Critique required please

[shams Faraz Amir]

Hi All

 

I have been uploading on alamy for over 3-4 years now with only 25 sales . Can you please advise how to boost sale. Any positive or negative feedback on my portfolio will be greatly appreciated.

 

 

[NYCat]

You could put the specific name of the park where you photographed the animal instead of just saying "a game reserve". I know these animals are in many different reserves but sometimes people are looking for a specific place. You describe a lot of them as "cute" and I would reserve that for the babies. These are just personal opinions and I may be wrong. Unfortunately, Alamy is loaded with images of African animals and I don't sell a lot of them.

 

Paulette

[Autumn Sky]

Proper keywording is tough skill because you are trying to predict what words potential customer is going to use in order to express idea in his mind, and everyone is different.  Important thing is the way Alamy indexes;  description (150 chars) are indexed the heaviest,  then 10 super-keywords, then everything else.  So fill out everything that is essential in these 150 chars!  Your descriptions are too short.   As NYCat says,  "cute" is probably better left out alltogeter, but "Kruger" should definitely go in description, or super-tags at minimum.

 

Another thing to keep in mind is Alamy Rank;   search false positives will drag it down.  So fighting to come up with 40 keywords just to satisfy "discoverability" criteria can actually hurt you.  It is essential to keep track of Alamy Measures & update metadata when obvious false positive shows up. 

 

Other than that it is about shooting unique content, which is harder and harder because of competition.   There are tons of safari animals shots everywhere, so yours must really stand out visually.  This image netted me ~200 USD so far

 

A lucky shot, and not super polished technically (old camera), but unique.  This is the key

 

Good luck

[shams Faraz Amir]

10 hours ago, NYCat said:

You could put the specific name of the park where you photographed the animal instead of just saying "a game reserve". I know these animals are in many different reserves but sometimes people are looking for a specific place. You describe a lot of them as "cute" and I would reserve that for the babies. These are just personal opinions and I may be wrong. Unfortunately, Alamy is loaded with images of African animals and I don't sell a lot of them.

 

Paulette

Thanks NYCat  , agreed sometimes we are just swayed to just fill in the description and keywords .

 

Advise taken. 

[shams Faraz Amir]

1 hour ago, Autumn Sky said:

Proper keywording is tough skill because you are trying to predict what words potential customer is going to use in order to express idea in his mind, and everyone is different.  Important thing is the way Alamy indexes;  description (150 chars) are indexed the heaviest,  then 10 super-keywords, then everything else.  So fill out everything that is essential in these 150 chars!  Your descriptions are too short.   As NYCat says,  "cute" is probably better left out alltogeter, but "Kruger" should definitely go in description, or super-tags at minimum.

 

Another thing to keep in mind is Alamy Rank;   search false positives will drag it down.  So fighting to come up with 40 keywords just to satisfy "discoverability" criteria can actually hurt you.  It is essential to keep track of Alamy Measures & update metadata when obvious false positive shows up. 

 

Other than that it is about shooting unique content, which is harder and harder because of competition.   There are tons of safari animals shots everywhere, so yours must really stand out visually.  This image netted me ~200 USD so far

 

A lucky shot, and not super polished technically (old camera), but unique.  This is the key

 

Good luck

 

 

Many thanks Autumn Sky.  I did get a few big sales in the last 3-4 years , but total sales is very low for me . Like in 21 I just got 3 sales of very small amounts.

 

Many of my photos were uploaded initially in 2017-2018 and then I just used so many not so relevant keywords. Since then I feel I have been better in  skills but let say I have a good pic of an elephant baby which I uploaded now , still in Alamy measures it shows my old not so good photos appearing.  Do I just delete those old pics  ? Or just update or remove those keywords.

 

I feel uploading new photos (similars) may help in getting search results - Am I wrong or is this the way ? 

 

My CTR is 0.22 for the last 11 year with only 25 zooms , may be because my old pics are still coming on the searches. Is there a way to win over this situation. False positives seems to be a good suggestion , if you could help me with a practical example from my profile please.

 

My image - PER5DM  gave me over 300 $ but it was just 2 times , I would love to get more sales of this and similar even though small amounts but at least keep me going.

[Autumn Sky]

Only can make the call if you should delete old images.  I know that lean port of 100 diverse and original images with good metadata can and will outperform port of 1000 images that are poor technically, similars with non-adequate metadata.   Largest mental trap across microstock industry is "If I upload more, I will sell more";  so they take 50 shots of same flower, with slightly different angle, and then wonder why none sells.  ("I have 10000 images online, but poor sales. What am I doing wrong")

 

False positives is best to study from Alamy Measures, updated every day.  Look at every image that came up with search.  I can give you example from my own port, just today.   Following image was returned for "Cougar Snow" search  phrase phrase:

 

 

This is false positive, as customer was probably looking for image of Animal with Snow Background.   Why was my image returned?  Because the name of this channel spanned by bridge is "Cougar Canyon" and my description reads "Snowy Footpath and Wood Pedestrian Bridge over Cougar Canyon in Canmore, Canada with Snowcapped Mountain Peaks against blue sky in the background".   Alamy indexed "Cougar" from title and there was "Snow" in metadata, and there you go.

 

(Situations like this are not easy to fix properly, as "Cougar Canyon" is legit phrase and someone might be searching for exactly that.   I should probably take out "Cougar Canyon" from description as Alamy appears to index each word separately in Description field, and then have "Cougar Canyon" in metadata as 2-word phrase)

 

 

 

 

[MizBrown]

2 hours ago, shams Faraz Amir said:

I feel uploading new photos (similars) may help in getting search results - Am I wrong or is this the way ? 

You're better off eliminating the old ones when you put up new ones with the same subjects.  The biggest issue was explained by someone else this way: If you have similar photos, and one of them that isn't as good as another shows up first in the search, the client may not see the better photos buried a couple more pages in. 

 

If a subject is very well covered by Alamy contributors, what may matter is getting the unique shot that shows well as a thumbnail. 

[shams Faraz Amir]

Thanks Guys , May be if someone knows what is Alamy rank ? I see my QZ rank is 3 but where is Alamy rank , does it impact overall sales and what is the criteria behind this people.

[Steve F]

56 minutes ago, shams Faraz Amir said:

Thanks Guys , May be if someone knows what is Alamy rank ? I see my QZ rank is 3 but where is Alamy rank , does it impact overall sales and what is the criteria behind this people.

 

Your pictures will appear at a certain level (e.g. first page, 10th page... etc.) in searches by clients, depending on various factors. CTR and Sales are the only factors we know about for sure in the secret formula Alamy uses to set our search ranking. Your CTR rank (on your Dashboard) is a function of the number of times a client zooms (clicks on) one of your images versus the number of times your images appear in a client search, but are not zoomed.

CTR=Zooms/Views * 100

This is basically a long way of me saying, don't spam keywords. E.g. don't put sky, blue, clouds for every single outdoors picture you shoot. There is a tendency to try to put lots of keywords for your images to try to get them seen by clients. So they may well appear in searches, but if they're not zoomed by a client, your CTR rank will drop. Which means your images won't show as high up in client searches. You don't want your images to get buried in the 255 million images on Alamy. By all means, put a lot of keywords in for certain pictures if they're relevant. Captions and keywords are almost more important than the image itself because you can have the most amazing images ever, but if they're keyworded wrong, no one will ever see them.

 

Include variant spellings, in particular British and American spellings. Also include singular and plurals  of words if appropriate. Don't worry about moving the line to optimised (green) - we have collectively decided that this is not a good idea unless you really need that many keywords.