Marketing & Promotion for Microstock Photographers

Who is this guide aimed at?

If you are reading this guide then you probably already have a more than passing interest in promoting yourself online as a photographer or illustrator. You likely already have a personal web site (or at least dabbled with some online presence), social services or posted your photos/portfolio on a Flickr like service. Many microstock contributors operate on a part time basis, some with the intention of turning that into full time work in the future. There are two ways to look at self-promotion from a microstock

view point:

• Concentrate on taking great photos and they will sell themselves.

• Market your work everywhere and in every way you can to earn more.A few years back it was easy to think the margins in microstock did not allow any scope to spend money/time on self-promotion other than a basic webpage or blog. As microstock becomes the ‘norm’and more photographers work at microstock as a full time job I’ve started to see countless photographers marketing themselves in all kinds of novel ways. This guide is just as useful to hobbyists as it is to full time microstockers. Some of the topics however clearly require an investment that may be beyond the scope of most people who only have a few hours to spare for their casual online activities. Marketing online is so easily scaled; you can spend as little or as much time as you like taking different approaches, the keys to it all are the iterative cycle of planning, implementation, measurement and refinement/analysis. You probably think your biggest hurdle at the moment is “how can I build a website” “how can I get 1000 followers” “how can I build a mailing list” – that’s the easy bit. Creating a plan that works is much harder to do, measurement and interpretation of results can be really quite challenging. Refinements to your plan often include simply accepting a failure and learning from it. We are going to look at marketing only in the online space, for photographers or illustrators who are selling ‘images’ as their products, i.e. Stock photographers. Photographers working in other fields should also be able to take away some useful information.
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Introduction:

To start with I really must highlight that with the diversity of images photographers take it’s impossible to create a one-size-fits-all marketing guide. A recent thread on Microstockgroup (2010: http://www.microstockgroup.com/general-stock-discussion/strategies-for-self-marketing-in-microstock) started me trying to organize 10 years of online experience into an easy to read guide. Most marketing activity online boils down to the following 4 options, each of which I will look at in more depth later:

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