Increasing profitability of sales on Shutterstock
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Creating stock work can be an excellent form of investment. The more useful information you have about which of your photos are the most popular, the more thoughtful your decisions will be regarding where to spend your time and money.
We, the Shutterstock team, believe that by sharing the available information with you, we can assist in making such decisions. Since the launch of our Catalog Manager six months ago, we have received a lot of feedback from authors who use this feature to track the income from their works.
This is one of several tools that help track earnings from your images featured on Shutterstock. Understanding the profitability level of each of your photos will help you optimize your spending and increase your return on investment in photo sales.
Shutterstock Catalog Manager
If you are not yet using this tool – here is a quick presentation of its capabilities.
The Catalog Manager allows you to:
- Sort images into sets
- Share sets with anyone
- Track statistics for each set individually
If you haven’t created any sets from your images yet, you will see a table like this on your page.
You can also access the catalog manager through the “Resources” menu on your author page after logging into your account on the stock site.
If you have already started using sets, you will see the message “Track Your Sets” in the left column on the author page. Below, a table will display the profit generated from each set.
You can create as many sets as you want and choose five to display on your page. By the way, you can access the catalog manager via a link located under this table.
From the sets, you can glean a lot of information. For example, if you spent a shooting day on one model and took numerous photos of her in different looks for Shutterstock.
Once you upload these images to the stock site, you can group similar concepts or themes into unique sets and see what total income they generate.
You might just track 2 or 3 shots to understand which one was the most successful and profitable. You can also group images by themes: what is more popular – images of people or animals? Which images are more in demand – those taken outdoors or indoors? Which of your models is the most appealing?
Ken Inness, a Shutterstock photographer from Philadelphia, uses sets for a more precise understanding of which models and concepts sell better. He says:
“I can create a set for a new model, for instance, in concepts like medicine or business, to see if this model has a marketable look in that image. I also use sets for editorial images to understand which sports are currently in favor. It’s no surprise that in the lead-up to the summer games, there’s a noticeable increase in demand for the ‘Olympics’ set.”
By the way, check out the informational video on how to use the catalog manager on the stock site’s website.
Keyword Trends
There are several more useful tools for Shutterstock authors. You can use the keyword trends tool to compare the popularity of similar keywords or to see seasonal spikes in the popularity of specific keywords. Here’s some information obtained with this tool – 5 popular keyword trends on Shutterstock.
Image Gallery Statistics
In addition to all of the above, you can also use the catalog manager functionality to obtain statistics about your image gallery, to learn buyer preferences for individual images.
To see statistics, first select a set in the catalog manager, then click on “Actions” in the upper right corner and choose “Show Stats” from the drop-down menu.
If you select “Show Stats” in the catalog manager, you will enter (in a separate window) the view of the statistics for that set.
Here you can see how each image in the set is performing, as well as which keyword leads buyers to find the image before downloading. This is an excellent feature that helps you understand which keywords are most important for your portfolio.
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Take these tools for yourself. By spending just a few minutes, you will gain knowledge that can not only save you time but also help you create true hits in photo sales.
Author: Shutterstock
Link: www.shutterstock.com/buzz/sets-tool-profitability
