Before we talk about how creative pros can build their network through Twitter, let's start with a multiple choice question.

Twitter is:
a) a microblogging tool?
b) a social network?
c) another online distraction?
d) not a good forum for professionals?
e) a great way to build your network?

The answer, of course, is it's whatevever you make it!

Rather than get into a long discourse about all the things you can do with it, let's look at 5 quick steps you can take to see if Twitter can help you make new professional acquaintances and build your network.

Here we go:
1) Create a Twitter account with a compelling background image and great profile photo.
2) "Follow" all your professional friends and acquaintances who are on Twitter.
3) Look at all the blogs and sites you frequent and look to see which authors and bloggers are on Twitter - follow them.
4) Do some research to find out which leaders in the markets you sell to are on Twitter, then follow them.
5) Make a point of "Tweeting" at least one insightful professional observation or interesting professional link per day. Add some personal Tweets as well if the mood strikes, although focus on delivering valuable tidbits in your area of expertise to your followers.

Keep Tweeting and adding new folks to your "follow list" for two weeks to a month and then assess whether you find value in it.

Chances are if you've followed the 5 steps above that you'll have expanded your network, learned a few things about your industry, and gotten some great insights as to your market.

Good luck!

BTW If you want some help learning to use Twitter, check out their Getting Started articles.

After months of late nights and thousands of hours of pizza-fueled development, we’re pleased to announce the launch of LicenseStream Creator 2.0. With a new look, way improved workflow, better search engine integration and new “stores,” LicenseStream 2.0 makes licensing your creative works easier than ever.

It also makes it easier to get compensated for your work. This new version includes a radical innovation: it ties search results to direct payment/licensing, removing the friction and shortening the throw, so to speak, between search-discover and payment (or licensing) for ANY type of digital content (including photos, videos, etc.)

A huge shout out is in order for a very dedicated group of alpha testers who spent months trying to “break” the software and who offered great insights. Watch for blog posts over the next few weeks as we feature this intrepid team here in the blog.

Some other great new features include:

• Integrated plug-ins for Adobe CS4.
• Enhanced SEO features.
• A new “members only” Marketing Education Center.
• New Marketing Tools.

 Watch out in coming weeks as we review the new features in LicenseStream Creator 2.0 and help show how you can leverage them to achieve real progress in your business.

We had some pretty exciting news hit the wire this morning. We've now teamed up with the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA), PMA – The Worldwide Community of Imaging Associations, and the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP). Members of these groups will now have access to professional discounts on LicenseStream Creator, LicenseStream PRO and LicenseStream storage upgrades.

Together, these premier photographers and imaging organizations represent a reach of nearly 35,000 creative professionals. Needless to say, these relationships mean a lot to us here and we're looking forwards to growing with these professional groups.

Check out the full press release...

 

Looking for an interesting way to get regular visits and generate interest in your photography?

Look no further than the example set by Uschi, our very own Manager of Technical Support at Imagespan and Owner of Uschi Gerschner Photography.

Uschi synergistically leverages a number of online strategies and, as a result, gets a lot of folks looking at her work.

First off, she's got her website, which is linked to her LicenseStream Gallery. This is further supported by her "photo a day" blog, Twitter feed, Flickr account, Lightstalker's profile and Linkedin profile.

What are you doing to get more people checking out your photos?

BTW - we've written in a previous post about how Creative Pros can leverage Linkedin. Check back as we'll add a post each week explaining how you can leverage additional web services and social media.

Photographers: LicenseStream provides rapid compliance with the PLUS licensing standards recently adopted by the major publishers.

In November 2008, three major publishers McGraw-Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Pearson announced that they would adopt the PLUS licensing standards in their contracts, and encourage image suppliers to begin embedding PLUS license metadata in all images.

PLUS (Picture Licensing Universal System Coalition) is an international non-profit organization dedicated to simplifying and facilitating the communication and management of image rights. The PLUS licensing standards allow rights and attribution information to travel within image files in a machine-readable format that provides instant access and universal understanding. LicenseStream's technology and Web-based services fully comply with the standards created by PLUS.

What does this mean?
By simply using LicenseStream you'll:

• Be fully PLUS-compliant
• Provide your customers content embedded with PLUS license information
• Use the same standards as major publishers

Are you a stock agency or media company? ImageSpan separately offers a LicenseStream API tool kit, which provides media companies and other image providers with a fully working embedded content licensing, royalty settlement and tracking service.

Want to find out about the latest content trends? The first ever User Generated Conference and Expo takes place February 9th and 10th at the San Jose Convention Center (full details at  www.ugcxevent.com). As an added bonus, LicenseStream users get 15% off the full conference rate with the following discount code: SPKRUXIS.

Of particular interest for LicenseStream users is the appearance of CEO Iain Scholnick in the following panels:

10 a.m., Tuesday, February 10
Photography Panel 5 - Sharing, Selling and Defending Photos Online

Licensing and sharing photos online provides both opportunities and risks for photographers and businesses. This session will provide best practices for sharing and selling photos online in a safe and secure way.

Moderator:
Maria Kessler, VP Creative Business Affairs, Jupiterimages

Speakers:
Ellen Boughn, Director of Content, Dreamstime
Leila Boujnane, CEO, Idee Inc.
Melissa Reeder, Development manager, Creative Commons
Iain Scholnick, CEO, ImageSpan


1 p.m., Tuesday, February 10
Photography Panel 7 - Servicing the Crowd - Business Opportunities around UGC

Users need services and so do the businesses they supply. Explore the opportunities in and around User Generated Content including affiliations, communication, licensing and money management.

Moderator:
Patricia Vargas, Dr. Director of Content, Jupiterimages

Speakers:
Tyler Olson, CEO, MicrostockGroup.com
Rahul Pathak, CEO & Founder, LookStat
Iain Scholnick, ImageSpan Inc.
Yuval Tal, CEO, Payoneer

Keynote speakers include Craig Newmark, Customer Service Rep & Founder, Craigslist, Guy Kawasaki, Founding Partner, Garage Technology Ventures, Fred Durham, CEO & Founder of CafePress as well as Bruce Livingstone and Kelly Thompson, CEO/Founder and COO of iStockphoto.

For more information, view speaker information and full session descriptions on the site. 

I bet LinkedIn is not the first place that comes to mind when you think about dynamic, exciting places to network with fellow professionals and prospective clients.

That said, did you know that if you search LinkedIn you get results for:

• 18,735 Art Directors
• 18,790 Photographers
• 267 "Photography" related groups, including "Photography Industry Professionals" with 4575 members.
• 1210 "Advertising" groups, including "Media Professionals Worldwide" with 22,496 members.
• 2624 "Media" groups, including "Those in Media" with 26,995 members.

I'll bet that got your attention!

The big question, of course, is how can you translate participation on LinkedIn into actual work.

There are a number of ways that this can happen, but the first thing you need to know is that you need to approach this (and just about every other online community) with the intent of adding value.

The truth is that if you start participating in groups, answering questions or making connections from a "sales" perspective you will have extremely disappointing results.

Instead, seek out the type of groups and individuals who you would like to do business with and make an impression on them by making their lives easier. In the Questions and Groups sections in particular, there is a lot of dialogue and a lot of professional questions. If you can be the one to step up and answer someone's question, you will then have their trust (and the trust of everyone else who sees your answer).

Once you've accomplished this, you'll find that opportunities start to present themselves where you can tell folk what your own specialty is and what you offer professionally. For instance, if you help out a peer they will be more than willing to tell others about you. Alternately, maybe someone will be looking for a specific type of photo and you can direct them to your site or LicenseStream Gallery ;-)

I know one professional who got a $20,000 contract and a feature on an industry-leading website after his first two weeks of following this approach.

What's holding you back from testing the waters?

Do you have Rights Managed licenses that you use on a regular basis? With new updates to LicenseStream you can now save these licenses and re-use or modify them over and over again.

You can apply these Ready Made licenses to images in your gallery so that they appear to potential buyers or use them yourself when you need to present licenses for private client images. When Gallery visitors see an image, any Ready Made license you've created will automatically appear as a convenient choice.

Plus, we've added new Gallery Management features that allow you to assign or remove Ready Made licenses with the click of a button.

We've also added a "Contact Me" feature for your Gallery images. When you apply this feature, potential image buyers are prompted to enter their contact information and a brief description. This information is then automatically emailed to you through LicenseStream. This is a great feature when you want complete control over the pricing of certain images.

Most top photographers understand the need to focus on an area of specialty if they want to grow their business. We recently posted on Marketing Your Photos – Start with A Niche and Marketing Your Photos - Expand On a Successful Niche. With this post, we’ll explore how to use LicenseStream Galleries to power your niche photography.

First and foremost, LicenseStream Galleries give you the means to display and sell your images to buyers around the world, using your choice of licensing models.

The key elements to your Galleries are groups, keywords and descriptions. Before setting up your gallery, you will want to consider your plans for the future. Let’s have a look at how your plans affect your choices within these areas.

Groups
Are you going to have one single niche or are you likely to eventually expand into multiple areas of specialty? If you have just one niche then your entire gallery will be built around that niche and your group naming structure will reflect that. For instance, if your niche is around wilderness shots, you might have groups like:

• Forest
• Desert
• Marine
• Mountains

However, if you are going to include outdoors sports as well as wilderness, you might have groups like:

• Sports – Kayaking
• Sports – Mountain Biking
• Sports – Climbing
• Wilderness – Forest
• Wilderness – Desert
• Wilderness – Mountains

 

Keywords
Assigning keywords to photos with the Keyword Generator and adding your own descriptive keywords is pretty straightforward. That said, it’s a great idea to give some thought up front to the types of buyers who will be searching through your Gallery. For instance, depending on who you cater to, an art director in an agency may well use different terms than an independent Web designer.

It’s also important to be consistent in your conventions for keyword selection.  For example, imagine if you have a lot of shots of Florida beaches and some of them were keyworded with the beach and state (Cocoa Beach, Florida), while some of them were only  keyworded with the state (Beach, Florida). In that case, imagine a buyer searching for “Cocoa Beach.” They would receive a set of results and think that they had a complete set of Cocoa Beach photos, when in fact some of the best ones could be missing due to your inconsistency in keywording.

Descriptions
Your photo descriptions in the gallery are another valuable tool. They are an excellent place to describe and set context for your photos. They are also searchable within your Galleries. As with keywords, give some thought to your buyers and the kind of language they relate to and are likely to use in their searches.

It’s also good to decide in advance how your Gallery will interact with your existing Web site or blog. If you have a showcase of your niche images on your site, it’s a fairly straightforward process to add individual photo links to each image on your site so buyers can license them directly through LicenseStream (see Setting Up Your Site or Blog to Sell Stock Using LicenseStream). Alternately, you can link to your Gallery home page rather than specific photos. This is a great strategy for email signatures, bios, business listings, etc.

Happy Shooting!

In our recent post we investigated the idea of starting with a niche as a smart strategy for marketing your photos. So, what’s the next step if you want to expand on a successful niche?

As with all businesses, there are basically only two ways to expand:

1. Grow your market (i.e. increase the number of clients you serve).
2. Grow the amount of business you do with your current client base.

In some cases, you may want to do both of the above. For example, a good strategy for the underwater photographer in our previous post would be to expand their market somewhat and then grow the volume of business within that market.

Let’s assume that the photographer in this example successfully followed the steps to develop a meaningful niche in the area of underwater photography in La Jolla, California. While this is a success in itself, it’s likely not going to create a revenue stream large enough satisfy all the needs of your business.

In this example, our photographer would be smart to follow many of the same steps mentioned in our previous post to expand the geographic boundaries of the market niche to include underwater photos taken throughout Southern California. There’s definitely work involved, but by following these same steps the photographer would over time be able to develop relationships with agencies, chambers of commerce, tourism boards and strategic retail partners throughout the geographic area (see Marketing Your Photos – Start with a Niche for more details).

Depending on the specific niche, after efforts spanning a year or two, you might well have the basis of a thriving photography business throughout Southern California. Let’s assume in the case of our underwater photographer, however, that the amount of business within this niche in this region does not generate enough revenue to satisfy their needs.

At this point, our photographer could expand the underwater photography niche beyond Southern California, but this would likely have its limits unless they were prepared for a rigorous travel schedule and the challenges of making new relationships far outside their locale.

A more efficient option may be to add a related niche or two. Closely related niches might include:

• Wildlife
• Beach shots
• Families interacting with nature

By capitalizing on existing relationships with art directors, agencies and businesses, adding one or more of these niches will be very easy compared to getting established in the first niche. With a receptive group of clients in place, this is a truly rewarding way to leverage all your work to date.

One critical point to remember, however, is not to try to plunge into too many areas at once. By doing so you would risk diluting the credibility and respect you took so long to build. As tempting as it is to try to do “everything,” keep in mind that it’s way more satisfying and ultimately way more lucrative to limit yourself to a number of niches in which you can truly excel.

Happy Shooting!

Watch for upcoming posts as we describe how to use LicenseStream to power your niche stock business.