Help DNF survive the winter

[DNF-Style]

Like discussed in other topics. People keep telling our images are great and they should sell very good.
Since they don't our images don't seem so great to the buyers.
We are doing al we can. Since about 4 months our keywording has improved and is stil improving. The rest is being re-keyed (very difficult on some agencies). We're working towards somewhat more stock related material. But still sales won't pick up.

Any/All help is appreciated. We give you full disclosure (please don't share outside this forum).
Here are our portfolio's
Shutterstock
Sales: 3847

Istock
Sales: 952 since december 2005 on 734 files

Dreamstime sales: 638 portfolio exposure 11.97% average 65.13/month acceptance ratio 83%

Albumo
Sales: 0 Earned 88 dollars though sinve the give 25 USD to start and after 1000 files 10 ct for every upload.

Bigstock
sales: 158 approval rate 84.94%

Lucky Oliver
Sales: 47

StockXpert
Sales: 78

Snapvillage (building up)
Sales: 0

Fotolia
Sales: 683

Gecko
Sales: 0

Crestock (building up)
Sales: 1

123RF
Sales: 122 since jan 2007

[Syates]

....We give you full disclosure (please don't share outside this forum).

Please be aware that Google is everywhere and the forum gets indexed so if you don't want to have things like this public, better don't post them. SY

[DNF-Style]

Well I think these numbers will sooner keep the tax audits away from us instead of diving onto us. They have bigger fish to fry.

[khz]

hi,
i am not one of the guru's of this business may be but, i have some thoughts on your situation my friend,

first and most important thing is quality of the photographs, which in your situation, they are great,

2: are they stock oriented or not, where will the potential customers will use your image? think about this before starting to shoot, and while determining your subjects and concepts always and always check out different sites with these concepts, what did people do about these concepts before you? which ones of these sell, which ones dont sell? try to shoot for micro stock only, your previous images that you shoot begore meetin micro stock may be awesome too, but most probably they wont sell.

3: keywords - may be as important as first two, it is the only way for customers to find out your images, so always double check different keyword combinations which can be usable for all sites, this keyword subject is the main reason why some photographers do extremely well in some sites, and cant sell on others

4: patience - i dont know how long have you been submitting to micro's but, y have to work very hard before things start to change for you. don get my wrong in any way that i am talking about your photographic knowledge or something, what i try to say is, every stock site has different characteristics and it takes time for you to learn these stuff. especially if it is not your full time job, y wont be able to catch the full time micro stockers in 6 - 8 months, who has been doing this business for more than 2 years. some of them are working very hard, every day and even nights to catch up the development of this business

[Talya]

What about canstock? They do not sell much but they do sell.

[lilcrazyfuzzy]

seriously, you do have spectacularly lower numbers than i expected by the quality of your port
and, well, i checked and you do make use of your keyword space, they are mostly well chosen,
..maybe..people shots are overrated?

let's see what lev has to say about this, you're much closer to his type of work than mine anyway, maybe there is a trick

[Talya]

DNF, if we are talking about survival, "girls with headphones" is a solution.  You prefer portraits, so I do not offer "isolated objects over white"     For glamour you need to love more intensive colors in my view, but your style will fit well in business theme, I believe. Maybe not welcoming as I said before, but problem solving, trouble, thoughtful (something more serious and deep than simply welcome) can be your theme (but clearly business related).  Could be a big market for that in USA in near future, I hope I'm wrong.

Good luck.

[DNF-Style]

What about canstock? They do not sell much but they do sell.

Joined there last month, no sales yet

[DNF-Style]

DNF, if we are talking about survival, "girls with headphones" is a solution.  You prefer portraits, so I do not offer "isolated objects over white"     For glamour you need to love more intensive colors in my view, but your style will fit well in business theme, I believe. Maybe not welcoming as I said before, but problem solving, trouble, thoughtful (something more serious and deep than simply welcome) can be your theme (but clearly business related).  Could be a big market for that in USA in near future, I hope I'm wrong.

Good luck.

Tried the saturated thing a few times to see if these would do better then our normally slightly desaturated ones but no noticable effect. Set our hopes on the Christmas copyspace to see how that'll do.
Planning to shoot business style but in a DNF-Stylish way. We always strive to shoot what others don't but there is a clear reason why others do shoot these lame photo's. They sell. Right?
So why is everyone telling us we should sell with our pf?
That's the thing we don't get. Working on titles, descriptions, keywords, all the things they told us are keeping us from selling. Making collections, lightboxes, building our networks, offering our stuff in the fora etc. Constantly changing and adding. Scratching our heads many times over this.

[Elnur]

I felt that your photos lack color and saturation. Photos must stand out among many others, they need bright contrasting colors - red, green, blue !!

[Syates]

...Working on titles, descriptions, keywords, all the things they told us are keeping us from selling. Making collections, lightboxes, building our networks, offering our stuff in the fora etc. Constantly changing and adding. Scratching our heads many times over this.

I think that is the way for you, change your "promotion-style", but not your "photographic-style". SY

[DNF-Style]

...Working on titles, descriptions, keywords, all the things they told us are keeping us from selling. Making collections, lightboxes, building our networks, offering our stuff in the fora etc. Constantly changing and adding. Scratching our heads many times over this.

I think that is the way for you, change your "promotion-style", but not your "photographic-style". SY

Well our preprocessing style is part of the photographic style of DNF. It would be like analogue photographing and not developing your film to say that the processing does not belong to the photographic style. It is sort of like Lev says for us also. But we do understand and we already did try on a batch where we saturated instead of desaturated our images. To see if they would do better then others. In fact on our last Christmas series. Christmas faerie with white sign we changed two factors. It is saturated to get the red to jump out and it is more commercial with the white board involved. We are hoping this will sell since so far only the more saturating batch did not do the trick.
We are now working on fiercer colors to see what our new batches will do.

Here's on of the Christmas batch:

[Talya]

DNF, I would not put too much hope on Christmas images now, the peak on the season is over, most of  people who wanted to do something about christmas already did. I was told that christmas images sell through whole year, but they not going to be that hot anyway. Try do do something about valentines.

I looked through your images at SS (randomly) and have to agree, there is some room for improvement in keywording. But I would not do it for old images on SS which are at the bottom of you portfolio.  There is basically no way on SS that will bring old image that sunk back to life unless it got into light box on the first page but this beyond your control. Adding keywords would not help. If I were you (and I gonna get hit again  ) I would try to delete several images which seem to have potential but sunk long time ago and upload again with new keywords, or upload slightly different version (saturated maybe, yes). For example (and I'm not sure about any particular example, maybe someone can advice you better which one has a good chance) : this one http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-3107520-boy-friend-and-girl-friend-in-arms.html     It may (may not of course) sells well for valentine, but there is no way to find this photo even when it was new (look at keywords).

Also, I saw a lot of teenagers pictures in your portfolio, this is underrepresented category, so and teenage and teen and young etc whenever you feel it possible, the same with pregnant women (you have a few).


BTW, I found the photo that is in my personal top10 (do not remember where I saw it, not at stocks probably), can not believe it does not sell well. I'm really glad I had a chance to meet you here, guys.

[Syates]

How is it going? And yes, I agree with Talya, it is time to shoot the Easter bunny and upload the Valentines! SY

[alex123rf]

Hi DNF,

We're great fans of your portfolio as you truly do get some great shots out there. It's also a wonder to me why you say your portfolio isn't performing.

As a short term solution, I've gone and looked into your portfolio a little deeper and I think the faved images might help. I've taken the initiative and faved them on your behalf, I hope you don't mind the initiative on my part. I believe we have also given you a Hear It! page for about a month or so.

I notice that you have some good baby photos and kids as well, so I faved some of them, hopefully it'll give you a bit more of an edge. Also I tend to agree that your images at times look very sepia-ish, perhaps you'd like to consider shooting some with more color and leave the heavy retouching to the designers who license your work. Of course, photographers are not masters of every subject and perhaps it's your style to use such lighting and techniques, but do feel free to experiment.

Also for studio shots, I also notice that those with props, or real life surroundings and shots with multiple persons, people mingling and interacting with colleagues, lovers, etc (logos, vgstudio, andreasr, iofoto) do particularly well too.

These are just my opinions and do note that I do not (or rather can't) see things from a total contributor point of view but I suppose every little advice should help.

Merry Xmas to everyone!