How to sell more microstock? The right way is good keywording.

When I started contributing to microstock, I didn’t care a lot about keywording. After the first short period when I submitted everything I had, I started to pay attention to the type of photos which had been downloaded the most, and I tried to adapt it to my portfolio, however it is difficult. Of course I also tried to improve the technical quality of my pictures. I had never payed attention to the keywording of my pictures, I just added the necessary minimum as I didn’t want to ‘loose time’ by editing detailed keywords to my pictures, as I found it pretty boring. With the time I realised how important this issue is. I started to do the exact opposite and added as many keywords as I could to my pictures, because I thought the more keywords will add, the more times my pictures will appear among search results and the more times they will be downloaded. However sometimes my picture got refused for not having relevant keywording – for example on IStockphoto there is a strong control of keywords added to pictures, as keywords have to match their own vocabulary.

Some agencies also have a system which allows all users of the website to report the badkeywording and also allows ‘punishing’ photographers who are adding irrelevant keywords for example ‘Dreamstime’. Dreamstime also has a great function which shows which keywords sold the picture. I realised that adding too many keywords will not help to sell the image because when a picture appears in search results and is not relevant for the search, it will not be downloaded anyway. So now I try to find the best way to add relevant keywords to my picture without having to spend hours searching.

Recently I came across the microsite ‘Pixmac’, which offers its contributers professional keywording for free. This sounds good but I have not yet tried it and cannot say if the keywording is good quality, however it is the only site offering photographers free keywording. It is also still possible to keyword your photos by yourself but you have to use their keywording guide which is based on clicking on the keywords and it helps you not to forget anything. But what I found most interesting are systems allowing easy keywording and multiple picture sending to different microsites. It is a payed service as far as I know, but I definately want to try it as it seems very clever to me.

The most interesting I found are
www.findphotokeywords.com
www.photokeyword.com
www.prostockmaster.com

Article by Tomas Boleslav

Tags: How to sell more on microstock? The right way is good keywording.