Friday, November 27, 2009

Your microstock strategic plan





The new year already started and  and now is  a good time to work on your 2011 microstock strategic plan. SWOT analysis is a very useful tool that can help you with that by identifying Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.
In the following paragraphs I will give some examples to illustrate how a SWOT analysis can be applied to a portfolio.


  • Strengths and weaknesses

These are by definition internal factors that you can impact on. I suggest first to step back and have a critical look at your portfolio to identify its strengths and weaknesses. For this it is very important to collect as much data as possible by for example look at your sale statistics and your ranking (if available) in the different agencies.
You can found out for example that one of your strength is few strong best selling images in your porfolio.

  • Threats and opportunities

Threats and opportunities are by definition external factors that are not under your control. Threats can arise for example from mergers/acquisition or bankrupcies in the microsock industry that may decrease the value of your portfolio. Opportunities can be new microstock or midtock agencies that you can start contributing to, new microstock tools that can improve your productivity, or submitting videos to footage agencies.


A SWOT analysis alone is not very useful, so once you are done with it , you will have to define  actions by applying the following rules:

  • Capitalize and develop your strengths
  • Eliminate or limit your weaknesses
  • Invest in opportunities
  • Identify threats
  • But also match strenghts and opportunities and try to offset weaknesses with strengths

A more detailed version (5 pages PDF, $ 5) is available for download in the link above that will help in your SWOT. At this end of this guide you will be able to list a series of actions to increase your productivity and earnings

Sunday, November 1, 2009

October 2009 earnings

Photos

Although I did not have any BME in any of the microstock agencies this month and only one EL (Cutcaster), October ended up being my second BME overall. IS finished ahead of SS and FT was third well behind in term of earnings. SXP did pretty well and BSP quite stable. It looks like that sales finally dried out at 3DS which is a shame because it is my largest portfolio with 1500 + pictures. The review process ended up working against them maybe....
My pictures went live later in the month at Veer so it is a bit too early to predict sales there and where it will rank among my other agencies.
I have now more than 1000 pictures online at Shutterstock and on almost all other agencies except BSP and IS.
My total microstock earnings this month are just below $500 but if I add to this midstock, it pushes my earnings close to $600.


Videos

No sales yet to report but I am still building my portfolio and learning. So far, my largest portofio is at ClipCanvas with 52 videos and my smallest at Revostock with 9 videos which tells you immediately where is the fastest to push pictures. Pushing videos is definitely more time consuming than pictures because there is no IPTC system, yet...
I was dissapointed so far with my experience at SS and IS because of issues with ftp processing and very slow reviews.
Pond5,AlwaysHD, revostock, Clipcanvas are doing a much better job and it is not surprising since they have more experience in this field.
Isyndica platform was very helpful since I had to upload my 5GB of footage only once....
If you want to see the videos I have on sale so far you can have a look here.

I will see if I can push my microstock earnings pass the $600 mark in November before the traditionnal slowdown of December and the slow recovery of January.Stay tuned for daily updates on my twitter!





Upload once - Sell everywhere! iSyndica, the web distributor