SEO for photographers is critical to the success of a portfolio website. For almost a year, I’ve listened to what Rob Haggart at A Photo Editor says. He’s brutally honest, highly opinionated and knows a hell of a lot more about the editorial photo biz than I ever will. Rob recently launched A Photo Folio so that photographers can have websites that photo editors won’t hate. If I were looking to launch an online portfolio today, A Photo Folio would be the place I’d start.

For several years, however, I’ve been a relatively happy client of SiteWelder. So, when Rob did this blog post about how his Photo Folio site is tweaked to keep photo editors happy, I compared it to what I had going on my site.

Here’s how I hacked two of Rob’s great ideas into my SiteWelder site. The common theme to all of this is “Photo editors work at warp speed in an environment that constantly distracts them from your portfolio. A PE will give your site a handful of seconds. Don’t waste it.” [Read more →]

For a photographer, the “stock market” does not refer to Wall Street. Rather, it’s the place that photo editors, graphic designers and kids working on term papers go for images - either because they have no budget to hire a photographer or because they have no time. In the golden era, which began to crumble six or so years ago, many pro photographers made very nice incomes through stock photography. Today, the rise of the internet and microstock has eroded the foundations upon which the stock titans, like Getty and Corbis, were built. As their margins get thinner, the amount paid through to the photographer continues to evaporate. Still, for the agile and the astute, there are many opportunities in today’s stock market. So where to start learning about stock photography?

PhotoShelter’s School of Stock is a great place. Originally conceived as an online archive for photographers, PhotoShelter continues to evolve with the stock market. Last year PhotoShelter launched the Collection as an online market for photo buyers. With School of Stock, PhotoShelter continues to gain momentum as an equitable meeting point between photographers and buyers. Check out their free tutorials - especially the Buyer Survey 2008. School of Stock is a blog - so use your favorite reader to subscribe to the frequently produced updates. [Read more →]