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.