Tips for Selling More Photos Online at dotPhoto.com

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1.  Promoting your Photos
2.  Organizing your Photos
3.  Organizing your Albums
4.  Pricing your Photos

Who sells photos online?

Many newspapers and professional photographers sell their reprints on dotPhoto.  Some connect their dotPhoto albums to their web sites, and others simply use dotPhoto as their primary web presence.

This page contains tips for maximizing your revenue on the dotPhoto service.

1.  Promoting Your Photos    Top

A.    Business Cards  
Include the following information to take advantage of dotPhoto’s event search website located at www.dotphotopro.com 

1.        Make the Login to your account the name of your business.

2.        When you have your cards printed include a field called “Event Name” and leave a blank space to fill in. (Be sure to name the albums you create in your dotPhoto account with the event name that you have chosen.)

3.        Include a “Date" field to Fill in the date of the event.

4.    Use the dotPhotoPro logo.  Please check our style guide for more information.

www.dotphotopro.com

B.     Set up a booth or banner at the event you are shooting.

C.    Collect e-mail addresses of potential clients, and send them a regular mailing.  Need a mailing company?  We like www.cooleremail.com

D.    Link from your existing website to your dotPhoto Storefront.  See the hyperlinks in MyAccount when you log in.

E.  Add a banner that clicks back to your web site from dotPhoto.  Set it up in the MyAccount link when you log in.

F.  Submit your album or web site to editor@dotphoto.com for potential inclusion in the dotPhoto newsletter or gallery page.

2.  Organizing your Photos    Top

A.  Watermark digital images when you upload them to your dotPhoto account.  This will protect your screen images when guests view them.

B.   Sort photos by caption. This feature helps you to organize images chronologically if you name your images with a time stamp or alphabetically.

C.   Create separate albums for each event or theme by organizing photos into albums containing a maximum of approximately 150 images each.

3.  Organizing your Albums     Top

A.   Make event photos easy to find.   Name all event albums with the event name followed by a subset name

            NY Marathon 11am to 12pm

B.   To group albums in sequential order instead of alphabetically, sort albums by date by clicking on the ‘created’ button over the date field. If you feel that your customers cannot understand dates, then you may want to add a prefix to the albums uploaded starting with Z99 and working backwards as you add more albums. Z99 being the oldest album will show up on the bottom of dotPhoto alphabetized list. For example:

            
            A99- road race 07-06-2002

            G46- dance party 04-15-2001

            L25 -baseball championship 02-15-2001

            Z15 -graduation 12-15-2000

            Z99- apple picking  10-15-2000 

C.   Password protect all albums for the same event with the same password.  This will prevent your customers from becoming confused by seeing other events:  only those albums with the same password are displayed.

D.   Generate a link to take your potential customers to all your albums that are password protected the same way. Copy one of the exposed links that are available in the ‘My Account’ area of your dotPhoto online storefront under ‘album links to thumbnail view’. The link should look like this: 

                http://www.dotphoto.com/go.asp?l=YourLogIn&p=AlbumPassword &AID=72750 

Remove the last part of the string that reads ‘&AID= 7250’ This link will bring all your customers to view only those albums that are password protected with the same album password.  You can either post this link on your own separate website that you maintain, or email the link directly to your customers.

E.   Include your copyright information in the album description field when you create them.

F.   If possible, include captions for every photo.  After an hour, your captions will be indexed by dotPhoto and your photos will be instantly searchable among millions from the dotPhoto search engine on the front page.
 

4.  Pricing Photos    Top
Some of our top grossing photographers use a pricing structure similar to the table below.  Of course, you can use any pricing structure you want (set your prices in MyAccount), but we provide this for guidance when getting started.

A.     3x5 ---- $6.95

B.     4x6 ---- $7.95

C.     5x7 ---- $10.95

D.     8x10--- $16.95

E.   11x14--$ 22.95

F.      12 x18- $26.95

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