Marketing Your Images

Ok so you have taken some great pictures but how do you go about marketing them?

Well we are always happy to look at buying your images or spare stock through our website WeBuyPics.com but you may well want to remain as the owner of at least some of your images so the established way of marketing your images is through one of the stock houses who will offer your images on a royalty free license to the general public. These stock houses have the great advantage of having huge traffic and sell a lot of licenses every day but also have a couple of disadvantages in as much as your images are competing will millions of other images and often the stock house keeps a large proportion of the license fee.

Having said this they are a good outlet for a lot of photographers and designers.

A lot of authors prefer to keep an element of control over who is licensing their images and use a Rights Manages License instead of a Royalty Free License. The main difference between the two is that a Royalty Free license grants a license to a person or organisation to use the image anywhere they wish whilst a Rights Managed License restricts where the image can be used such as a single web site or publication so the copyright owner keeps much more control.

A lot of authors sell a Rights Managed License through their web site and a popular way to market the website and their images is to allow a portion of their stock to be used on a Creative Commons License and this is how we promote our sites.

Basically a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License allows an image to be used for free in return for an attribution link of the copyright owners choice. This link helps in several ways firstly people see your image on other websites and if the like it may well click on the link bringing traffic and potential sales to your website. Secondly the search engines will reward you for having links on other sites as they recognise the link as a vote for your website which may promote your web site in the search engine rankings.

Unfortunately using this method you will find people cheat by taking your images and not providing you with an attribution link and it may take some of your time to follow up on these infringements.

We have a policy of emailing most website owners about copyright infringements except in the case of blatant copyright infringements when it is perpetrated by professional web designers or commercial companies who should know better and often build their whole web site using Creative Commons images without following the terms of the licenses.