How to Increase Sales on Photobanks? (Part 1)

Have you noticed that at a certain stage in working with stock photo sites, there comes a point when you keep adding new works, but the number of sales stays about the same? For example, you have 2,000-2,100 sales on a stock site per month, and it just won’t go any higher. It’s clear that with persistence and consistently adding new works over time (2-3 months), a jump is possible. However, many microstockers, upon reaching a high level, find themselves stuck at this plateau, struggling to move to the next level and achieve another BME (Best Month Ever). Let’s try applying some strategies that can help you keep growing your sales on stock sites. Many of these methods are successfully used by experienced microstockers in their stock site work. I believe everyone can find something useful here — there are plenty of options. Try to find an approach that works for you and see if it helps boost your sales.

Focus Only on Major Stock Sites

Yes, many may scoff, while others might agree with my suggestion. It’s quite logical to work only with the main microstocks, or perhaps to include stock sites where uploading, tagging, and other time-consuming processes are highly automated. Major stock sites include, in my view, Shutterstock, iStockphoto, Dreamstime, and Fotolia.
Why avoid second-tier stock sites? Simply put, by focusing on less-prominent sites, you spend a lot of time getting acquainted with their specifics, tagging and uploading works, and then tracking sales and views. In terms of overall stock earnings, especially when your portfolio is small, the contribution of smaller sites is minimal. Try calculating for yourself what percentage of your total income comes from smaller stock sites, analyze the time spent on them, and I’m confident you’ll decide to focus on working with the leading stock sites.
I suppose your next question would be, “But what about microstockers with massive portfolios?” For seasoned microstockers, uploading an entire portfolio to a small stock site once and forgetting about it until they’ve accumulated another thousand works is not an issue. Meanwhile, even on smaller sites, this portfolio can generate some income. So, once your portfolio reaches a thousand works, it may be worth considering uploading it to minor stock sites. This bulk upload approach saves time — upload and forget until the next thousand.

Tagging Your Masterpieces Takes Time

In the assembly-line preparation of works for stock sites, tagging often gets minimal attention. Many microstockers use ready-made templates for tagging, sometimes without even checking for extraneous keywords or relevance in descriptions. This is especially common when preparing series of works. Just for curiosity, ask yourself: what if there’s one work in that series, a unique illustration or photograph, that could become a bestseller?
Take a little extra time to review your series and identify works that you think have the potential to be bestsellers. For these works, try to spend a bit more time tagging than usual. Try to write a more detailed description, come up with a unique title, and adjust keywords to be more precise.

Pay Attention to Titles and Descriptions

A work’s title should be concise yet give a clear and understandable description of the illustration or photo’s concept and should consist of more than one word. The title is what the buyer will see first in the stock site’s search results.
It’s common for a buyer to browse through a stock’s catalog without a clear idea of what they want, just looking for something that catches their eye. If they click on your work, it means it caught their attention, and now you need to ensure they don’t move on. Here, the description plays an essential role. Aim to make the description more vivid, perhaps even better than the actual photo or illustration. You want to encourage the buyer to start reading the description — if they begin, they’re likely to read it all the way through. Besides, a good description has another advantage: search engines index titles, descriptions, and keywords on stock sites. So it is quite possible to attract a buyer for your work even from Google search results. By the way, if a buyer arrives directly at your work from a search engine, registers on the photobank, and makes a purchase, you will additionally earn referral commissions from the photobank.

Improve the Quality of Your Work

One of the key factors in boosting sales on photobanks is improving the quality of your work. Quality improvement can be achieved in various ways. One option may be to upgrade your equipment. For example, using a new camera that produces higher-quality images, lenses, and flashes. This equipment significantly impacts the quality of your work. Of course, this option is capital-intensive, but it quickly pays for itself and allows you to raise your earnings level on photobanks. This also includes purchasing a tablet or upgrading to a higher-end model. Photographers should strive for better image processing using new software versions, new filters, plugins, and all the features of professional software. This can bring extra vibrancy and color to your photos. Illustrators need to hone their drawing skills, develop new brushes, and so on. Perhaps, personal improvement and upgrading your equipment can bring the biggest growth in photobank sales.

Increase Your Portfolio Volume

In photobanks, as in many other areas of business, there is an inviolable axiom – money attracts money. In the context of photobanks, this means that the same illustration or photo uploaded to a novice’s portfolio and to a professional stocker’s portfolio will yield completely different sales volumes. Author recognition linked to portfolio volume has always positively impacted and will continue to impact overall photobank sales. What to do? The recommendation is simple – become a well-recognized author by building a quality and extensive portfolio on the photobank. If you currently upload 10 works per week, increasing the upload rate to 20 works per week will boost sales of photos and illustrations on photobanks not only because you are adding more works but also because your overall portfolio volume is growing.
Increasing the number of works has a particular impact on earnings level on Shutterstock, which you will quickly feel. However, recognition on Shutterstock has significantly less effect on sales than on other photobanks. Therefore, increasing your portfolio volume at an accelerated rate will allow you to raise your earnings level on Shutterstock in a short time, while on other photobanks, your portfolio’s visibility will grow, ultimately leading to higher earnings, although over a longer period.

Use Lightboxes

If a photobank buyer sees your illustration in the stock database that almost suits them but needs a version with a blue background, your lightboxes can help in their search.
Try to group all similar illustrations and photos on the same theme or storyline in separate lightboxes, and create an appealing banner for each lightbox. Then place this banner in the description of the works included in the lightbox, as well as where it will be more visible to buyers, for example, in the header of your portfolio.
These lightboxes will help organize your portfolio by theme and make it more convenient for buyers, which, in turn, will bring additional purchases of series works and an overall increase in photobank sales.
To be continued…