Is Your Stock Collection Healthy?
Have you ever shopped at a Farmer’s Market? Hundreds of choices of fruits, vegetables, canned pickles, dried beans and so on. Shoppers can spend a lot of time, roaming, looking and selecting
the items for sale. The community Farmer’s Markets are growing. And unlike a 65,000 square foot Wal-Mart where merchandise is segmented by signs (“Household”, “Canned fruit”, “Auto”, “Toys”), Farmer’s Markets on the other hand are an ocean of unregulated produce. .
More people are discovering their digital camera can match and reproduce the same visual quality of the images they see in magazines and books. These folks (we can rightly call them photographers) are discovering they can gain recognition for their art – plus make a few dollars. And like farmer’s markets, on-line galleries are expanding. And more and more photographers are loading them with more and more images. It’s true that you can find quality farm fresh vegetables and fruits at a farmer’s market. You can also find photo treasures on the Internet. But will your photos in an on-line photo gallery find themselves being purchased by a photobuyer? Probably not. The reason is simple. In an ever-expanding supply of pictures, your chances of being discovered by a photobuyer become less. What to do? Reverse the marketing process. Put yourself in the photobuyer’s position. If they need a picture of a rainbow, covered bridge or a seagull, they don’t go to the Internet to find it. They shout out the window and 20 photographers will run to them with that kind of generic picture. In the editorial stock photo buying process, photobuyers always need a specific picture to illustrate their project (magazine article, cover, book chapter head, etc.). The photo need might be a specific South American musical instrument, or a toy used by children in Norway, or a plant that is only grown in Japan. Photobuyers usually find themselves engaged in an extensive search. They want to make the experience as effortless as possible. They use a search engine such as Google. They usually find a particular picture that ‘almost” fits the bill. They are not quite satisfied, and they know, thanks to the Internet, they can do better. Their next step is to contact the photographer of the photo they found to learn if the photographer is a specialist. If he or she is, they probably have a deep selection of photos in that particular category. Here’s where your marketing strategy comes into play. Because there are thousands (soon to become millions) of photographers displaying their pictures on on-line galleries, photobuyers gravitate as quickly as possible to the photographer who specializes in the area of their interest and need. THE LAW OF ATTRACTION If you want to become a successful on-line stock photographer in the online stock industry, you need to become a lure to the moving hordes of photobuyers who are continually scouting for the “just-right” photo for their current project. (And they need more pictures tomorrow.) Since we all come from a culture where we expect to sell our wares to the local community, it’s difficult to imagine that somewhere in the world a buyer is looking for a particular picture that’s in our database right now. Making the match is the mission, and describing your picture (keywords, tags, labels) is the method. The time has come for you to select one or a select few specialization areas of stock photography that appeal to you. Begin developing a deep selection of pictures in those areas. You’ll soon become a “lure” for photobuyers worldwide, who need your kind of pictures and will appreciate being able to come back to you again and again because your photo collection matches the theme of their publishing house.
|