak for itself. But it doesn’t. Depending on the buyer, viewers will often want to know at least what the image shows and often why you shot it too. Again, the temptation is to write too much — in which case, the viewer won’t read anything and will probably skip past the pictures too.

“There isn’t an optimal length for captions, but short and to the point is generally a good rule to follow,” says Jennifer Wu. “All captions should try to cover the basic descriptive information: who, what, when, where, why and how; but the amount of detail and format will depend on your intended audience. Always include descriptive keywords that can help you and your clients find the image.”

And that’s when you reach the really tough stage of building an online portfolio. Bringing people in to see it.

[tags] photographer portfolio, photography portfolios [/tags]

If there’s one form of marketing that outshines all others it’s word-of-mouth. You can spend a fortune on advertising but nothing beats the power of a personal recommendation from someone who knows you — even if they’ve never actually hired you.

That’s why networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn have proved to be such giant hits both with people looking for friends and with professionals looking to expand their businesses.

But can sites like these help photographers find work?

According to Brendan Wovchko of SocialNetworkExpert.com, they can but it’s more likely to happen on LinkedIn than on Facebook. “A photographer would want to leverage a professional network to find new business, not a social network,” he says. “LinkedIn is a professional network and Facebook is a social network.”

The difference, Brendan explains, is that a “professional network’s purpose is to create business opportunity. A social network’s purpose can range from dating relationships, ratings and reviews of products, connecting former classmates, affinity sites (ie. Harley Davidson owners), photo sharing, or connecting people by nationality.”

Certainly, LinkedIn makes searching for potential clients much easier than Facebook does. The profile — a marketing page that requires as much attention as a professional resume — asks for details of experience and education, and the Advanced Search feature lets members look for “potential employers” by industry sector. LinkedIn, in short, feels as much like a job site as a networking site.

But most photographers are looking for one-off gigs rather than long-term corporate employment. They want to find couples that plan to marry as much as companies that are planning their catalog shoots. The sort of job searching that LinkedIn offers can put your name on an art director’s desk — especially if you can find someone who knows him or her — but it’s likely to require some hard networking or a long wait before the effort pays off.

The photo-sharing feature on Facebook though can make the passive searching easier. In particular, the ability to put up images and share them can turn your profile into another outlet for your online portfolio. Even though people using the site might be looking to keep in touch with old friends rather than employ a photographer, displaying your images can lead to additional income from models who need headshots or friends of friends who need their reception shot.

“[H]aving a web-presence has been very helpful,” says Clint Cook, a professional photographer who does a lot of fashion/portfolio work and maintains a Facebook profile. “Facebook and its photo galleries have been part of that for me and gotten me some very good attention and some well-paying jobs at low cost for that type of marketing.”

Finding photography work through both Facebook and LinkedIn will require sending lots of carefully-written emails before you uncover potential clients. But there is another opportunity available on these sites: the chance to shoot profile portraits. If you spot a bad picture on a profile belonging to someone in your area looking for love or a job, you could always drop them a line and offer them a more eye-catching image.

But when it comes to putting images in front of potential buyers, building online portfolios and networking, it’s hard for both Facebook and LinkedIn to compete with Flickr.

Although like Facebook, Flickr is a social networking site rather than a professional networking site, it’s still doing a very effective of job of matching photographers with buyers. Just as photographers gather on Flickr to look at each other’s pictures and discuss techniques, buyers come to find Creative Commons images… and sometimes end up paying for unique photos and even handing out commissions. The different photo sets let members show off their skills, groups allow them to network more effectively in their fields and anyone can write to anyone else without having to prove they’re friends first.

You should certainly network on Facebook and LinkedIn. But with the right strategies, you should expect faster success on a site that was actually designed to let photographers show off their work.

[tags] photography marketing with linkedin, photography marketing with facebook, photography marketing with flickr [/tags]

It might be a marketing tool as old as advertising, but surf around photographers’ websites long enough and you might notice that many have chosen to skip the company logo. It’s as though photographers believe that if they’ve got good photos, they don’t need a graphic to help their services stand out.

Or, to put it another way, it’s as though some photographers think they know more about marketing and branding than companies such as Google, Coca Cola and Nike.

Of course, every photography business needs beautiful photos to show clients but a well-designed logo does something else. It reflects with one easily identifiable image what the company stands for and what it can do. It should appear professional and clear; be recognizable so that it helps to turn a photography business into a brand; be easily transferred to stationery and business cards as well as appearing on websites; and it should say something about the photographer and his or her work as well.

“Since I live in Seattle, and a big part of what I love (and love to shoot) in the area are the islands of Puget Sound, I asked my logo designer to come up with something that had a water/island look to it,” explains Curt Gerston, a part-time event photographer. “Basically, since I shoot locally, I wanted clients to recognize a look that was ‘our home.’”

According to Linda McArdle of the The Logo Company, a design firm that has created around 15,000 logos — of which 250 were for photographers — all logos should be clean and easy to remember but photographers’ logos in particular should also be simple and artistic.

In theory, that should be easy. A photographer who doesn’t have the capacity to be artistic needs more help than a good logo can provide. And in practice, many photographers, especially those who shoot microstock, have the sort of background in graphic design that lets them produce their own logos. Laurentiu Nicu, for example, designed his logo which he uses both on his website and his Flickr page. “The logo has a major importance,” he argues. “People recognize me better.”

For those whose skills lie in cameras rather than Corel Draw, the alternative is to hire someone to do the job for them, but even paying a professional designer can take a little effort. The Logo Company describes its work process here using an example of a photography client, but in general, the company offers initial concepts within three working days, with revisions taking another two business days each. Most projects are completed in around two weeks and cost $149, says Linda, but require plenty of help from the client. Good feedback on the designs is important and so is clarity when explaining ideas to the designer.

The result though should be worth a lot more than $149 as clients appreciate both the sense of professionalism a logo confers and the message it suggests. “I suspect the logo and look of my website helps people feel comfortable with my services,” says Curt Gerston. Measuring the value of that sense of comfort though isn’t so easy.

Logo by Laurentiu Nica

[tags] photography logo, photography marketing [/tags]