Make Money Selling Stock Photos: Selling to Your Niche, Part 5

I apologize for being away for so long. Much going on in my personal life, ended up putting my photography on hold for the past year. But now I'm back and hope to move forward with what I really love to do!

This is Part 5 of an 8-part series. If you have gotten this far, you should now have several collections of images compiled, have identified the niche markets who would be the most likely people to purchase each collection, and considered the various categories within this niche that you can market to.

In my previous blog, I determined that the best people to buy my Southwestern stock images would be travel agencies, regional publications, tourist-centered businesses, regional business and web designers - all of who concentrate or have a tie to New Mexico. Now where do we go from here?

It's research time! Begin a spreadsheet (such as Excel or Google Docs) with each page containing a list of possible leads within your niche market. For example, I would have one page for Travel Agencies that book Southwest trips, another for Regional Southwest Publications, a third for Southest Businesses Located in New Mexico, and a fourth page for Regional Web Designers.

You'll need to create columns on your spreadsheet for Company Name, Contact Person, Address, Phone Number, Email and Website. Then add colunmns that will help you keep track of your marketing efforts to reach each company, such as "1st Email", "2nd Follow-up", and Comments.

Now you can get started by filling in your leads and contact info. The easiest way to find leads is a Google search or Google maps. I could begin by searching for "Travel Agencies booking trips to Santa Fe". Or "New Mexico publications". Or "New Mexico tourism". Now you start visiting the websites that came up under your search and build your leads list with contact information found on each website. This should get you off to a pretty good start with many possible leads.

As you work on possible searches, take a few side trips to explore other possibilities you may not have considered. While working on my list of Web Designers, I thought about New Mexico bloggers. Yep, that's a good idea considering that bloggers are always looking for new content and images to populate their posts. New Mexico Bloggers became a new category on my spreadsheet.

You get the idea - search and find as many leads with contact info as possible that fits with your photographic niche.

In Part 6, we'll discuss what to do with your leads after you have compiled your list.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4