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.