If you are reading this article then you probably already have a more than passing interest in promoting yourself online as a photographer. You likely already have a personal website (or at least dabbled with some online presence), social services or posted your photos/portfolio on a flickr like service. Many microstock photographers operate on a part-time basis, some with the intention of turning that into full-time work in the future.

There are two ways to look at earning more money from a microstock viewpoint:

1 – Concentrate on taking more great photos and they will sell themselves.

2 – Market your work everywhere which way you can to earn more.

A few years back it was easy to think the margins in microstock did not allow any scope to spend money/time on self-promotion other than a basic webpage or blog. As microstock becomes the ‘norm’ and more photographers work at microstock as a full-time job I’ve started to see countless photographers marketing themselves in all kinds of novel ways.

Marketing online is so easily scaled; you can spend as little or as much time as you like taking different approaches, the keys to it all are the iterative cycle of planning, implementation, measurement and refinement/analysis. You probably think your biggest hurdle at the moment is “how can I build a website” “how can I get 1000 followers” “how can I build a mailing list” – that’s the easy bit. Creating a plan that works is much harder to do, measurement and interpretation of results can be really quite challenging. Refinements to your plan often include simply accepting a failure and learning from it.

We are going to look at marketing only in the online space, for photographers or illustrators who are selling ‘images’ as their products, i.e. stock photographers. Photographers working in other fields may be able to take away some useful information.

To start with I really must highlight that with the diversity of images photographers take it’s impossible to create a one-size-fits-all marketing guide. With 10 years experience in running photography sites is say that most marketing activity online boils down to the following 4 options:

> The traditional independent stock photographer – create a contact base of buyers and sell direct to them. I don’t recommend for microstock, but it’s not something to rule out, consider it depending on the price point people are willing to buy your images at. Some of the tools used in this style of marketing (CRM) email lists etc. are still useful.

> Turn into a social network guru building networks of buyers who you have a relatively hands-off relationship. Posting your images sprinkled with your affiliate links at any opportunity – you match the images to an audience who wants them making your ‘network’. A network that buyers want to be a part because you make it useful for them; hopefully they will also be taking part suggesting useful material themselves.

> Build a website or blog and create regular written content that in time will hopefully attract visitors, some of who will be buyers. Such written content might also be on an article syndication network, press releases and guest posts. Making use of forums by helping answer questions too, just make sure you are answering buyers questions, not photographers’.

> As above but with your images make the main part of the content. Create a gallery of images, sit back and prey. To promote this perhaps give some of the images away as free samples with a creative commons license to attract image users, then try to convert visitors to your stock archive into buyers.

Which is best? Only you can work that out, and often it’s a mix of some if not ALL of them as your audience demands.

Internet marketing campaigns revolve around 3 things – search engine optimization, social media and content marketing. These marketing efforts are referred to as pull strategies. These are the marketing efforts that are designed to “pull in” your target clients, instead of pushing them to make favorable buying decisions.

The oft-repeated adage in Internet marketing – content is king – remains as relevant as ever. After all these emerging developments and shifts, the content of your Webpage remains to be the lynchpin of Internet marketing. Search engines scour the pages of your Website to assess if such pages measure up to the search query. On the other hand, your target readers will follow the content of your blogs, whitepapers, articles, etc. in order to get a clear picture of the product or services that you are offering.

This means that you need to generate quality content to build your reputation online. You have to exert extra effort to show that you are a trusted and reliable source of information. Thus, if you want to hit the jackpot in your Internet marketing campaign, you have to work on your content.

There are 4 common pitfalls that you must avoid in your Internet marketing campaign. These are the following:

Inadequate Fresh Content

Fresh content is the lifeblood of content marketing. This may appear to be a perfect case of redundancy. How would you perceive a blog site where the latest post is already a few weeks old? Blogs that are generally stagnant are considered by readers as fairly useless and won’t waste their time reading through the content. You are losing out on the opportunity to rank well at Google since each of the posts in your blog can target various keywords and these can help improve your online presence.

Connecting With the Wrong Audience

Follow the basic rule in marketing – profile your potential clients. You must monitor who are reading your blog posts regularly. Carefully assess if you are missing out on some earning opportunities from other segments of the market. Determine what your priorities are. Do you want to build your reputation as an expert in a particular field or niche? Or do you want to share information with your target clients? You must also get a good grip of the online behavior of your target readers and find out what they are looking for when they browse the Web.

Coming Off As a Hard Sell

You will surely mess up your Internet marketing campaign if you treat your content marketing as your medium in selling your product or service. You have to remember that your primary objective is not to sell but to market your product or service. You are into content marketing to “help” your potential clients. Your readers will surely not appreciate it if you sound a bit too “promotional” when you provide content for your blog.

Producing Content Without Promotional Value

On the opposite end of the spectrum, you should find ways to promote your product or service without going overboard and appear to be a hard sell. Learn of the “stealth” techniques so that you can get the desired response from your readers. When you produce a great article or white paper, you can get positive response from your target audience. This puts you closer to your main objective of developing a potential business through higher CTRs. Make yourself visible on the Web. Get those posts on your social profiles, company newsletters and social bookmarking sites. Of course, don’t forget to put share buttons on your blogs so that your target audience can republish or link to them.

It is no easy task keeping up with social media. This is an ever-evolving world with new websites, technology and terms that appear almost every day. However, there are some words and phrases that will always be useful. Here is a short glossary we have put together. Read it. Print it. Share it. Bookmark it. Of course, there are words we may have omitted or overlooked. Please feel free to include them in the comment section below.

Aggregation – The process of gathering and remixing content from blogs and websites that provide RSS feeds.

Alerts – Specific words, phrases or tags that search engines check and send to you be email.

Badge – An image that is squared and displayed on a blog that signifies a blogger’s participation in an event or contest.

Blog – A type of website that is usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary. The word is a contraction of the term “web log.”

Blogger – A person who writes and updates a blog. The word “blogger” was first used for the name of a website that was launched in 1999 by Pyra Labs.

Blog Post – Content that is published on a blog. This may include pictures or embedded videos and links.

Blogosphere – The totality of blogs and conversations on the Internet.

Blogroll – A list of sites displayed in the sidebar of blog, showing who the blogger reads regularly.

Bookmarking – Saving the address of a website or item of content, either in your brower, or on a social bookmarking site like del.icio.us.

Buzz – or buzz marketing is a term that was formerly used in word-of-mouth marketing and now is being used online. It describes the interaction between consumers about a product or service that amplifies the original marketing message.

Chat – Interaction on a web site with a number of people adding text items one after the other into the same space.

Communities – Groups of people communicating through the Internet.

Community building – The process of recruiting a potential community or network participants and helping them find shared interests and goals.

Content – Text, pictures, video and any other meaningful material that is on the Internet.

Content Management Systems (CMS) – Software platforms that offer the ability to create and manage web pages, blogs, wikis, and other tools.

Crowdsourcing – Harnessing the skills and enthusiasm of those outside an organization so they may contribute content and solve problems.

Facilitator – Someone who helps people in an online group or forum manage their conversations.

Feeds – The means by which you can read, view or listen to items from blogs and other RSS-enabled sites without visiting the site.

Folksonomy – While taxonomies are centralized ways to classify information – like libraries – folksonomies are the way people or “folks” create less structured ways of classifying information.

Forums – Discussion areas on websites where people can post messages or comment on existing messages.

Groups – Collections of individuals with some sense of unity through their activities, interests or values.

Lurkers – People who read but don’t contribute or add comments to forums.

Mashups – The mixies that “techies” do to combine several tools to create a new web service.

Micro-blogging – A form of blogging where the entries are limited to a certain amount of characters or words, like Twitter.

Newsreader – A website or desktop tool that acts as an aggregator, gathering content from blogs and similar sites using RSS feeds so you can read the content in one place, instead of having to visit different sites.

Open-source software – Any computer software whose source code permits users to study, change, and improve the software for free, and redistribute it in modified or unmodified form.

Photosharing – Uploading your images and sharing them on a website like Flickr.

Platform – A framework or system within where tools or applications can work.

Podcast – Audio or video content that can be downloaded automatically through a subscription to a website so you can view or listen offline.

Post – An item on a blog or forum.

Profiles – The information you provide about yourself when you sign up for a social networking site.

RSS – This stands for Really Simple Syndication.

Share – Offering people the use of your text, images, video, bookmarks or other content.

Social media – The term for the tools and platforms people use to publish, converse and share content online. These tools include blogs, wikis, podcasts, and sites to share photos and bookmarks.

Social media marketing – The term that describes the use of social networks, online communities, blogs, wikis or any other online collaborative media for marketing, sales, public relations and customer service.

Social networks – Large websites that host multiple communities comprised of people with profiles who have with similar interests. These sites offer a place where people engage with one another online and share content. Example communities include: Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, YouTube Flickr and Twitter.

Subscribe – The process of adding an RSS feed to your aggregator or newsreader.

Taxonomy – An organized way of classifying content – as opposed to a folksonomy.

Threads – Strands of conversation.

Tool – A software application for your computer.

User generated content (UGC) – also known as consumer-generated media (CGM) or user-created content (UCC) – The various kinds of media content, publicly available, that are produced by users.

Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) – Using a computer or other Internet device for phone calls without additional charge, including conference calls. The best-known VOIP tool is Skype.

Web 2.0 – A term that describes blogs, wikis, social networking sites and other Internet-based services that emphasize collaboration and sharing.

Widgets – Stand-alone applications that you can embed in other applications like a website or a desktop.

Wiki – Web pages used to collect content about a topic. Anyone with access to the pages can edit or modify the information.