Posted by NERKSA_NAYR52 on January 27, 2008 at 11:00 PM
Hey,
I'm pretty new to photography but I have some ok equipment and am working on a building up my protfolio abit. I was starting to think about starting a professional account on SmugMug and was wondering how much a average wildlife photographer would make on this site? I am by no means expecting to pay for my college education or make a living off of it but would like to make up for a bit of the expenses and maybe help pay for some new eqipment. Has anyone not made at least enough money to pay for their account? Thank you.
Ryan
Posted by Mitch Erwin on January 28, 2008 at 12:53 PM
Ryan,
I currently use the Smugmug site as a means of having a personal site as I have found it to be very economical and another means of having visibility of my work on the WWW. It is a very easy site to set up and once it is, all a person has to do is add or rotate work to it. I think in todays age you need to take any means to getting your name out amongst the numerous photographers out there. I also choose to have people to contact me directly when purchasing as opposed to using the shopping cart option on Smugmug. I like to have some control over that!
As far as the money made off the site - I'll leave a vague statement. I'm sure it depends on the photographer and their work. Some probably do VERY WELL, and others make menial sales.
Personally I use all means: internet, booths at fine art fairs, art gallers and have found out word of mouth and networking in your region, town, etc is the best method to creating sales.
I have two websites with Smugmug and I'm making money from both of them. They are both very different sites, so I'm selling photos differently on each.
photos.christinacraft.com (which is attached to www.christinacraft.com)
My wedding site. After weddings I create an online gallery for each couple and sell prints via Smugmug. I make a significant profit from people purchasing prints.
www.naturestocklibrary.com
I sell stock photography and prints via this site and I made $2,000 in my first year (the site has been live one year this January). It took several months for the site to start appearing in Google and I had to do my own marketing to get it in front of photo buyers. My traffic has gradually increased by about 10-20% each month and, with the traffic increase, I'm getting more sales. I have to be more aggressive with my marketing and I realized something about nature photography... you have to do a lot of off-line marketing via postcards, etc., with photo buyers for stock photos.
People that buy prints online will find you through google. However, you won't make a lot of money selling prints - but you will at least pay for your account.
People that buy stock photography generally do not do google searches for images. Instead, they rely on trusted sources. If you don't have a copy, try to find the PHotographer's Market (they have it in the library as well)... and read their articles about marketing to stock picture buyers. Most times you have to send a postcard with a picture and your website address along with an extensive list of your inventory on the site. Then, when the buyer is looking for, say, a picture of a grizzly bear, they will look through their postcards and then visit your site. Picture buyers don't have enough time to do online research looking at every individual photographer's web site. Instead, you have to form a relationship with them - and this usually entails sending post-cards and inventory lists by snail mail. It took a year for me to realize that my aggressive online marketing approach would only get so far and now I'm about to spend this year doing offline marketing to get people to purchase from my website. I hope to increase my sales substantially once I start doing more aggressive offline marketing (my postcards have just been ordered so we'll see how well they do when they are mailed out). I used www.VistaPrint.com - which is another great service for photographers (very very cheap products).
Smugmug is a great platform and I absolutely love it... but wanted to give some extra advice about how to market yourself after you get one up and running.
"People that buy stock photography generally do not do google searches for images. Instead, they rely on trusted sources. If you don't have a copy, try to find the PHotographer's Market (they have it in the library as well)... and read their articles about marketing to stock picture buyers. Most times you have to send a postcard with a picture and your website address along with an extensive list of your inventory on the site. Then, when the buyer is looking for, say, a picture of a grizzly bear, they will look through their postcards and then visit your site. Picture buyers don't have enough time to do online research looking at every individual photographer's web site. Instead, you have to form a relationship with them - and this usually entails sending post-cards and inventory lists by snail mail. It took a year for me to realize that my aggressive online marketing approach would only get so far and now I'm about to spend this year doing offline marketing to get people to purchase from my website. I hope to increase my sales substantially once I start doing more aggressive offline marketing (my postcards have just been ordered so we'll see how well they do when they are mailed out). I used www.VistaPrint.com - which is another great service for photographers (very very cheap products). "
This reflects the feedback we've had from a couple of long-time experienced stock photographers in our circle of friends. One has dropped all agency contracts because none market as well as she can do on her own. Last year she spent a little over $4000 on post cards and postage (one a month to prime prospects), and coincidence or not, she trippled her stock income. The second has been doing the post card bit to augment sales through agencies. He's getting pretty tight jawed about spending so much to promote himself, only to give half the sales back to a couple of agencies that aren't doing much for marketing. He's likely to dump the agencies this year, too.
I, too, use a Smugmug Professional account to offer 3000 plus images to the world. As stated above, if you are going to get in the game in almost anything these days, you must have an internet site. For me, it is more of a place to show people what I can do more than to make sales directly from the site. I can refer folks to look at the site and my business cards list the site in big print. "Sales" generally come from someone seeing what I do and then asking me to do something similar for them. It also helps get your name around. You will note that most of the "photographic groups" you can join, ask for your website.
I like Smugmug because I do not have to program anything myself if I do not want to. I do add a little customizing, but mostly through their easy to use settings. Like someone above, I request folks to contact me BEFORE making a purchase. You will find that someone trying to get a large print out of a smaller JPG is not going to wind up being happy. Smugmug now allows larger filesizes, but is still limited to JPG's whereas I would use TIFF's for printing purposes.
Someone did actually find my images of a certain cemetery using "google" and bought the rights to the whole electronic set for a family book he was writing. That right there paid for over a few years worth of the Professional fee.
I write this many months after the initial request for thoughts as I figured others would stumble across it while trying to figure out if they want to use Smugmug.
Smugmug works for me in the way I intend it to work...which is NOT for making direct sales from listed images.
Discussion
4 repliesI'm pretty new to photography but I have some ok equipment and am working on a building up my protfolio abit. I was starting to think about starting a professional account on SmugMug and was wondering how much a average wildlife photographer would make on this site? I am by no means expecting to pay for my college education or make a living off of it but would like to make up for a bit of the expenses and maybe help pay for some new eqipment. Has anyone not made at least enough money to pay for their account? Thank you.
Ryan
I currently use the Smugmug site as a means of having a personal site as I have found it to be very economical and another means of having visibility of my work on the WWW. It is a very easy site to set up and once it is, all a person has to do is add or rotate work to it. I think in todays age you need to take any means to getting your name out amongst the numerous photographers out there. I also choose to have people to contact me directly when purchasing as opposed to using the shopping cart option on Smugmug. I like to have some control over that!
As far as the money made off the site - I'll leave a vague statement. I'm sure it depends on the photographer and their work. Some probably do VERY WELL, and others make menial sales.
Personally I use all means: internet, booths at fine art fairs, art gallers and have found out word of mouth and networking in your region, town, etc is the best method to creating sales.
Hope this is helpful!
I have two websites with Smugmug and I'm making money from both of them. They are both very different sites, so I'm selling photos differently on each.
photos.christinacraft.com (which is attached to www.christinacraft.com)
My wedding site. After weddings I create an online gallery for each couple and sell prints via Smugmug. I make a significant profit from people purchasing prints.
www.naturestocklibrary.com
I sell stock photography and prints via this site and I made $2,000 in my first year (the site has been live one year this January). It took several months for the site to start appearing in Google and I had to do my own marketing to get it in front of photo buyers. My traffic has gradually increased by about 10-20% each month and, with the traffic increase, I'm getting more sales. I have to be more aggressive with my marketing and I realized something about nature photography... you have to do a lot of off-line marketing via postcards, etc., with photo buyers for stock photos.
People that buy prints online will find you through google. However, you won't make a lot of money selling prints - but you will at least pay for your account.
People that buy stock photography generally do not do google searches for images. Instead, they rely on trusted sources. If you don't have a copy, try to find the PHotographer's Market (they have it in the library as well)... and read their articles about marketing to stock picture buyers. Most times you have to send a postcard with a picture and your website address along with an extensive list of your inventory on the site. Then, when the buyer is looking for, say, a picture of a grizzly bear, they will look through their postcards and then visit your site. Picture buyers don't have enough time to do online research looking at every individual photographer's web site. Instead, you have to form a relationship with them - and this usually entails sending post-cards and inventory lists by snail mail. It took a year for me to realize that my aggressive online marketing approach would only get so far and now I'm about to spend this year doing offline marketing to get people to purchase from my website. I hope to increase my sales substantially once I start doing more aggressive offline marketing (my postcards have just been ordered so we'll see how well they do when they are mailed out). I used www.VistaPrint.com - which is another great service for photographers (very very cheap products).
Smugmug is a great platform and I absolutely love it... but wanted to give some extra advice about how to market yourself after you get one up and running.
Good luck with your account. You'll love Smugmug!
Cheers!
This reflects the feedback we've had from a couple of long-time experienced stock photographers in our circle of friends. One has dropped all agency contracts because none market as well as she can do on her own. Last year she spent a little over $4000 on post cards and postage (one a month to prime prospects), and coincidence or not, she trippled her stock income. The second has been doing the post card bit to augment sales through agencies. He's getting pretty tight jawed about spending so much to promote himself, only to give half the sales back to a couple of agencies that aren't doing much for marketing. He's likely to dump the agencies this year, too.
I like Smugmug because I do not have to program anything myself if I do not want to. I do add a little customizing, but mostly through their easy to use settings. Like someone above, I request folks to contact me BEFORE making a purchase. You will find that someone trying to get a large print out of a smaller JPG is not going to wind up being happy. Smugmug now allows larger filesizes, but is still limited to JPG's whereas I would use TIFF's for printing purposes.
Someone did actually find my images of a certain cemetery using "google" and bought the rights to the whole electronic set for a family book he was writing. That right there paid for over a few years worth of the Professional fee.
I write this many months after the initial request for thoughts as I figured others would stumble across it while trying to figure out if they want to use Smugmug.
Smugmug works for me in the way I intend it to work...which is NOT for making direct sales from listed images.
Troup Nightingale