LookStat – Official Blog

Stock photographers should be aware of all licensing options available to them (microstock, macro, direct licensing) and should decide which path or combination thereof makes the most sense for them.

The idea of direct licensing is one that has high mind share among photographers at the moment and most of the conversations I have heard tend to center around the technologies needed. While the technology platform is important, the harder part is having people know you exist. This may surprise you, but “build it and they will come” doesn’t really work. You need to help buyers find you.

It’s All About the Buyers

The goal here is to get people to seek you out. If you become known as the go-to photographer for your niche, then potential customers will seek you out. To do this effectively online, you need to decide what niche you are targeting, identify keywords for that niche and then make sure that your home page reflects those keywords and is SEO optimized.

In addition to SEO on your website, you need to make the most of the social media outlets available to you. These tools are blogs, twitter, facebook, linkedin and countless others. Think contribution – the more you can give to your community in terms of knowledge, advice, input, the more you’ll get back. It’s way better to educate and inform (at least via social media) than it is to drown people in your links.

Branding is a long term goal and like any activity that is fighting entropy, it takes longer to build than to destroy – nurture it. Every trace of you online contributes to your total brand perception.

Rank Highly For Your Niche, Not Just Your Name

No matter how big your brand, I’m close to 100% certain that the group of potential customers who know you will be smaller than the group of customers who have no clue who you are but still want the kind of images you produce. As a result, you have to make sure that your website does a good job of attracting people who are searching for your genre of work, rather than for you. You probably have a vast image library – get those images online and keyword them well. Remember you need to rank highly in searches for your genre, not just for your name.

Now Comes the Easy Part – Licensing Platforms

While you may disagree with me, I would argue that after you have buyers coming to you, the mechanics of technology licensing are relatively easy (thanks to the hard work of the platform vendors.)

I know of three platforms for licensing stock images directly (Clustershot, LicenseStream & PhotoShelter) and I’ve summarized some of the basic features and costs below. I am not an expert on the ins and outs of these systems, I just wanted to put some of the basic features in one place to simplify comparison.

In all cases, you need to remember that you are responsible for:

• Keywording – There’s no escaping this step. If your images are online, you’ll need to add keywords. All the systems below read IPTC/XMP metadata. (we can help with this)

• Legality – You need to ensure you set license types that are appropriate for the releases that you have. For example, if you don’t have a model release for commercial use, don’t sell a commercial license. All of the platform sites push this responsibility onto the photographer.

• Pricing – You can set prices; the platforms do provide guidance, but you have the final say. If you decide to have the platform set a price, make sure you test-drive to ensure things are being set appropriately.

The main advantages of using a licensing platform is that they have investing the time and dollars needed to build a solution for secure hosting, transaction processing, and client delivery of images. Doing this from scratch is messy and you’re way better off focusing on creating images and brand-building.

Stay Tuned

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be creating test accounts and uploading images to get a feel for how the process works. I’ll be documenting what I can and I hope you find it useful. If you have specific questions, please leave a comment and I’ll do my best to answer them over the course of my trials.

A Request for Help

If you have experience with any of these platforms, or use others, please let me know and I’ll expand the post. Finally, if I have misrepresented anything or left out critical pieces, again, I’d love to be corrected.

We were lucky enough to work with Tom Grill (CEO of Tetra Images & a Founding Member of Blend Images) on one of his micro submissions. He has written a blog post about his impressions of the service which you can read here.

Sure there is a fee involved, but when I factor in the savings of time and aggravation and apply that time to producing even more pictures, I probably come out ahead of the game…

…For me, the service is money well spent.

It was an absolute pleasure to work with Tom and to be trusted with his images and we look forward to the opportunity to work with him again in the future.

We are back online again. Thanks for your patience.

We have had a surge in new signups over the past week and need to add some more database capacity. Sorry for the hassle. We’ll be back up shortly. Hope everyone is having a great Friday!

We just released an analytics API to make it easy for sites to provide stats through the LookStat platform. The API was designed with ease of implementation and security in mind. If you’re interested in providing stats through the LookStat platform, we’d love to hear from you.

Keywording images is not much fun, but it’s important. This is true whether you are selling your images through microstock sites, uploading them to your own website for direct licensing or to help with traffic and brand building. Keywords need to be relevant to ensure a good user experience – you don’t want someone to land on your page and be irritated because the image has nothing to do with the keyword they searched on. Cast a wide, but relevant net. It’s far better to have 100 people visit and 20 people buy than it is to have 10,000 visit and all of them leave.

Don’t Forget About Titles and Descriptions

If you care about SEO (and you should) then keywords aren’t the only items that matter. You’ll need Titles and Descriptions to maximize your chances of getting found via search. Remember to keep things concise, relevant and focused on what people are likely to be searching for. iStock had a great post on this very topic recently and I recommend reading it. The crux of the issue is to be literal and descriptive.

“Localized Rainstorm” is not a good title for the image above. Much better to go with the more descriptive “Dog Peeing on Fire Hydrant” that the photographer chose. Titles aren’t about being witty or making potential buyers smile, they are about making sure your image can be easily found when someone is searching for the subject of your image.

Fix Your Page Titles (The Best 15 minute investment you can make in SEO)

The single most important factor that you control for your SEO is the page titles. This is the string that displays in the browser window title area (above the URL) and is controlled by the <Title> element. It is crucial that you select titles that contain high relevance search terms.

There are a ton of images online that may have keywords, but have the image filename in the title. This may come as a shock, but “DMC_33430934.jpg” is not a highly used search term for a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge at Sunset.

If you’re interested in learning more about page titles and ranking factors, check out the results of this survey on SEOmoz. Titles & Keywords are the top 2 factors listed.

There is no magic SEO bullet and it’s a process of continuous improvement. Having said that, fixing your title tags is a relatively straightforward thing to do and has a concrete benefit. (The time consuming part is making sure your images have good titles & keywords.)

Image Title First – Your Brand Second

Another important aspect to keep in mind is that you should lead with the image title, not with your own brand. The reason for this is that you want to rank highly for searches for ‘Golden Gate Bridge’ – you already rank highly for the name of your business.

As a result, “Golden Gate Bridge at Sunset Stock Photo | Eye Rock Photography” is generally better than having your business name at the front. This is even true on your home page. In general, a guiding principle with SEO is that you want to rank highly for your concept/category where possible. Those who know your name already know how to find you.

You can see this good examples of this use of “Keywords | Brand” in action at a range of sites around the web including:

• Microstock sites like: iStock, Shutterstock
• Individual photographer sites: David Sanger, John Lund

In general, as long as you have the keywords somewhere in the title, you’re ok, but having them listed first is generally considered the best approach. (Screenshot below is from the results of the SEOmoz survey mentioned earlier.)

My Images Sell Themselves

After someone arrives at your site, this is true. At that point, it is all about the image. To get people there, however, you need to make that image’s page visible to a search engine crawler. Today’s crawlers are text driven and need to be told what the page is about. Without a title, description and keywords, your images are effectively invisible.

Good keywording is critical if your images are online in any capacity whatsoever. Whether you are licensing them through microstock sites, your own website, or merely sharing them online to get them noticed, the words you use to describe them matter.

Keywords in Spreadsheets Don’t Count – Embed them in the Image

Keywords that live in spreadsheets are of no use to your images when they are online. They need to be embedded in the image file itself so that the metadata travels with the image. Microstock sites use IPTC Title, Description and Keyword fields to describe images and SEO-aware web services for image archive/display and sales, like PhotoShelter, will read these fields as well. Most photo editing and collection management applications will have ways of editing the image IPTC fields effectively.

We Can Help

As part of our Back Office Services, we offer IPTC-embedded keywording and SEO friendly titles and descriptions. If you’re interested in learning more, please contact us and we’ll get back to you to discuss your requirements.

We have been hard at work and a little too quiet (ok… way too quiet) about what we’ve been up to, but we’re finally ready to start talking about the features and services we have been developing. We just rolled out an update to our home page to reflect a new set of services that we have been providing to busy stock photographers for the past few months.

You Create the Images – We Do the Rest

We are now offering a full menu of Back Office services for stock photographers – keywording, uploading, submission & MR management – for a flat fee per image. Photographers are free to pick and choose whichever services they need, from the full package to selective elements based on their own workflow and requirements.

We have been providing these services for several months now to a core group of customers but are excited to open them up to a broader audience.

Why Offer These Services?

We believe that the workload associated with activities that aren’t directly tied to creating great images continues to go up and that this isn’t a great use of a creative individual’s time.

We’re committed to reducing friction and making life better for photographers and our goal with our Back Office services is to allow photographers to focus on doing what they do best, which is creating great images. We provide a flexible, cost-effective way to take care of the rest.

What About Analytics?

New feature development on analytics had taken a back seat to getting our services offering built out but we have added to our team and are back to active development on that feature. We will be announcing some enhancements to analytics in the next couple of weeks. We’re really excited about what’s coming and we hope you will be as well.

As always, feedback and questions are welcome. If you’re interested in learning more about our Back Office services, please contact us and we’ll get in touch right away.