Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
@joannsnover wrote:
5. How to I get rid of the icons in front of keywords, categories and similar images? (same link as for 2)
Does:
[class^="icon-"], [class*=" icon-"] {
display: hidden;do the trick? Just used the inspect element thing on chrome and it seemed to work.
@shelma1 wrote:
Thanks all, and especially to Leo, Jo Ann and Martha for all the work and support. And thanks to the people who helped out with info and donations for the Facebook page. But if only three or four of us like and comment, it’s fruitless. Facebook reduces the number of people who see the posts without community involvement.
Instead of growing, the page is shrinking. And I’m spending a lot of time and effort reaching Martha, Jo Ann and myself. 🙂
I figured most contributors would be sharing the posts on Facebook… Of course it will be fruitless without everyone trying to spread the word. I did spam my entire friends list to “like” the symbio page last week though. lol
@joannsnover wrote:
Lighting and background.
Not sure what you have for lighting and whether you were planning to do isolations or a scene (such as her at a chair or in front of a white board/black board), but ensure that you have enough light to get good illumination with no hard shadows or on camera flash. If the message of the shot is the signs, then you don’t want a busy background or anything distracting.
I’m not familiar with that camera but I read the summary at the link you provided and it talked about good results in good light, so don’t depend on cranking up the ISO.
You might also consider some closer shots of just her hands making signs – sometimes things have more possible uses if you don’t see a face.
I was mostly thinking outside in the daylight, which will be tough since the grass is all brown here now. I could build a light if needed but, was mostly thinking kind of natural.
I could pretty easily isolate for a shoot. I have a bunch of blank newspaper 😉
Can someone give us some insight into the ping lists? I’ve never changed it, but that would bring organic traffic also right?
Well, I just set up daily posts for the next 10 days. Wonder what that can bring in …
I don’t mind the registrations that much. I disabled the admin bar and hid all the comment boxes. It’s hard to benefit from comments anyway.
@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.
@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 …
@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.
@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 🙂
I’m not entirely convinced that it needs to break out on it’s own either. With the work that you’ve done creating Symbiostock you could have probably made it a stand alone CMS, independent of WordPress at all. If people find installing Symbiostock all that daunting … Then they probably can’t host their own website no matter what the platform is.
For 2014, I think we should focus on usability and availability from a customers perspective. That’s what most of us are missing right now. I’d rather spend 2014 getting us noticed.
As for Python and SQLlite. I know none at all. I do know some php, css & html though and am always happy to help. Thank you for all that you’ve done Leo.
@simi wrote:
Yes I do have open slot, recently from casoly’s tool I found out that, I am not part of anyone’s network 🙁 , mostly because of I have added those site in my network whose slots are already filled ( network site <=10) , I still have slots open , if you fill my site is match and eligible enough to be part of your network , then please feel free to add me , I will be glad, i will add in next couple of hours , I have small and mixed of portfolio and slowly growing it up.
My site is – http://www.ephotobuy.com/
Added. Thank you
@shelma1 wrote:
At some point we need to discuss how to get more eyeballs to Symbio sites. This poll is a bit depressing.
Only 36 have voted. Also, the project is still pretty young as far as page rank goes. I feel pretty satisfied with the 1 sale. lol
@shazamimages wrote:
@leo wrote:
I’ve asked around to some of the more established illustrators — they get weekly sales. I begged them to share with the rest of the community. Some of them feel they will get flamed (MSG) and have other reasons for not saying so.
Its annoying, but the stronger sellers end up being strong *silent* types, and you don’t hear much from them 🙁
That is understandable, but this is an anonymous poll. So those reasons don’t make any sense for something like this.
I don’t hardly say anything in MSG, it seems like a few of the members look for excuses to jump down another contributors throat. Seems like quite a few of them have nothing better to do than sit online and follow yuri and Sean around all day.
I’m not an “established illustrator” at all but, I’ve been seeing a sale usually every week. Not on Symbio of course. Just the one so far.
The other day when I was having problems with my site I tried to upgrade to 3.1.1 like 3 times with this exact problem. Guess I should have read around a bit 😉
