your friendly local stock agency

Here’s a little tip for making some extra money in the stock market: be your own agency.

While it’s really not as difficult as you might imagine, it does take a little more work than simply uploading images to be approved by someone else. If you’ve got images, all you need is a gallery with a flexible shopping cart system. I use Exposure Manager mainly because they give me complete private-label branding control: I can self-fulfill any type of product I want, at whatever price I want. This includes any type of digital download licensing I want to offer! The main thing, though, is to have a site where you can send your clients to find images, and then for them to be able to order whatever it is you have to offer.

Once you have your site, it’s a matter of letting people know about it. Along these lines, you have to decide just how broad or how narrow you want your market to be. For me, I pretty much stick to marketing locally. I don’t spread myself to thin, trying to be everything to everybody. I’m only looking to add clients that will spend anywhere from $200 to $3000 a year with me, for anything from images for their websites to images for greeting cards. Typically, I market to office managers and administrative assistants–the people that either make purchasing decisions or recommendations. You’ll find that most of these people, even though they might work in competing organizations, actually talk to each other A LOT…”who did you use for xxx, where did you get yyy.” The goal is for your name to be the answer.

After you’ve gotten a handle on who you’re going to market to, what you need is inventory. It’s not a matter of having a bazillion images, but of having enough unique stuff that really represents where you live. You clients are going to be looking for exclusive-use images; they aren’t going to mind that you work with their competitors, but they aren’t going to want to share. That’s why you need to make sure you have a broad enough inventory that if someone takes an image exclusively, you’ll have something to replace it.

From your inventory you can build your marketing collateral; you might be able to get away with not having to actually print anything but a simple business card. Even if that’s the case, you’ll still need some imagery for emails and web pages. You’re just looking to get across the point that you have a nice collection of images available for reasonable prices.

As to pricing, this is my logic: since I’m shooting on spec, I don’t need to charge as much as I would for a commissioned shoot; since the client is getting a unique image from me, I can charge more than what they would pay to a micro stock agency; since they’re getting it directly from me, I don’t have to charge as much as the macro agency because I’ve eliminated the middle men.

One really neat thing about this approach is that it puts your work where it can be seen by people you know and come in contact with on a regular basis; in other words, it gives you VISIBILITY! Granted, there’s nothing wrong with being able to walk into a prospect’s office and show them an image on page 49 of a travel guide that you shot (even if you only made $1 for it). But, you have to admit, it would surely save on the shoe leather to simply send out emails, showing your prospects your images being used on other client’s sites, or to show them how another client’s Christmas card turned out.

Your mileage may vary. As with anything, you’ll only get out what you put in. For me, though, in the long run, I think I’ll feel better about my sales, knowing that it’s between me and my clients (no middle men), that I’m not giving my work away, and that my clients are truly appreciating what I’m doing for them (because they and I know that they have lots of choices).

Good luck!

By the way, the image above, shot while riding around, taking in a freak Spring snow storm (we typically don’t get much snow around here), was recently licensed for a Season’s Greeting card by a local law firm.