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!
