Stock Photo Links

Archive for March, 2010

LinkedIn is a powerful Social Networking site that is particularly useful for anyone with a photography business to promote.

Register/Login to your account and create your profile and resume.

http://www.linkedin.com

Take your time and add relevant, interesting profile information. The secret with any Web 2.0 marketing is to do it like you mean it … if you just go through the motions to try and build links and skip over the ‘shared content’ part you’re missing the point!

Make sure you include a few relevant keyword phrases … don’t overdo it … put your main keyword phrase in there 2-3 times, plus a couple of others once or twice.  Remember it is primarily for real people to read, so don’t go stuffing too many keywords in there.

Then add links to your various photography websites …

Creating your links and anchor text

1. Click on My Profile => Edit My Profile

2. Click the Edit link beside your websites.

3. This will let you edit your additional information (click edit).

4. Add a web site listing. Start by taking the box that says “Choose” (it may say ‘My Website’, ‘Comany Website’ etc, and select “other”. This will let you to specify keyword rich anchor text.

5. Enter a keyword phrase that describes  the page you’re linking to. This is used as the anchor text, so make sure it’s ‘readable’ and totally relevant ot the page content.

For example, if the page is a lightbox of ‘Custom Car’ photos, you might enter ‘Stock Photos of Custom Cars’. If it’s a photo page, always try to include the words photos or images or photography.

6. Then enter in the URL, … and check it first in a separate window … and then click Save Changes.

Making your links visible

1. Look for the link titled “Edit Public Profile Settings” in the upper right portion of the screen. Click on it.

2. Then on the next screen make sure that the “websites” box is checked.

3. Click Save Changes.

You can have up to 3 URLs in your profile so use them wisely.

If you have your own website you might choose to link to:

1. Your Home Page or Portfolio, with “Your Name: Subject Stock Photography” as the link text … where Subject is a keyword phrase describing one of your key subjects or fields of work.

2. A Photo Page such as a Lightbox or a Gallery, and again, the link text should be a specific keyword phrase and the page should be totally relevant to that phrase. ie. Golden Retriever Stock Photos.

… and this last link is important …

3. A different website page that links to your website, ie a Facebook page, or an article published on www.EzineArticles.com, or a profile on another stock photography portal website.

Altenratively, if you don’t have your own personal website, but a presence on a photography portal instead, you might take a similar approach …

1. A link to your main profile/portfolio page

2. A link to a photo lightbox or gallery set.

3. A link to another webpage that links to your main web presence

This extra link to an external website is known as 3-way linking or ‘triangular linknig’ and is extremely valuable for SEO. It’s something you should do regularly when you’re promoting your web presence. For every 5-10 links you set up to your main web precense, always try to add one to a different website that links to your pages.

OK, back to LinkedIn to finish off … as with all Social Marketing, the secret is to use the website yourself!

The best way to do that is to set it as an extra ‘home page’ tab in your browser, so it opens every time you launch your web browser. Then whenever time permits, you can login and do something …

You can update your status as appriopriate …  look for the What are you working on now? heading …

• Any time you’re adding new photo content, post a note and link it to your portfolio.
• If you make a new gallery or lightbox or album, let people know with a direct link.
• If you do any other web marketing … blogging, articles, video etc … give it a mention here as well.

It all adds up and people will check it out!

Have fun … and look me up for a new ‘connection’ when you’re done!

This is great value item for anyone serious about promoting their photography online.

It allows you to take a selection of photos, captions, chhose some background music and trasnistions, and create a short promo video with just a couple of clicks.

You can then upload that to YouTube and boradcast it through services like TubeMogul, generating targeted traffic and valuable high-PR backlinks.

The software was designed for the Internet Marketing crowd — and as a group they know a thing or to about generating website traffic — and the thrust of it was originally to use short articles and convert those to videos.

Fortunately for us we work in a visual medium, so our emphasis is more on the photos and we can jsut add short captions instead.

I used to subscribe to a website that let me do all this, and I’ve got to tell you the  monthly fee was about double what these guys are charging for the software. Needless to say I’ve since cancelled that membership and I’ve been using the standalone product instead with great results.

I strongly recommend you check out the Video demonstration at the link below …

http://www.ozurl.com/l/videos

PS. It is PC only, so Mac users might find Animoto a useful alternative.  You can check out Animoto here.

First up I want to make one thing absolutely clear …

The articles you write for Online Article Marketing are NOT a ‘sales pitch’ for you or your work.

Each article should be about a different Subject that you photograph.

The idea is to attract people  with an interest in a specific subject … that you happen to have photographs of.

So you write an article about a specific subject that you have photographs of, post it to various article directories, with links back to photos of that subject. So you’re offering up good free information about the subject, with the option for your reader to then go and look at photos of the subject.

This works for you in a number of ways …

First of  all you get visitor targetted traffic … people with an interest in your subject, read your article and visit your website.

If your article is good, it’s quite possible it wil lbe syndicated … ie people will republish it in their own blogs and newsletters, with your links still embedded, increasing your exposure even further.

(A good newsletter can go to 100K+ readers and generate a virtual avalanche of visitors overnight … they won’t al lbe buyers but in those sorts of numbers, you’re likely to find a few!)

And of course you get instant backlinks.

Some of the article directories have a high Google PageRank, which means any links from their site to your site increases the value of your site in Google’s eyes … and htat improves your ranking in the search engines.

And the higher you rank in Google, the more peope lare going to see your link … and the more visitors you’ll get!

So for the ‘writing’ part of it, always remember, it’s all about The Subject … not you, and not even your photos as such.

If you have a lightbox of ‘dog images’, write an article about dogs.

If you have a set of restaurant food images, write a short piece about the specific cuisine.

If you have a set of photos of a building, find out something about the style of architecture or even the architect.

If you have photos of a city, write a brief guide to the must-see sights.

If you’re writing multipel articles for a given subject, you can make one of them  about ‘photographing XZY’ if that’s your interest, just as lnog as you avoid the ‘sales pitch’ approach.

A  lot of photographers resist this sort of approach to marketing their work, and plenty will insist that their work stands on it’s own and they should have to write … but unfortunately they’re missing the point.

For their work to speak for itself, it’s got to be seen … and online that jsut doesn’t happen without written content to tell the search engines what it’s about. And really it’s nothing new.

Savvy photographers have been putting words with their images for years to sell more photos. It’s always worked well for editorial sales, and in an internet environment this approach is even more effective.

So again, as a bare minimum, you should be planning to publish 2-3 short articles on each of your key subjects. Submit those to 20 of the biggest article directories, and you’ll be adding 50+ high value backlinks and generating a lot of useful, long-term traffic.

Now I can already hear many of our readers groaning that they don’t write, can’t write or simply won’t write. That’s OK, there are several ways you can still use this powerful website marketing tool if you’re serious.

You don’t need a whole lot of content and you don’t need to do it constantly. In fact one short article for each of your key subjects will do the job.

1. The best suggestion I can offer is to learn enough to get by.

The writing for these articles does not need to be perfect … interesting, relevant & readable is much more important. And long term, if you want to market your photography online you should be providing related written content.

If you want some good assistance, I’d really recommend you register with www.EzineArticles.com as an author.

Once registered, look for their offer of free training emails. These are priceless!

You’ll get a heap of great information plus some good simple templates & ideas for writing short effective articles. Just apply those to your key subjects and you’ll

2. Alternatively, you can find someone to write for you.

You can go to a website like www.eLance.com and post a job for someone to ghostwrite say 12 short articles for you, one on each of your key subjects. You provide the subjects, the article length and the time frame, and various freelancers will bid for the job.

There’s currently 11,000+ Article Writers registered on eLance, so as long as you’re clear and specific about what you need, you should get quick results and a good price. $50 could easily get you a hig hquality 500 word article on 10-15 different subjects. Try it and see!

If you want to have a go at this yourself, one easy starting point is the ‘list’ article …

Top ten ways to photograph ……..
Seven things you never knew about ……..
3 pro secrets to great …….. photos
The best  ….. tips for 2010
How to build a ……
How To buy a ….
10 Things to do when you visit …

Pick your subject and fill in the blanks.For SEO submissions you only need a short, basic article, but if you can write a good one, slightly longer, you’ll have soemthnig that people are more likely to sundicate and republish for you (with your links embedded of course!)

That’s one for later though … we’ll show you how to put them to work in the next post.

This website lets you insert any long & complicated web URL, add a ‘keyword’ of your choice, and make a shorter, user-friendly link from it.

You can check it out now at the link below …

For example, you might enter one of your web portal links with all the querystrong  id information to make it shorter and easier to remember:

Becomes …

Alternatively, you might decide to use a relevant keyword as a tag, and a lightbox of dog photos might become:

Just enter the long links into the form, add a relevant keyword (or your name) as the tag, and submit. You’ll immediately be given a shorter, more simple link that your Clients can easily remember and if need be, type into their web browser.

An added bonus is, using a relevant keyword can sometimes add to the SEO value of the page where you add the link.

You can also add a password if you want, to keep the destination URL private … could be handy if you need to show a Client previews from a shoot. There’s also an option to limit how many times the link can be viewed. Not sure why you’d want to do that, but the option is there!

Here are a few more ideas of how you can use these links …

• If you have to send a long link via email, you risk the link being broken over two lines, and your Client will never make it to your webpage, so shorten it and you’ll make it safer (and it will look more professional.
• Convert any long or complicated links that your Clients might need to type in to their browser, so there’s less chance they’ll make a typo and give up … especially important if you’re sending links by ‘snail mail’ or printing them on your busienss card.
• When you post to some websites like Twitter, you only have limited space, so use this link shortener to reduce the space you use up on your link.
• Make it easy for your Client to ‘remember’ what you’re sending them by using a relevant keyword or even your name in the link.
• Make short, easy-to-remember redirects for all your important webpages, so any time you’re talking to a Client, or prospective Client, you can give them an link there and then.

This service is totally free and links are permanent, so put it to good use!

Bookmark it now!

http://ozurl.com

Video Marketing is hot and I’ve got to tell you, I’m always amazed more photographers aren’t using this medium to drive targeted visitors to their websites. Just incase you haven’t really looked at it yet, here’s a few statisitcs to get you thinking …

• There are more people that watch YouTube videos than all of the 4 US News Networks put together!

• Over 40% of internet users watch online videos on at least a weekly basis; over 70% at least monthly.
• Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL are among the hundreds of Search Engines that give priory listings to websites that host video content.
• 4.7 billion videos were watched in the UK in April 2009 alone, up 47 percent compared to April 2008.
• 68% of people who watch online videos, will in turn, pass links for these videos onto their friends…turning them into viral traffic machines.

So what does all this mean to photographers?

Well for starters, we’re already working in a visual medium, and we already market our work to creative/visual people … so it’s a perfect match.

We have the content. We just need to format it for distribution and get it out there. Pretty simple really!

By now, I’m sure most of us have made a digital slideshow of some sort, and it’s not a big step to convert that to a video file. Add some background music, overlay some text captions, insert a few transitions and you’re ready to go.

You then ‘syndicate’ these videos via any of the video sharing websites, and suddenly you’re getting laser-targeted visitor traffic from those sites, PLUS you’ll usually find your videos ranking well in the search engines, PLUS the backlinks from the video sites will also improve the ranking of your website.

It’s a win-win-win situation and I think any serious photographer would do well to consider it.

The Video Marketing Strategy

Ideally I’d recommend a couple of short ‘slideshow videos’ for each of your Key Subjects.

For Search-Engine-Optimization purposes (SEO) … ie. ranking well in the search engines to generate maximum targeted visitor traffic … specific focus on a single subject for each video is the best approach.

A short slideshow of 12-15 images is plenty. The videos don’t need to be long. Keep it short and leave the viewer wanting more. That way they’ll be more likely to click through and visit your website.

OK, so once you have the video, you have to publish it.

Obviously YouTube is the best-known of the Video Sharing websites and gets the most traffic, so you should start there, but there are literally hundreds of other places to consider.

My preferred option is to use a Submission Service to automate the process.

TubeMogul will submit to 20-30 sites for you for free. After you set up a free acount, you need to register with each of the selected video sites and save your login details on TubeMogul. Once that’s done it only takes a couple of minutes each time you have a new video to broadcast.

Professional services such as Traffic Geyser will submit to 100+ sites for you at the push of a button. I personally prefer Traffic Geyser as it also includes submissions to various Blogs, RSS Aggregators, Social Bookmarking sites and even Podcast sites where appropriate, creating an instant network of content and backlinks.

The best part about these submissions services is, as the new content appears on the web, Google is quick to index it, and it’s quite possible to secure page one search listings within hours or even minutes of posting your videos.

There are a heap of ebooks available on all this but looking through them, most are all much more complicated than we need to market  photography. You’ll find some links below if you want to go all out on this — and it is good information — but most people don’t need to go that far.

I’m all for keeping it simple.

1. Pick Your Subject. The key for any SEO work is to focus on a specific keyword. For us that’s a subject. If you have a list of your key subjects, you can jsut work through it fro mthe top.

You then want to find a relevant keyword phrase that is actually being searched for. You can use the free Wordtracker Tool or the Google Keyword tool to see how many searches are performed each week for specific words and phrases.

2. Select Photos To Suit. 12-15 is more than enough. The key is variety. If you use images that are too similar, people will quickly lose interest. Each new image should reveal something new and intriguing about the subject.

3. Create a Slideshow Video. There are plenty of ways to do this …

You can use the free Open Office Impress to export a ‘PowerPoint’ presentation as a video file. You could use the free (PC) screen caputre software in the Members eLibrary to record any slideshow. Or Lightroom has a built-in video export function for Mac users (free for now!) I’m sure there are plenty of other programs available.

The Traffic Geyser service actually has a video maker built in to the platform  …  just upload your photos, add music and transitions, overlay text and save … click a button and it’s published as well. You can get a test drive of the Traffic Geyser service here. The full version isn’t cheap, but you can make and post a lot of videos in a one month trial!

There’s also a nifty bit of software I use that is designed to convert short articles to videos but works extremely well for this. I just insert my images as the background, paste my ‘captions in as the text overlay, set my transitions and add a background music track … and export it as a web-ready file.

4. Syndicate It! This is simple a matter of posting your video to the sharing sites so people can view it and pass it on. Again you have a few options here but I prefer to out-source as much as possible …

You can just post it to YouTube and you’ll get pretty good exposure. If you have one or two other Video Sharing sites you like, you can add to those as well, but as soon as you spend more than 5 minutes on this, I recommend using a submission service and going all out.

In that case, you can use the free TubeMogul submission option and instantly post your videos to 20-30 sites. There is a little bit of initial set up to do, but it’s we’ll worth the effort.

If you’re going to be doing a lot of this, I’d have to recommend Traffic Geyser. This is really a complete Social Marketing service. Register and look out for the free trial offer. Then go hard. You’ll need to set up all the account logins, so set aside some time for that … or ‘buy’ a set of pre-made logins.

If you research your Keyword/Subject carefully and do a full broadcast using the Traffic Geyser package, a top ranking in Google is a real possibility … for every one of your Key Subjects! (You can publish a lot of videos in a one month trial!)

A Few Additional Considerations:

Keywords: Again I can’t stress this enough … get specific. It is much easier to get a high ranking for a phrase than a single word. Don’t be afraid to go ‘long-tailed’ … a 3-5 word phrase … you’ll get a better ranking and more targeted traffic. Use this free Keyword Research tool for ideas, or take the 7 day trial to see how many people are searching for specific phrases every week.

Title: Make it interesting and catchy. Your video previews don’t always ‘sell’ your video well, so make sure your title works for you as well, building interest and curiosity, prompting people to stop and take a look. (Make sure you use your keywords in the title!)

Description: Always start your description with your website address. Then use your keyword immediately after that, built into a readable, interesting description. Keep it to 200 words or less.

Competition: What we’re doing here is fairly specialised, so this shouldn’t be a problem, but always do a search ion Google for your Keyword Phrase, and make sure there aren’t too many sites competing. Over 100,000 results and you need to get more specific with your phrase … less than 30,000 and you stand a good chance of taking out position one!

Length: Never forget the goal here is to get people to visit your website … so always leave your viewers wanting more! 10-15 images is plenty! Always finish up by letting the viewer know more images on this subject are available in your professional stock catalogue at www.yourdomain.com

Audience: Also remember you want to attract photo buyers, so make sure your presentation is totally professional and make sure your captions indicate that you are a professional and your work is for sale. When picking your keyword phrase, always chooseone more likely than be searched for by commercial photo buyers … ie “xyz stock images” rather than “xyz pictures”.

The Viral Effect:

The exception to the keep it specific rule is if you want to go for a viral effect so that viewers help you out by passing on your video (and link)

This means making a video that has some element in it that makes people feel compelled to pass it on. You don’t ask them and they probably don’t even realise that’s your goal … they just do it because the content is so good they know their friends and colleagues will appreciate it.

Often it’s humour, sometimes shock value can work, as can a feel good theme. Whatever route you choose, if you can create a video that people simple have to share with their friends, you can start to get some incredible exposure.

The added bonus here is, these sharing sites are ‘syndication’ services, so anyone can embed your video on their site, promoting your video (and your website) to an even larger audience, all with you ever doing any more with it.

Here are a couple of examples of videos that went viral …

This first is some interesting facts and figures in a short presentation … quite simple really, but it get’s people thinking, and they can’t help but pass it on …

My guess is, something like this, with your photos as a background and relevant ‘interesting’ facts, could work just as well if you geared it to a specific audience?

This second link is a listing of some of the most successful viral videos. The listing changes regularly so it’s worth looking from time to time to see what other people are up to. A lot of them are fairly predictable clips of idiots hurting themselves, but if you check it regularly you will find some real gems.

Additional Resources, Downloads & Links

Creating The Perfect YouTube Marketing Video: This is a comprehensive ebook packed full of useful information. Probably a bit more than most people need, but if you’re going invest some time and effort in this marketing strategy it could save you some time and headaches.

Articles To Video Software: Convert short targeted articles into powerful SEO videos in minutes. Check out the short video demonstration on this page.

Traffic Geyser: Register then look for the free trial offer tomake and publish as many videos as you can! If you’re using a lot of video, you cannot beat this service for convenience and exposure right across a mix of social media websites.

Tube Mogul: Free service submits to 20-30 video sharing sites. Small set up required but very effective marketing.

Word Tracker: Great for getting ideas of related keywords. Don’t pay too much attention to the ‘search count’ though as it’s a very restricted network.

Google Keyword Tool: This will give you a much better idea of search volume. Note that the first number is your local search volume … ie your country/region, your language, while the second is ‘everyone’ … so you can plan on the effective volume for any particular search phrase being somewhere in between!