The turning of the year is a great time either to get your photography business rolling or implement new practices to kick it into high gear.  While possessing first-rate technical skills and taking compelling photographs may give you an edge over competitors, establishing your photography business and competing effectively requires you to think strategically and to secure a firm grip on the management and financial aspects of your business.

Whether you’re just starting out or a seasoned pro, this is a great time to time to determine what works, what doesn’t, and to adopt practices that will strengthen your operations, drive revenues and boost profits. Take a look at the following list of five New Year’s photography business resolutions and select the right ones for you.

• Create a business plan (or revisit the one you have): Writing a business plan is a critical step in the success of any small business.  It can serve as a roadmap for building and managing your business. If you have an existing business plan, revisit it and ask the hard questions: Did your business accomplish what you set out to do this past year? Why or why not? Make notes on what steps may help you achieve unfulfilled goals and determine what goals need to be revised. Your new or revised business plan should include realistic and specific goals, as well as concrete steps for reaching those goals. For example,
  • Set a goal of reaching three clients per month. Then create an offer designed to bring in those customers. This could be a New Year’s email to your current client base that extends discounts to those who refer business to you and promotion codes for new customers who come to you via referral. Include gift suggestions for all occasions, including photo calendar gifts for the New Year, family portraits for a special anniversary, or pet portraits for birthday gifts or notecards.
    
• Leverage the power of LicenseStream: Many photographers now have sites online to promote their work, but remain reluctant to post all of their work online for fear of piracy. Alternatively, they offer only a subset of their images through stock agencies. Photographer, writer and historian Joseph Sohm is among those who have turned to LicenseStream to help him address these problems and to promote, track & create new revenue streams.
  • Says Sohm: “LicenseStream empowers me to publish all of my photographs directly to my Web site and to global search engines, so that anyone can find my search-optimized photos online and pay for them with a mouse click." Sohm's “Visions of America: Photographing Democracy,” is a book of photographs taken over 30 years and across 50 states that offers a sweeping portrait of life in the United States. It recently won the Gold medal for “Best Coffee Table Book” at the 13th annual Independent Publishing Awards in New York City.
    
• Engage with Social Media: In addition to leveraging LicenseStream to publish to major search engines and other Web sites such as Flickr, photographers also are turning to a range of social media channels to share information, socialize, develop trust and authority online in a way that builds their brand and fosters relationships that help grow their business. (For more about how photographers are using social media and the results of such efforts, check out the Social Media Survey conducted by Jim Goldstein and compiled by Jim in partnership with Taylor Davidson.)
  • As we’ve written about in the ImageSpan blog a social media strategy typically involves engagement with customers and partners via multiple avenues. For example, many photographers are Blogging to Build Relationships via columns they write regularly on their websites. Alternatively, you may want to explore how LinkedIn Provides the Missing Link between Social and Professional Networking that helps you build your brand, leverage the community of Facebook for Fun and Profit or Grow Your Network with Twitter.  
    
• Don’t go it alone: Even the most experienced and successful of photographers eventually may feel they’ve hit a brick wall when it comes to cultivating their business. While many photographers will find camaraderie via online forums, it doesn’t hurt to build a community of local peers with whom to meet, share experiences, and business tips and tricks. Photographer Steve Castillo of Menlo Park recharges his batteries by meeting regularly with other photographers to swap information about the latest technologies and promotional ideas. Says Steve: “These meetings are great for learning about new ideas and for reinforcing basic promotional techniques, such as sending clients reminders that you enjoy doing business with them, and finding ways to stay connected to them.”
  
• Revisit pricing and expenses: The threshold of a New Year also is a great time to review all of your efforts in 2009 and determine which were profitable and which were not. As part of this process, it pays to revisit pricing. Are you charging enough to cover costs and grow your business? Are your prices in line with norms for the type of photography and geographic market in which you operate? Are your profits sufficient to pay for your overhead, new equipment and training? This also is a good time to review expenses. Consider sharing workspace costs, equipment, and combining different talents to collaborate on projects and expand networking circles. If your passion for photography far outweighs your business acumen, it may be worth spending a little more upfront on a business consultant who can help you run your business more efficiently and profitably. 
  

 What else is on your list? Click on the “Comments” link below to share your top New Year’s photography business resolutions with the LicenseStream community.

 

Today ImageSpan, the creator of LicenseStream, is announcing a strategic alliance with liveBooks, Inc., the leading provider of customized portfolio websites and marketing software for professional photographers. By teaming the market-leading LicenseStream licensing and royalty payment automation platform for all media with liveBooks’ services, the companies will deliver a set of best-in-class services that will empower photographers to publish their content safely and directly to the Web and global search engines, enabling them to extend their online reach and generate new revenues. To see today’s full announcement, go to the ImageSpan Newsroom.

To  learn more about how this strategic alliance can help you more efficiently manage your photo archive, click in to the webinar liveBooks will host with ImageSpan at 2 p.m. Pacific (5 p.m. Eastern) this coming Thursday, July 30. The webinar will feature ImageSpan’s Community Agent and Strategic Relations Director Pamela Fischer. See how you can enable licensing of your photos on your liveBooks Web site using LicenseStream and turn each piece of content into its own storefront. Register for the liveBooks webinar now!

How do you price your content for licensing?  It depends on a few key variables, including the type of content you want to license and the licensing model you select for that content. In this blog, we’re looking at pricing photographs, and so a key variable to consider is the goal of the photographer.

 

For example, are you (or the photographer you represent) targeting a specific market with a particular set of images?  Are you looking for the big single image license, or would you prefer to see your image(s) licensed multiple times to a number of different end users? The process of asking such questions applies to all the types of content that can be licensed through ImageSpan’s LicenseStream, including photos or other images, video, audio, even text and will help you determine the type of licensing models you’ll select.

 

Before we review how to select the best licensing model for your work, it may be helpful to look at some of the unique services LicenseStream offers and at how they will help you maximize the value of your work.

 

One is LicenseStream’s automated pricing engine. ImageSpan has conducted extensive research to ensure the automated pricing engine available in LicenseStream generates accurate pricing. Our platform also is designed so that you, the image creator, may allow people to license images for specific usages, types of media, regions, dollar amount, etc.  This empowers you as the content owner to negotiate larger deals – and not leave any money on the table.  Image buyers, especially when licensing their content for a large media buy or for an exclusive license, typically prefer to speak with someone to ensure they are obtaining the proper rights, etc. LicenseStream facilitates this exchange by building an email function into the licensing request process. Once the rights are agreed upon, completing the transaction with LicenseStream provides a clear record of the agreement’s terms and can be transacted by you (or the content owner you represent), or your client.

 

LicenseStream offers another unique advantage to both the content creator and the buyer: our licensing process generates licenses using the PLUS code – a machine-readable code that provides critical information such as the rights attached to a specific image and the license’s expiration date. This is extremely helpful for publishers using the content and who license very high volumes of images and need a way to track all the rights that they already have. Equipped with the ability to access the information provided in the machine-readable code, publishers can know exactly when and for what purposes they need to re-license an image.  At the same time, the PLUS code helps you as the content creator ensure that your clients use the images only as defined by and for the length of time the license permits.

 

However, before you even assign a price to content, you need to determine the business model you’d like to wrap around your content. In this post, we’ll review three established licensing models and one new model developed by ImageSpan as a response to the needs of our subscribers.

 

Royalty Free 

Pricing Royalty Free content is simple – it is based on the size of the image, video or other content that the buyer needs. It places no limitations on usage or duration of usage on the part of the licensee. Generally, the only limitation is that buyers cannot resell the image. For photographs or videos, pricing usually varies based on the resolution of the piece that is bought (i.e. higher resolution images cost more money). Standard Royalty Free prices range anywhere from approximately $39 to $500 for a single image.  Today, Royalty Free images also are available via a subscription model or on an old-fashioned CD, whereby a client pays an upfront fee, per user, to gain unlimited access to a pool of imagery for a certain period of time. 

 

Rights Managed 

Where image pricing really gets fun is when you are working with Rights Managed (RM) imagery.  Favored by top pros, this model ensures that a work’s creator gets paid fairly based on the value to the client. Because this model can be so complex, it typically isn’t used with lower-priced transactions. Several factors enter into RM imagery.  Pricing is based on how an image will be used, where it will be used, length of usage, type and amount of distribution and exclusivity.  For the most part, RM licenses are non-exclusive, meaning the -customer understands that someone within their industry may use the same image.  For very high-profile ad campaigns, book covers, even greeting cards and other photo products, the Exclusive license is preferred and in fact it  can be very valuable. 

 

Exclusive

Exclusive licenses typically are used in cases involving high-profile, high-priced licenses to ensure that a competitor does not also use the same image to promote the same product, or in some cases, any other product (as in the case of an all-industry exclusive license).  This type of license should always be negotiated offline and the terms tailored to a specific use.  Once the terms are established, the transaction can be completed online as long as the content owner puts the content with the exclusive pricing in the shopping cart for the customer to the customer can easily complete the transaction. Editorially speaking, you may license an image exclusively for the cover of a magazine or a book.  An exclusive license for the cover of a magazine is going to be LESS than an exclusive license for the cover of a book.  Why?  The life span of a magazine is less than that of a book.  However, the image on the cover of any publication is what will sell the publication.  For the cover of a magazine, I would charge at least an additional 100% of the usage fee for the exclusive. 

 

Selling an exclusive license for the cover of a book is different in that the presumed shelf life of a book, so to speak, tends to be longer and the pricing for book (and therefore the image) typically is higher.  Just as a cover sells a magazine, the cover of a book really does sell a book.  It is important that you ask who the author is, especially for a retail book written by an author that you know will print and re-print.

 

You want to get market value!  Also, remember, when you license an image exclusively, you are blocking that image from being licensed again for that usage, within that industry and for an agreed-upon period of time. Exclusive licenses can go for well over $25,000 - $30,000 or more -- for a single image!  When licensing an image exclusively in the Commercial space, remember, again, it is being used to sell a product – what that agency is going to spend on media vs. what they are going to spend on your image is HUGE – get market value!  For an advertising exclusive, you should add a minimum of $5,000 to $10,000 for a usage fee.

 

Rights Simple

Rights Simple licensing combines the protection and detail of a Rights Managed license with the simplicity of a Royalty Free license. With this unique licensing model, developed by ImageSpan, buyers can get a license for a specific use but they are not limited by the industry or the region in which they use the work. It can be selected in a single click and all the terms of the license are included in the simple statement. In most cases, Rights Simple transactions of similar quality are priced higher than Royalty Free and lower than Rights Managed.  

Choose the Licensing Model that Best Meets Your Goals

Pricing is always an interesting challenge. Before you assign a price, it is critical that you carefully consider the benefits of each licensing model and how that selection affects pricing. For example, while a Rights Managed image may sell for a high price, the market for such an image may be limited. If you’re looking to expand your market, Royalty Free content may find a broader user base than Rights managed content, however, revenue from individual Royalty Free sales likely will be lower. Similarly, Rights Simple content may be priced low, but it is likely to find a larger market and appeal to buyers that usually don’t purchase stock, namely commercial media and advertising firms.  

Coming Up

Next week we’ll take a deeper look at the licensing model most favored by top photography pros – Rights Managed images.

 

 

 

 

Global Internet traffic will be nearly four times larger in 2013 than it is in 2009, according to a forecastreleased by Cisco last week. By the end of 2013, says the report's executive summary, the equivalent of 10 billion DVDs will cross the Internet each month.

Internet video, which now accounts for about one-third of all consumer Internet traffic (not including the amount exchanged through P2P file sharing), the report adds, will account for more than 60 percent of all consumer Internet traffic in 2013.

As Tyler Willis subsequently pointed out in MediaPost's Video Insider column, the question this massive growth projection raises is: which business models will be poised to take advantage of this trend? Writes Willis: “While video advertising is predicted to increase steadily, especially as television dollars move online, it won’t increase large enough to meet the new demand. According to eMarketer, online video advertising spending is projected to increase less than 30% into 2010. There’s an urgent need for new business models that will help the market monetize this massive increase in attention.”

ImageSpan’s LicenseStream service offers just such a business model.  LicenseStream’s market-leading licensing and royalty payment automation platform addresses the issue of monetization in a couple of critical ways:

• LicenseStream is the first service to enable content creators to publish their content directly to the Web and global search engines, enabling anyone in the world to find their search-optimized content and pay for it with a mouse click. This essentially makes the content itself the storefront. The implications of this are clear: this innovation will dramatically speed the pace of transactions and drive incremental revenues. In this era when crumbling old-line media and distribution channels are being replaced by aggressive, Web-based middlemen, the ability for any creator or enterprise to go directly to consumers is a huge boon.

• LicenseStream cuts out the inefficiencies associated with current manual processes for selling or licensing content. Until now, companies seeking to monetize video or any other type of content they run into a wall because their content revenues can’t cover the costs associated with processing content licensing transactions. In fact, the more content they have, the greater the negative calculus. As a result, the fragmentation of content means that most companies have a tough time justifying the cost of putting the head as well as the long tail of their content on their Web. By automating the costly, manual processes of registering, licensing, tracking, accepting payment and distributing royalties for creative content – videos, photos, images, music and even text -- LicenseStream’s royalty distribution services can deliver immediate payment to content providers anywhere in the world – minus the hefty costs of building systems to manage these new value streams. 
  

To learn more about how individuals and businesses can monetize the massive amount of content (including video) coming online, check out our full range of offerings at www.licensestream.com. Better yet, to try a free, 30-day trial for LicenseStream Creator, click here.

If you happen to be in San Francisco Monday, May 18^th, consider attending the SanFran MusicTech Summit at the Kabuki Hotel in Japantown.  The Summit will bring together  developers in music and technology, along with the musicians, entrepreneurial business people, media, investors, service providers, and organizations who work with them at the convergence of culture and commerce.  The main topic of discussion will be the “evolving music/business/technology ecosystem in a proactive, conducive to dealmaking environment.”

The focus is a timely one, given that the music industry and almost every other type of media industry is struggling with how to make money and capture the full potential of new media. And in the current challenging economic environment, content owners of all sizes – from individual creators to major media and entertainment companies –  are eager want to make their entire catalog of media – not just the hits – available online to maximize their assets’ value.

ImageSpan’s CEO Iain Scholnick will participate in a panel on music in audio-visual works and speak to how LicenseStream helps content creators publish their content directly to the Web and to major search engines in a way that protects it and make money.  As an added bonus, John McDermott, Stroke9 who also heads up music and media development at ImageSpan, will be speaking on a separate panel about musicians as active participants in their own careers. Here are the details for both panels:

 

SanFran MusicTech Summit

9 a.m. – 6 p.m.

Monday, May 18^th

Kabuki Hotel, 1625 Post Street

San Francisco

 

9:20 a.m. - 10 a.m. Music in Audio-Visual Works

 

Audio-visual communications will increase as high speed broadband, network computing, crowd sourcing and faster computers proliferate. Digital tools in software and hardware make audio visual productions as simple as blogging. It is possible that “music” will rarely exist without packaging to images particularly as personal media devices merge to audio visual capability. But there is a hitch to the exponential explosion of audio visual communication. Words as common language are free but virtually all of the existing common “language” in audio and in visual content is not. How do we advance to an audio visual context on the Web with the proliferation of parties claiming rights in sound and images?

Panel:

Zahavah Levine Esq. - YouTube

David Leibowitz Esq. - Gotuit / CH Potomac

Iain Scholnick - ImageSpan

Joshua Wattles Esq. - deviantART (Moderator) 

 

1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.  Musicians as Active Participants in Their Own Careers

 

Speakers:

Layne Fox - DJ 40 Thieves / IRIS / Smash Hit Music

Francis Ten - West Indian Girl

John McDermott - Stroke 9 / ImageSpan

Jean Cook - Future of Music Coalition /Violinist for Jon Langford

Waco Brothers

and Ida (Moderator)

For more information, go to: http://www.sanfranmusictech.com

 

 

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!

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.

Doesn’t sound like the best scenario, does it? Don’t get me wrong, there can be a lot of value in the huge stock sites for photographers and some do very well from them. That said, they may be a good place to get customers, but are a horrible place to send customers.

LicenseStream shines at helping photographers avoid this scenario. By using the e-commerce back end that comes with every LicenseStream subscription, you can easily add a “purchase license” link with every image you want to sell on your site.

With LicenseStream e-commerce enabled on your site, you also can choose between Rights Managed, Royalty Free and Rights Simple licensing models (or use all three).

Check out the Setting Up Your Site or Blog to Sell Stock post to find out how LicenseStream can help you to enable e-commerce on your site.

Note: While this article speaks to photo sites, it’s equally valid for those selling stock video.

Want to sell stock photos or video from your own site or blog? If so, you may already have an idea of the challenges of integratingwith an e-commerce platform or of setting up merchant accounts for payment, etc.

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.