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Posts
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So, we’re all doing what we can for SEO …
But, the topic of paid traffic keeps getting tossed out, while I’ve always been a firm believer in advertising (my day job revolves around it) You have to realize that we’re in for some pretty stiff competition, with SEO or paid. Traffic is not going to come easily, and we all need to work hard to get to where we will get noticed.
Even with most cost-per-click advertising, which only charges you when someone clicks your ad, advertising is goddamn expensive. For instance, right now the term “stock photos” runs around $15.66 per click. Through adwords you can manage the pricing pretty well … I’d imagine that to be during peak times. I’ll have you note though, the daily value of being the #1 position for that term, is $23,786.04 … That’s a lot of potential expense or loss depending on what route you are going to take.
But, that’s a really popular keyword. One of the tricks to great SEO and getting traffic, is finding a niche … Much like everything else on the web.
The more images we have, the more we’re going to get noticed. If we can gain repeat customers through ease of use, quality, and great customer support, we can grow. It’ll take work and it will take time. Paying for traffic could gain us a bit of notice but, eventually it is going to be us and our own professionalism that brings the buyers in.
My day job revolves around advertising as well.
Right now I pay about 50¢ per click on Google. But actually it’s less than that, because my Google coupon gave me $100 of free advertising after I spent $25…so those clicks are actually about 13¢. Of course next month the coupon’s up, so I’m back up to 50¢. Facebook gave me $50 of free advertising, so those clicks are free for now. Why wouldn’t you at least go for Facebook ads, if it’s free?
I’m working every day on the Facebook Symbiostock page, but with Facebook monetizing the site you either need to get involved as a group (liking, commenting) or you need to keep paying to get people to see the posts. There are several of us who like and comment every day, but that’s less than 10% of people who’ve signed up for Symbiostock.
Hey, I’d definitely rather not pay. If you have ideas other than paid advertising that will get us noticed, please share! I’m certainly open to ideas, and I would guess everyone else would be too.
Thank you for your insights — this is the first time I’ve ever seen anyone go to this length show the true aspect of SEO/PAID.
Personally I’ve always stayed away from paid advertising simply because utilizing paid advertising successfully is a game that requires lots of experience!
I’d like to validate what you say concerning SEO in general – it is a time/focus relationship. Even with low traffic I tend to get quite a few sales per month on my site…but that took a lot of motivation in the beginning.
Just curious…what did your motivation consist of? I’m not being facetious. Were you motivated to be patient and wait it out, and in time the sales started organically? Or did you somehow go out and seek out clients without paying for them? Your site is successful, so clearly you’re doing things right.
Of course, since my job is advertising, my first thought is to run paid ads. Until I started Facebook and Google my site was getting very little traffic.
I did everything, because SEO was as fun for me as imaging. Just for fun, I’ll list some things:
1. I watched google news feeds, then produced images optimized for the present issues to show up in organic results. It worked a few times! I was on page one within sevebteen hours a few times.
2. I used some dark-side methods which I won’t expound on, but they were very useful for instant results and longterm ones as well 😀
3. I set up hundreds of images to publish on a timed basis, 1 per day.
4. I set up a HUGE ping list in wordpress. (research that). Every time I published an image, it alerted hundreds of sites and search engines.
5. I published occasional project blog articles, and gave away a few free large-scale images.
6. I spammed the hell out of facebook and twitter (regardless of what they say, twitter and facebook are glorified spammers)
7. I optimized onsite SEO to the max (Symbiostock’s big feature)
8. EDIT: My original system had a contextual keyword system ( http://wordnet.princeton.edu/ ) — it allowed me to use tons of useful keywords which although not searched by the customer, landed plenty of traffic due to contextual relevance and rare searches. Yes, the keyword tags worked in SEO.
So its really a product of much work. Also it helps that people think robots and orange men are cool. Another secret, verfied by an anonymous source – Illustrators tend to sell more for the simple reason that modern image search engines rank illustrations higher due to imperfect algorithms in image recognition.
But yes, I can say that my site was more than a tie-breaker in succeeding in this business during the years of decline (which started a few years ago in Microstock). Also custom work requests were something I did a lot of, though they tended to be an extraordinary headache 🙂 also the result of the site.
This is funny and cute, but I was also able to get traffic to my iStock page quite a bit, resulting in plenty of referral $$$. I gave this up though when Istock started to become more inhumane.
@shelma1 wrote:
My day job revolves around advertising as well.
Right now I pay about 50¢ per click on Google. But actually it’s less than that, because my Google coupon gave me $100 of free advertising after I spent $25…so those clicks are actually about 13¢. Of course next month the coupon’s up, so I’m back up to 50¢. Facebook gave me $50 of free advertising, so those clicks are free for now. Why wouldn’t you at least go for Facebook ads, if it’s free?
I’m working every day on the Facebook Symbiostock page, but with Facebook monetizing the site you either need to get involved as a group (liking, commenting) or you need to keep paying to get people to see the posts. There are several of us who like and comment every day, but that’s less than 10% of people who’ve signed up for Symbiostock.
Hey, I’d definitely rather not pay. If you have ideas other than paid advertising that will get us noticed, please share! I’m certainly open to ideas, and I would guess everyone else would be too.
Shelma, what keywords are you getting at 13? I wasn’t trying to imply that I’m against advertising. But, of course organic traffic is always better. Mostly I was just trying to put the competition into perspective and inform everyone that, like it or not, it will take time and work 🙂
Can you pinpoint if your sale was a result of your advertising efforts? For me at least, my posts are what are bringing me the most traffic and the one sale that I’ve had. I share the Symbiostock post on my personal facebook daily, and have been putting in a deal of effort on Linkedin since I belong to a couple graphic artist groups there. But, if we decide we want to get an advertising group together, I mean, we could do something donation based even, to try and bring in some traffic and get us noticed. Hopefully, with a small amount we could start a snowball 🙂
Thanks for posting that annotated chart. I’m not sure what the takeaway from it should be for us – this isn’t my field.
I do know that when I search, I never search google for stock images without other keywords. In general what I do is search for keywords that describe what I’m looking for and then add stock photos to the end if the first page or two is flooded with family pictures or selfies and isn’t useful to me.
So if I search (images) for palm beach aruba docks right up on the top row are two of my images (from Shutterstock). Wouldn’t I do better to get my images (from my site) up there with Shutterstock, if I was going to spend money on words?
Taking a less likely example (but one which I used in test searches to see how agencies were doing versus my images), if I search picnic rolling dandelion meadow my site’s images (some) are in the first row, so I don’t think I’d want to pay for anything there. You can see some more examples in this blog post on authorship and the agencies
I’m not even sure how big a factor google search position is for the purchase of stock imagery – do buyers look there or do they go to whichever agency is their “preferred site” and just search there.
It may be irrelevant to our symbiostock sites, but if we assume some buyers try to find us by our name on the agency sites, the images that show up if I search for jsnover stock images are dominated in the first few rows by the agencies that sell the least – stockfresh and iStock (where I have 100 images left). That suggests that they puchased that position and it isn’t doing them any good.
As an aside, a while ago another site owner suggested that we have our agency name (jsnover in my case) buried somehwere in our symbiostock pages to help search engines find our Symbiostock sites. I did that (in the footer in the same color as the background so you can’t see it) and I notice one of my Symbiostock site images shows up in the jsnover stock images results
I’m certainly interested in any suggestions about ways to help people who buy to find our sites – and thanks again for those who know more about this area for helping educate us.
@leo wrote:
I did everything, because SEO was as fun for me as imaging. Just for fun, I’ll list some things:
1. I watched google news feeds, then produced images optimized for the present issues to show up in organic results. It worked a few times! I was on page one within sevebteen hours a few times.
2. I used some dark-side methods which I won’t expound on, but they were very useful for instant results and longterm ones as well 😀
3. I set up hundreds of images to publish on a timed basis, 1 per day.
4. I set up a HUGE ping list in wordpress. (research that). Every time I published an image, it alerted hundreds of sites and search engines.
5. I published occasional project blog articles, and gave away a few free large-scale images.
6. I spammed the hell out of facebook and twitter (regardless of what they say, twitter and facebook are glorified spammers)
7. I optimized onsite SEO to the max (Symbiostock’s big feature)
8. EDIT: My original system had a contextual keyword system ( http://wordnet.princeton.edu/ ) — it allowed me to use tons of useful keywords which although not searched by the customer, landed plenty of traffic due to contextual relevance and rare searches. Yes, the keyword tags worked in SEO.
So its really a product of much work. Also it helps that people think robots and orange men are cool. Another secret, verfied by an anonymous source – Illustrators tend to sell more for the simple reason that modern image search engines rank illustrations higher due to imperfect algorithms in image recognition.
But yes, I can say that my site was more than a tie-breaker in succeeding in this business during the years of decline (which started a few years ago in Microstock). Also custom work requests were something I did a lot of, though they tended to be an extraordinary headache 🙂 also the result of the site.
This is funny and cute, but I was also able to get traffic to my iStock page quite a bit, resulting in plenty of referral $$$. I gave this up though when Istock started to become more inhumane.
Some shady SEO is actually industry practice, keyword spam, reblogging etc … and isn’t going to hurt us much if at all. This is actually one of the best benefits of keeping us on wordpress Leo.
If we could get in the habit of posting daily (even if you do have to reblog a bit) we will start to see organic traffic. Which I’d much prefer to paid traffic.
@joannsnover wrote:
Thanks for posting that annotated chart. I’m not sure what the takeaway from it should be for us – this isn’t my field.
I do know that when I search, I never search google for stock images without other keywords. In general what I do is search for keywords that describe what I’m looking for and then add stock photos to the end if the first page or two is flooded with family pictures or selfies and isn’t useful to me.
So if I search (images) for palm beach aruba docks right up on the top row are two of my images (from Shutterstock). Wouldn’t I do better to get my images (from my site) up there with Shutterstock, if I was going to spend money on words?
Taking a less likely example (but one which I used in test searches to see how agencies were doing versus my images), if I search picnic rolling dandelion meadow my site’s images (some) are in the first row, so I don’t think I’d want to pay for anything there. You can see some more examples in this blog post on authorship and the agencies
I’m not even sure how big a factor google search position is for the purchase of stock imagery – do buyers look there or do they go to whichever agency is their “preferred site” and just search there.
It may be irrelevant to our symbiostock sites, but if we assume some buyers try to find us by our name on the agency sites, the images that show up if I search for jsnover stock images are dominated in the first few rows by the agencies that sell the least – stockfresh and iStock (where I have 100 images left). That suggests that they puchased that position and it isn’t doing them any good.
As an aside, a while ago another site owner suggested that we have our agency name (jsnover in my case) buried somehwere in our symbiostock pages to help search engines find our Symbiostock sites. I did that (in the footer in the same color as the background so you can’t see it) and I notice one of my Symbiostock site images shows up in the jsnover stock images results
I’m certainly interested in any suggestions about ways to help people who buy to find our sites – and thanks again for those who know more about this area for helping educate us.
I think people who need a lot of images definitely steer for the larger stock sites. However, the more casual buyers are more likely to use google images. If they find something that is watermarked, hopefully they’ll want to find a way to purchase that image. (and sadly stealing images off of google has become a regular industry practice for graphic designers, I’ve threatened my company a couple times because of one designer who can’t seem to help themselves.)
That’s what I meant on Leo’s post last night, I think the future of Symbio needs to be making it easy for the customer … Something like, log in, search, and buy…. And that could easily be the future of Symbiostock.com … Where we’d likely receive the most traffic … stockphotos.com is obviously already snatched up 😉 and I’d be willing to bet he wants a chunk for it.
He paid $250,000 for it in December…
@joannsnover wrote:
He paid $250,000 for it in December…
Stockphoto.com is obviously used, stockphotos.com however is available from some guy named Jeff Kubarych. lol …
Doesn’t really matter anyhow …
I still don’t think paid advertising is the way to go. Especially when you sell highly specialized products at a very low price. Why would you want to spend $1 per click and then sell your image at $1? And that’s only if you make a sale per click which is highly unlikely. It’s like working for Google or Facebook or Bing, Yahoo … They’ll get richer while you struggle to stay afloat.
The free ad coupons, sponsored by Bluehost or occasionally by Google and Bing, are a different story. I use them but I don’t continue the ads after their value is used up.
BTW, I’m selling the domains stock-photos.us and stock-images.us at $100 each if anybody is interested. I hope it’s not against the rules to mention that here.
@dp69_2001 wrote:
@shelma1 wrote:
My day job revolves around advertising as well.
Right now I pay about 50¢ per click on Google. But actually it’s less than that, because my Google coupon gave me $100 of free advertising after I spent $25…so those clicks are actually about 13¢. Of course next month the coupon’s up, so I’m back up to 50¢. Facebook gave me $50 of free advertising, so those clicks are free for now. Why wouldn’t you at least go for Facebook ads, if it’s free?
I’m working every day on the Facebook Symbiostock page, but with Facebook monetizing the site you either need to get involved as a group (liking, commenting) or you need to keep paying to get people to see the posts. There are several of us who like and comment every day, but that’s less than 10% of people who’ve signed up for Symbiostock.
Hey, I’d definitely rather not pay. If you have ideas other than paid advertising that will get us noticed, please share! I’m certainly open to ideas, and I would guess everyone else would be too.
Shelma, what keywords are you getting at 13? I wasn’t trying to imply that I’m against advertising. But, of course organic traffic is always better. Mostly I was just trying to put the competition into perspective and inform everyone that, like it or not, it will take time and work 🙂
Can you pinpoint if your sale was a result of your advertising efforts? For me at least, my posts are what are bringing me the most traffic and the one sale that I’ve had. I share the Symbiostock post on my personal facebook daily, and have been putting in a deal of effort on Linkedin since I belong to a couple graphic artist groups there. But, if we decide we want to get an advertising group together, I mean, we could do something donation based even, to try and bring in some traffic and get us noticed. Hopefully, with a small amount we could start a snowball 🙂
Looking at my stats, the search term “clipart” was most popular.
I’m pretty sure my one sale was sent from my Facebook page, since I was promoting a sale on that image via FB at the time and was not advertising on Google yet.
Advertising “Symbiostock” is a good idea, but I also think individuals actively working to bring traffic to their own sites is just as (if note more) important. And I suspect more people would be interested in that. Just a guess. Maybe I’ll start a poll.
@shelma1 wrote:
@dp69_2001 wrote:
@shelma1 wrote:
My day job revolves around advertising as well.
Right now I pay about 50¢ per click on Google. But actually it’s less than that, because my Google coupon gave me $100 of free advertising after I spent $25…so those clicks are actually about 13¢. Of course next month the coupon’s up, so I’m back up to 50¢. Facebook gave me $50 of free advertising, so those clicks are free for now. Why wouldn’t you at least go for Facebook ads, if it’s free?
I’m working every day on the Facebook Symbiostock page, but with Facebook monetizing the site you either need to get involved as a group (liking, commenting) or you need to keep paying to get people to see the posts. There are several of us who like and comment every day, but that’s less than 10% of people who’ve signed up for Symbiostock.
Hey, I’d definitely rather not pay. If you have ideas other than paid advertising that will get us noticed, please share! I’m certainly open to ideas, and I would guess everyone else would be too.
Shelma, what keywords are you getting at 13? I wasn’t trying to imply that I’m against advertising. But, of course organic traffic is always better. Mostly I was just trying to put the competition into perspective and inform everyone that, like it or not, it will take time and work 🙂
Can you pinpoint if your sale was a result of your advertising efforts? For me at least, my posts are what are bringing me the most traffic and the one sale that I’ve had. I share the Symbiostock post on my personal facebook daily, and have been putting in a deal of effort on Linkedin since I belong to a couple graphic artist groups there. But, if we decide we want to get an advertising group together, I mean, we could do something donation based even, to try and bring in some traffic and get us noticed. Hopefully, with a small amount we could start a snowball 🙂
Looking at my stats, the search term “clipart” was most popular.
I’m pretty sure my one sale was sent from my Facebook page, since I was promoting a sale on that image via FB at the time and was not advertising on Google yet.
Advertising “Symbiostock” is a good idea, but I also think individuals actively working to bring traffic to their own sites is just as (if note more) important. And I suspect more people would be interested in that. Just a guess. Maybe I’ll start a poll.
Of course promoting ourselves is more important! and in the long run that promotes each one of us.
As mentioned. How can we really afford advertising as individuals and make profit. That $15.66 to pay for keywords “stock images” is really expensive for any one of us to get one click … However, between 165 of us … $1 each would mean 16 clicks … That’s more what I’m getting at. Honestly, I’m not afraid. But, other people have their livelihood riding on making Symbiostock work.
@dp69_2001 wrote:
Of course promoting ourselves is more important! and in the long run that promotes each one of us.
As mentioned. How can we really afford advertising as individuals and make profit. That $15.66 to pay for keywords “stock images” is really expensive for any one of us to get one click … However, between 165 of us … $1 each would mean 16 clicks … That’s more what I’m getting at. Honestly, I’m not afraid. But, other people have their livelihood riding on making Symbiostock work.
There’s no way I’d spend $15.66 per click! I’m using Google AdWords Express (very easy), which gives you just a few keyword phrases to choose from and allows you to input geographical areas you’d like to target (I’ve input several countries that seem to get the most sales on Shutterstock). My traffic shot up as soon as the ad started running. I’ve set a very low daily budget (just enough to use up the free advertising they gave me for this month after I spent my initial $25). So far it’s “costing” about 50¢/click…if I was actually paying full price.
IF I start getting sales and it seems worth it, I’ll pay for clicks next month. If not, I might just advertise here and there when I have a special promotion or something. I paid for clicks for an old site of mine (not stock art) and it was successful, but I was selling $50-$100 items on that site.
Now that Leo’s shared so much great info about how he got traffic to his site, I’m going to try some of that too.
Everyone’s efforts to get traffic has to pay off or it’s not worth it. But not promoting doesn’t seem to be working, since the great majority of people who answered the poll about sales have 0-1 sale so far. That doesn’t even pay for monthly hosting. I may give my site a year, but then if I’m not even making enough for hosting, what’s the point? The hours I spend uploading to my site I could spend generating more illustrations that will earn money on iS and SS.
I’m just trying to figure out way for this network to get enough traffic so we all start making money. I want us to be successful.
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