Thank you to everyone who attended the “Driving New Revenues from the Web: Missouri History Museum’s Story” webinar last week.  We had a great turn out and many asked some great questions.  If you missed the webinar, a recording is now available for viewing on our website click on the following link to view now:

http://www.licensestream.com/licensestream2/Portal/knowledge_center/webinars.aspx

Quick Overview of the Webinar:  We heard from Angie Dietz, Digital Asset Archivist for Missouri History Museum discuss their need to leverage the power of the Web to extend their reach online so that anyone, anywhere could quickly find and license their images and other digital assets.  We then learned how LicenseStream helped the Missouri History Museum monetize its vast historic archives to drive new revenues and discover new markets.  We also reviewed how LicenseStream Content Tracker works with Digimarc for Images to find and address unauthorized uses of content across the Web and also create new revenue opportunities for the museum.

We hope you find this type of information useful.  Keep an eye out for other upcoming webinars by viewing our webinars page or signing up to receive notices . If you have other webinar ideas we’d love to hear from you (post in the comments below).

As you already know the ‘Market Content’ section helps you create html code that you can paste into your own website or blog. With this code, you can create thumbnails of your images that link directly back to your LicenseStream account. That way, anyone, anywhere in the world who sees one of your thumbnails can click on the image or related link button to begin licensing on the spot.

But did you know that you can also:

•  Use the html code to link to your licensing page from your Flickr images?
•  Use larger, preview-sized images instead of thumbnails to link back to your licensing page?
•  Link directly to your licensing page from your own or another website?

In each of these cases, all you need to do is modify the html code we provide to make sure it links back to the correct content – usually a licensing page within your LicenseStream store. Here are a few quick examples and tips on leveraging HTML code to better market your content.

Link from Flickr

1.   Say an image buyer for a travel agency finds your amazing image of underwater diving off the coast of Hawaii on Flickr. To make it easy and seamless for them to license that image, simply provide a link that will take them from the Flickr image directly back to your LicenseStream account (add the html code to the description field for the image). Before adding the code that follows below, modify it by replacing the image ID after id= with your own image ID from the html code provided in the Market Content area:

<a href="http://www.licensestream.com/LicenseStream2/Shared/Dispatcher.aspx?id=cfb140f7-f793-4a2e-bec9-830f7aa5d1c2" rel="nofollow">License this image</a>

Once it is modified, add it to the description field for the image.
Example from Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/uschi1306/3725097329/in/set-72157621406631921/

Showcase Your Photography

2.    If you have a visually superb photograph that you want to showcase, you may want to display  larger images instead of thumbnails. To ensure that anyone clicking on that larger image can begin licensing it with a mouse click, simply modify the html code by replacing the text ‘Thumbnails’ with ‘UserComps’ in your html code:

<a href="http://www.licensestream2.com/LicenseStream2/Shared/Dispatcher.aspx?id=3071c372-1531-4c0c-8d58-9d1b6423f2fa"><img src="http://www.licensestream2.com/LicenseStream2/ContentStorage/47/

UserComps/fdemp5bb.jpg></a>

Example of a linkback from a larger image:

http://www.uschigerschner.com/PhotoArchive.html

Link from your Own (or Another) Website

3.   If you have a LicenseStream account but have built your own online presence elsewhere, it’s easy to link to your LicenseStream account from an image you are hosting directly on your own website. All you have to do is modify the html code below by replacing the image ID after id= with your own image ID from your html code:

<a href="http://www.licensestream.com/LicenseStream2/Shared/Dispatcher.aspx?id=2688b5bc-dfe0-418a-9c8e-ab0710525730">License this image</a>

Example of a linkback from another website:

http://www.uschigerschner.com/index.html

liveBooks users please note: Most liveBooks sites are created using Flash. As a result, you will not be able to link back to specific content in your LicenseStream account using the html code. Instead, you can simply add a link to your LicenseStream store from your liveBooks site.

As always, please feel free to contact support@licensestream.com with any questions or feedback.

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.

I’ve met a LOT of photographers lately who are finding the task of independently selling their own stock quite daunting. In particular, many photographers wonder how they can compete against agencies that have massive resources and existing relationships with art directors, ad agencies and the like.

The simple and most effective answer is to start by competing with them on a level where you can actually win! The best way to do this is to pick a niche and make it yours.

Let me explain…

Agencies often do a good job of getting your work in front of buyers, but are typically challenged in terms of dealing with very specific and narrowly focused subject matter. After all, there are only a certain number of topics that they can specialize in. With this in mind, your goal is to define a specialty topic that you can “own.”

The market you are in and the topic you want to specialize in will define just how “narrow” you need to get in order to find a niche in which you can thrive.

Consider the example of a commercial photographer in Southern California who shoots underwater as a hobby. This would be an example of an excellent niche. That said, we need to narrow it down a bit.

For instance, if you search “underwater photography California” in Google, you get 394,000 results. If you narrow it down to “underwater photography San Diego” you get only 162,000 results. If you narrow it even further to “underwater photography La Jolla” there are only 24,400 results and a “first page” that you could definitely get listed on if you take the time to do proper search engine optimization on a relevant section of your Web site, Gallery or blog.

Does this mean you want to limit yourself to such a narrow niche? Not a chance! However, a narrow niche like this is a great starting point. Having narrowed things down, you now have a very specific set of obvious potential buyers.

You might start by contacting the La Jolla Chamber of Commerce and letting them know about your unique collection of images from their area. Chances are good that they will also give you some tips on other people and businesses you might want to talk to. Depending on your promotional strategy, you might even consider licensing the Chamber of Commerce some of your images at a very favorable rate in exchange for photo credits and promotion.

Next, you might want to contact a selection of relevant businesses in La Jolla and let them know about your collection of images available for licensing. Typically, you’ll get a mix of businesses that have in-house marketing staff and other companies that use an agency. In the latter case, find out who their agency is. Chances are that agency would also want to know about your collection of photos.

To support these activities you might also try a few non-traditional tactics. For instance, you could:

• Start a blog, posting stories and photos from your underwater sessions in the region.
• Find a good quality printer of postcards and visit all the relevant local stores with a sample of postcards featuring your images and their branding (plus very clear photo credits and your URL). They may well be more than willing to offer such a postcard for sale. You’re not likely to get rich from this sort of postcard revenue, but it could be an extremely effective way to become known as THE photographer in this area.

Realistically, with the approaches outlined above, you could achieve “success” within 6 to 12 months with some diligent effort. Conversely, if you put in the same amount of effort but spread it across a number of different stock areas, it’s unlikely you’d get nearly the same amount of traction in that timeframe.

The real question is how to then grow this first success into something even greater.

Interested? Check back next week as we discuss how to expand upon a successful niche.

Ever wonder how to make the best use of Groups and Lightboxes?.
    
Groups are a great way to organize your content making it easier for buyers to get to specific categories they might be interested in. Take the Scenic Gallery of Roth Stock Digital Media for example. While the entire gallery offers a range of content, Groups have been set up to help those looking just for Animals, Cities and Towns, Colorado Scenes, the Continental Divide, Flowers and Plants, Lifestyle, Pikes Peak, and a little burst of color with the Red, White and Blue group.

Pikes Peak © Lee Roth

As the gallery expands into new regions, photographer Lee Roth tells us that additional groups are planned including Utah Scenery, Arches National Park, Zion Canyon National Park and Bryce Canyon National Park. Lee says you will find all of the Utah content in the Utah Scenes group, yet you will be able to quickly drill down to a specific park if you like, without even having to search for it. Lee considers this suggestive selling to people who may not immediately realize what topics are available in the main group.

We work on the red carpet in Hollywood and Las Vegas at events like movie premieres, awards shows, charity benefits and nightclub parties. So, as you can imagine, we've created a number of groups in his Celebrity Gallery. Here you’ll find groups highlighting different types of events, not to mention headshots and full length. These groups help publishers search a subset of the entire gallery. This way, if they are looking for headshots for a story about hairstyles, for example, they don’t have to search the entire database or scroll through lots of pages where full length fashion shots are mixed in. Of course, with good keywords, publishers may also search for “Headshot Jessica Alba” and go straight to what they want.

Angelina Jolie, © Lee Roth

So what are Lightboxes good for? Let’s say the publisher who was searching for hairstyles is not sure of how much space they are going to have for photos to accompany the article that is being written. By creating a Lightbox, the buyer can save the photos they like in their own area for quick reference when it comes time to make the final selections.

So, as you can tell from these examples, Groups and Lightboxes are powerful tools. And when combined with good keywords, these tools can make your site very efficient to use, and as a side-benefit, very useful to search engines as well (but that’s a topic for another Blog entry!)


Lee Roth is executive producer of Roth Stock Digital Media, based in Hollywood, California, with their newest studio located in Las Vegas, Nevada. Lee’s celebrity photos are syndicated worldwide and regularly appear in such magazines as People, In Touch, Us Weekly, Cosmopolitan, Harper’s Bazaar and many others around the world. In addition to celebrities, Lee also specializes in live events, scenery, environmental issues, and private glamour sessions.

Lee’s bio and links to all of his content categories are available at his portal, RothStock.Com. He may be reached at 702.202.4555 or producers@rothstock.com for more information and booking inquiries.

 © Lee Roth 2008 / RothStock.Com 

I’ve seen a number of photographers lately who have websites that link to major internet stock photo services and it strikes me that this is not a wise move.

Here’s the scenario:

• Photographer attracts a potential customer to their Web site.
• Potential customer is interested in licensing an image.
• Potential customer clicks on “buy” link and is taken to a site where the photographer’s work is surrounded by that of thousands of competitors, many competing at bargain basement pricing.

Fortunately, LicenseStream can make it  a very straightforward process. For thepurposes of this post, we’ll assume that you are already using LicenseStreamand have a Gallery set up.

Read on as we quickly walk through the rest of stepsinvolved:

1. Gather the images on your site that you want to sell from your site.
2. Upload them to your LicenseStream account and activate them, ensuring that you select the licensing model and pricing you want to use for each one (Rights Managed, Royalty Free, Rights Simple).  Be sure to leave the permissions in place to let them get published to your Gallery.
3. Go to your Gallery URL and click on the cart/purchase link for one of the images you want to sell from your site or blog (note that you must be logged out to see the cart link in your own gallery): 
   
   
4. After clicking on the cart/purchase link, select the URL from your browser for this particular “License Content” page (for instance: http://www.licensestream.com/LicenseStream/Gallery/galleryLicense.aspx?uid=628&cid=5801)
5. Edit the page that displays the corresponding image (or video) and post the URL you’ve just copied. If you’re posting on a blog this can be as simple as pasting the URL into the blog post. If you have a site, you’ll likely want to create a custom link. In the example below, the “available for download” link takes your visitor directly to the “License Content” page for that particular photo. Visit http://www.summerstockphotos.com/glowingclouds.html if you’d like to see it in action.
6. That’s it - you’re done. Visitors to your site or blog can now click on the link for a specific piece of content and be taken directly to the License Content page where they can select their preferred resolution and purchase the license in a secure environment.