I'm in love with Twitter! It's a fantastic marketing tool that appears deceptively simple - but has many nuances to discover. What a great way for microstock photographers to connect with web designers, publishers, and just about anyone else who might buy your photography.
Here are a few books about Twitter and business that I've downloaded to my Kindle (you can also get them the good old-fashion way as the printed page!) :
Twitter Power: How to Dominate Your Market One Tweet at a Time
Once you get into Twitter, you'll want to do a little experimenting with other Twitter apps. These tools really make Twitter come alive. Here are a few that I use:
TweetDeck - great for communicating with and keeping track of everyone
TweetBeep - kind of like Google Alerts - but for Twitter
Twitter List - search tool from Squidoo, allows you to create topic lists from Tweets
I'll be posting more on Twitter as I develop my own marketing approach. Stay tuned!
Labels: making money with stock photos, niche market
If you sell your stock images on
Dreamstime as I do, you can take advantage of a great marketing tool:
Image Collections. This is a technique of grouping together images with a specific theme or criteria, which are then accessable on the
Dreamstime site. It's the perfect resource for reaching new clients
and sharing your work with current buyers. You can search for collections on
Dreamstime by typing in key words on the
Collection section page. (At this time, there are over 5,700 collections indexed.)
Site users, such as designers, can use
Image Collections to quickly find like-themed images, as well as bookmark the collection and return to it when new images are uploaded. Each Collection is given a Referral Link that can be used by the collection manager or anyone else who wants to share that group of images.
Are you getting the idea here? This is a really easy marketing tool that you can use on your blog, website, Twitter profile or Facebook page.
But there's a catch. There are two types of
Image Collections - public and private. The collection that is public and appears on the site index must contain the work of at least 5 photographers. That means you can showcase your photographs on a particular theme, but you must also include the work of 4 other people along with yours. The private
Image Collection contains only your themed work. It is given a Referral Link, but not listed in the site index. The only way others can see a private collection is if you give them the URL. In my opinion, you can use both as marketing resources.
Use the public collection to grow a large theme-based Collection and updated it frequently with new images from you and other photographers. This will make the Collection more likely to come up in search results and introduce you to other photographers that you include within your Collection. They may very well reciprocate the invitation by inviting you into one of their own Collections, thereby increasing your exposure on
Dreamstime.
Use the link from your private collection wherever you market your work online (signature, blog post, Twitter). Or include the link on a postcard featuring a collection image. Or email the link to your email list of designers whenever you add a new image to a Collection. I'm sure you can be creative at finding numerous ways to share your private
Dreamstime Collections.
Here's a list of my Dreamstime Image Collections:
Labels: making money with stock photos, microstock agency, microstock photography
