I had quite a few months of fairly decent sales (well, relative to my past sales, nothing comparable to other people's sales on this site though), October seems determined to cut me down to size... only 3 sales so far this month. Oh well... maybe next month my sales will soar once again.
I was actually talking to one of my referrals yesterday... he is a professional photographer so I have high hopes that his stuff is going to have a lot more success... As he's new to Dreamstime he had quite a few questions... and I found myself expounding on a few theories as to how he could do better on Dreamstime (of course I realized almost immediately that I'm not actually putting into practice my own advice, oooops).
After explaining the upload methods (he hadn't caught on to the FTP immediately and kept complaining how long it was going to take him to upload his back catalog of 5,000 photos), I had to explain the pricing model to him, and so forth and so forth...
In any case, the strategies we talked about briefly were:
1) Think commercial, not art: meaning in some cases don't follow the conventional thinking about composition rules etc. Think about leaving an image incomplete and/or leaving empty space around a subject to allow consumers to add elements of their own. (see Ellen's blog A Good Stock Image is an Incomplete One... for more on this).
2) Don't overkill a subject... probably better not to post too many photos of the same subject in your portfolio... don't compete with yourself (unfortunately, I only realized this one myself after having gone in completely the other direction... and I'm not even a horsey person!!!).
3) Post a lot of pictures about diverse subjects, thereby increasing your chances of showing up in one search or another.
4) Set yourself a goal of submitting a certain number of pictures a day (not one that is realistic for me unless I limit myself to 2 or 3 pics a day). This so that you can keep your motivation up and ensure a constant flow of new images into your portfolio.
Just a few ideas, would be interested in hearing what ploys other people think may be useful.
