Photography marketing techniques

If you’re a wannabe professional photographer you will have to display your work somewhere so that potential photo buyers can find it; this usually means publishing it on a photography website or on a photo-sharing website, but there is another way of doing it.

I’ve just sold a photo to a national magazine, but for various reasons it wasn’t published on my photography website – it was published on a local community website, instead.
Someone from the magazine visited the community website, saw the picture and was able to contact me because the photograph was credited to me and because my contact details were placed next to the photo.
The words in italics are really important. There’s no point in having your work published on a community website (or on any other website or photo-sharing site, I guess), unless the photographs are credited to you and your contact details can easily be seen.

Profile of a magazine or newspaper photo buyer

Why would this person decide to visit a local community website? Surely it would be more logical to visit the local photographer’s websites?
To analyse her (in my case, it was a female photo buyer) motives, we have to put ourselves in her place. We have to find out where she is based, and how much she knows about my local community and the photographers in my local community.
She’s based in a city which is several hundred miles away from my local community. At this point, she doesn’t know anything about it. Also, she doesn’t know anything about the local photographers. All she has is the name of the place.
Let’s call this place `myplace’, and hope that Myspace doesn’t sue me for it.

Stalking photographers

She could, if she wanted to do, type something like this in a search engine: `photographers myplace’, but without the quotation marks. She would then be presented with a list of photographers in myplace. This is assuming that every local photographer in myplace actually has a website.
At this point, she would encounter her first problem. The photograph that she wants to buy was a news photograph. It was taken at a media event, an event which was covered by the local media.
But not all photographers are news photographers. Some are just wedding photographers, or wedding and portrait photographers. Some of the photographer’s websites that she might decide to visit won’t have any local news photographs on them, they will just have pictures of happy brides and somewhat puzzled babies on them.
In reality, if she’s an experienced photo buyer, she will know all this. Instead of searching for the local photographer’s websites, she will start by searching for the name of the place where these photographers are based.
She should then find the local community website. They always seem to be pretty prominent in the search engines, probably because they are highly relevant and not-for-profit.

Practical steps to marketing your photographs on a local community website

So if your home town or the district of the city where you live has a local community website, consider contacting it and offering to supply it with any news photographs that you might have taken.
Don’t ask for a fee, it won’t have the money to pay it, just ask to have your contact details published next to the picture instead.
Be sure to watermark your pictures – protect them against copyright theft. It’s unlikely that a national magazine or newspaper would steal them but someone else might.