Beginning of another month – these seem to come round so quickly! July 2021 was OK in terms of total earnings, but looking below the hood, things don’t look so good! Total income ended with $2933 which is in line with July earnings in the past couple of years. So no growth, but no decrease in that top line number. However, I “sold” 100 images to Adobe Stock for their free catalog and received $500 for those pretty low earning...
I’m still trying to boost the sales of my Fine Art prints, which is a slow process! As part of that, I’m adding more photography or particularly travel photography related articles to my main photo portfolio site, BackyardImage where I have added a blog area. I also joined a group of bloggers from Fine Art America where we are all writing photography articles aimed more at a general reader, linking actively between each other (using a “Follow” setting on our...
I’ve been thinking about what makes a stock image that takes off, especially one that illustrates a story or article. Of course, the subject needs to be in the news, but more than that, it needs to be the subject of more opinion oriented articles. If something is in the news because it is newsworthy in real time – some violence, that collapse of the building in Florida – the website will almost always use some real-life imagery from the...
June is not normally one of my better months and this June was no change to that pattern! Actually, this June was my lowest earner in that month for the past 5 years, which is not a good start to this article! Still not bad at $2604 especially as I have been doing very little new stock work this year. Here is the normal graph with the historical story: Often people ask how many hours I put into stock photography...
It is not often that I write a heading like this! But I was reading the Washington Post today with an article about a world first at West Virginia University in Morgantown where they did an experiment on a long term opioid drug addict who was pretty much going to die in the near future from an overdose or similar accident. They inserted some probes deep into his brain and implanted a small computer in his chest that (if I...
Sorry – another fine art story! I will get back to stock photography soon… I recently produced three articles on Social Media for Photographers, and one of the issues I came across is how to feed the Pinterest beast with new pins showing off the latest images I have uploaded to Fine Art America. I use Tailwind to schedule these pins and that has a free pin creation system but it is limited to 15 pins a month. As I...
Facts help us make decisions, but facts about our aggregate sales on Fine Art America are pretty hard to come by. We get good information on each sale as it happens, you can see a list of all sales in the “Behind the Scenes” area under “Sales”, but how about answering the question – what is my most successful image in terms of print sales? How about which image does best on products other than prints? Where do my sales...
If you are still with me after Part 2 of this series, when I dug deeper into Pinterest in particular, I’m taking a wider view this time with my efforts in trying to boost engagement on Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram. Pinterest is involved as well for extra measure, plus a dose of Twitter! I decided that I wanted to post just one photo every day with some words about what the photo meant to me, or how I approached the...
As you have probably surmised from my other posts, I have been putting a lot more effort into social media recently to try to boost some print sales and stock has been just “ticking over”. I have added a few images as I have taken them, but, to be honest, not very many! I will continue to write these posts, but if you feel that the value is no longer there, feel free to cancel your membership. If you don’t...
Sorry, Alex for stealing your approach, but everything about May seemed to be more of the same. Just look at the columns for May in the graph: This May’s results of $2759 was almost the same as the previous 4 years of earnings. In May 2018 I had 10,000 images on Deposit Photos, this May I had 16800 – same earnings from a 60% increase in assets. No wonder there isn’t the same enthusiasm for stock photography as there was...
