Symbiostock Vendors Is Now Available!

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Product Launch: Symbiostock Vendors

Transform your website into a multi-vendor platform.

Symbiostock Vendors is finally here! This much awaited professional plugin allows you to transform your store into a multi-vendor platform. Perfect for businesses that are comprised of multiple artists who want to work together as one entity.

How Symbiostock Vendors Works

Symbiostock Vendors allows you to set up a single Symbiostock website with multiple sub ‘Symbiostock Contributor’ accounts. There is one central administrative account (basically like the parent account) that is responsible for the overall operation of the site. And just like a normal Symbiostock website, this admin account controls Symbiostock Settings, the website’s appearance, plugins, Woocommerce settings, etc. It is from this administrative account that sub Symbiostock Contributors are created. Whilst simple to use, the system is advanced and scalable so contributor accounts can be added or removed as required.

Tools Accessible to your Symbiostock Contributors

Each of your Symbiostock Contributors has access to their own WP dashboard and their own Symbiostock FTP folder, from which they upload and manage their individual media products. Contributors cannot see the products that belong to other individuals and are unable to access the main website’s admin settings. Contributors can only upload their digital media via FTP and once uploaded and processed, contributors can edit metadata, publish and manage their products as one normally would when using Symbiostock Pro. Published products all show up in the one central website’s shop listings.

Technical insight into how to use Symbiostock Vendors can found in this user guide.

Compatible with Symbiostock Premium Plugins

Premium Symbiostock plugins including Symbiostock Video and Symbiostock Submitter are compatible with Symbiostock Vendors and these can be added through the administrative account. So if you’re using Symbiostock Video, for example, your contributors will be able to add video media to your store. And with Symbiostock Submitter,  the administrative account can submit media to third party agencies.

Symzio Integration

Symbiostock Vendors is compatible with Symzio. To have your media files included in Symzio, just like a normal Symbiostock powered website, all you need to do is meet the eligibility criteria and apply. The integration process is exactly the same as it is for regular Symbiostock sites. Once connected, your website integrates into Symzio as one business. This means the combined pool of published media is piped through only one single Symzio account.

A Unique Business Opportunity

Symbiostock Vendors is designed for business professionals or entrepreneurs who want to unite, connect and grow a unique online marketplace with other individuals as a collective. With the ability to have unlimited contributors uploading their digital media onto one central store, you have the opportunity establish a hub very much like a mini microstock agency. There is so much room for implementing inspired ideas with Symbiostock Vendors, for instance:

  • Teaming up with photographers who focus on similar niches, or radically varied subject matter, to establish a large online portfolio.
  • For digital illustrators, establishing a vector art business collaboratively.
  • Creating a collective of photographers, vector artists and videographers specializing in one theme.

Symbiostock Vendors is a commercial grade plugin that provides a new way of diversifying your revenue prospects. The cost of the plugin is $199 and as with all of our premium plugins, Symbiostock Vendors comes with lifetime updates. If you have any queries about about Symbiostock Vendors please post your questions in this forum thread.

Purchase Symbiostock Vendors >>

50% Off Symbiostock Hosting Packages

Offer available until the end of August 2017.

A reminder to anyone interested in getting on board with Symbiostock Hosting – grab a massive discount by signing up before the end of August. This special offer is only available to new users and provides 50% off the first term of hosting. This means that if you sign up for a monthly plan, your first month will be 50% off. But if you sign up on an annual plan, which is where this offer is ridiculously good, you will receive 50% off the entire first year of hosting. So for example, if you sign up annually on our ‘Economy’ plan, normally $143.99, with this offer you can get it for only $72 for the whole first year!

We made this offer to celebrate the launch of Symbiostock.org’s new look, which occurred late late month. In order to claim this special discount, please use the coupon code ‘NEWSYMBIO’.

View all Symbiostock Hosting packages here >>

This offer is only available for people who have not signed up with Symbiostock Hosting before.

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Marketing For Success: Add a Blog to your Digital Media Store

It’s an old concept, but there are many reasons behind why just about every business with an online presence does it – business blogging is an effective marketing tactic.

First of all, you may be wondering, what is business blogging? Aren’t all blogs the same? The short answer is no, business blogging is quite different from regular blogging. Regular blogging is usually a hobby venture or the blog itself is the primary business. Whereas business blogs serve to support the growth of your business. Business blogs aim to draw in new visitors and turn them into leads, or customers for your main business.

So why add a blog to your digital media store? Let’s examine some of the large reasons why a business blog is a valuable marketing strategy:

1) Blogs help to drive traffic to your website

The more content rich pages your website has, the more chances you have to rank in search engines. Sure, you create new pages every time you upload new images – which is good combined with effective keywording. But blog pages rich in quality textual content can draw in a wider pool of visitors and create stronger signals to search engines. It’s important to understand, that simply creating blog pages that lack depth and don’t provide interesting content will not do – poor quality leads to poor user experience which could actually be detrimental to your site and cause search engines to view your pages as spam. On the other hand, quality content can create opportunities for your site to rank in search results and can build a stronger audience who may in turn share your pages through social media channels.

And remember, every new blog post has the potential to work for you in the short term and the long term. In the short term you might attract existing customers back to your website, or get views through sharing your blog post on social media. In the long term, if you consistently output quality content, your blog posts can bring in visitors through ranking in search engine results – thus generating a stream of visitors over time.

blogs-humanize

2) Blogs  humanize & establish trust towards your brand

Blogging provides a means for you to demonstrate the personal side of your business, which can generate trust in your visitors towards your website and the products you offer. By sharing insight into your passions, issues of importance and your unique personality, you build trust and increase your brand’s likability. This may be especially important for independent digital stores as we are dealing with a target audience who have long established comfort with mainstream stock agencies – increasing trust in your brand serves as a way of hooking and converting these customers into YOUR customers.

3) Blog posts create opportunities for sharing

Every time you publish a blog post, you create a new opportunity for yourself and your audience to share your blog with other people. Every post is something new to tweet about, or share on Facebook, or link to from Google+. Social media is a proven powerful marketing tool and adopting the strategy of sharing not only exposes more people to your content, the inbound links generated tells search engines ‘Hey! Look here because other people are!”.

And something important to keep in mind is the powerful opportunity you have through our Symbiostock community to connect with other independent artists and work together to share each other’s blog posts. Imagine the potent search engine signals that you could produce by teaming up with other artists and working together to do something as simple as sharing each other’s blogs through social media!

Concluding Ideas:

Blogging is a low cost marketing strategy, all it takes is a little bit of time and dedication. We’ve outlined some of the major reasons why blogging makes sense and why you should start a blog, or if you already have then keep at it for your Symbiostock site. There are other benefits of blogging, some of which you can learn about in this Small Business Trends article.

Blogging Success Tip

To encourage you towards beginning, or continuing your blog, we’ve started a forum topic for brainstorming ideas on the sorts of themes you could consider blogging about:

Business Blogging Ideas – What can you blog about?

You can also look at other business blogs to develop ideas and to figure out the kind of voice you want to present in your blog. This is not to say that you should write about the same things, or the same way that other people do – it’s to help you gain insight on the possibilities that exist. As a professional and an individual with a lifetime of experiences, you can inject your knowledge and unique perspectives into your blog to create something original and reap benefits for your business.

So challenge yourself, take action now and increase your marketing potential with blogging – its a simple & proven strategy!

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If you aren’t using a CDN, start NOW to speed up your site

As we near the final stages of the Symzio engine, we started exploring the end service from a global perspective. Our goal, from the start, was to compete at a level that is on par or superior to the larger agencies. In order to accomplish this for customers, we needed a service that would provide quick results for customers in South Africa as well as Japan, and this cannot be accomplished using the standard single server solution.

Well, it actually can. Use a CDN.

We ran a test using Cloudflare’s Free CDN on one of our Symbiostock PLUS sites. Here were the results:

 

With Cloudflare disabled:

With Cloudflare enabled:

This indicates, on average, a 31% increase in load speed for customers.

The way a CDN works is, they have servers all across the globe in different places. When a person accesses your site from a part of the world, it delivers content from a server closer to them. So even if your server is in Brazil, a user in Russia will actually be getting your content from a CDN server in Poland, for example.

Aside from the speed increase, it will reduce the load on your server as cache’d stuff will be loaded from the CDN rather than your original server, as well as provide nearly absolute protection from DDOS attacks as the CDN acts as a shield.

The CDN also has intelligent algorithms that ensure that dynamic content, such as your cart page, continue to provide non-cache’d content so your dynamic content remains intact.

In my opinion, every single Symbiostock user should switch to a CDN, and I recommend the free Cloudflare CDN service.

One additional note – Symzio will be sourcing all its media directly from your sites; it will not save copies of your images (in most cases) on its own server. As a result, we are going to be ordering results on each individual search page according to how fast the image loads for a customer. This means, you are likely to get more exposure and more sales the more globalized your site is. Accordingly, it is a near certainty that Symzio contributors that use a CDN will have a direct advantage over users that don’t.

How difficult is it to use a CDN?

All you do is sign up with them and switch the nameservers through your registrar to them. That’s it.

We are switching every site we run over to a CDN, and see no reason why every Symbiostock user shouldn’t as well.

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Promote Symbiostock for Free – Get Premium Stuff!

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As a burgeoning new open-source enterprise, Symbiostock is off to a great start. We’ve got a nearly zero error rate with the official plugin, our hosting service is streamlined and likewise bug free, and we’re getting great feedback all across the board in regards to the direction we’re taking.

All that being said, we still need your help! The internet has become a giant social machine and amidst all the noise, we want artists all around the world to learn about Symbiostock. The more people that use it, the more development we can invest in, and the more powerful it’s going to get.

Symbiostock was born out of a need to be in control of our media – to sell it at our rates, in our environment. I wanted to be able to sell any image I took that I felt held artistic merit – not just the ones some person a thousand miles away deemed worthy!

But Symbiostock is just the first step. We need artists, artists exactly like you, to come on board. You see, the more artists that choose to sell independently, the more we, as a group, compete with the larger agencies. In doing so, we force all concerned to take us seriously and even out the playing field. That means more artistic freedom, more profits, and more control in the digital media marketplace.

Here are two cool, totally free ways in which you can help Symbiostock now:

1) Give us a glowing review on WordPress.org:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/symbiostock/

WordPress is where we distribute and update Symbiostock. Great reviews allow people to really understand how the plugin can help them, and are the bread and butter of any good plugin.

2) Submit your site to the Artist Network

http://www.symbiostock.org/artist-network/

Showcasing your site in the Artist Network is a fantastic way to both promote Symbiostock and your site. Visitors will be able to find you and visit your store, and artists can see your different sites to envision how theirs might look. It’s totally free, and a great networking tool.

And, if you help promote Symbiostock in these two ways, let us know, and we’ll give you a complimentary two-months of free hosting with PLUS, or if you prefer, 50% off any of our premium themes.

This is open to both new and current users. Just let us know via private message once you’ve supported the project in both those ways.

And remember – even if you don’t need hosting or themes, taking five minutes to help us out would be a really fantastic way to spend those five minutes – we’d love you for it.

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