Where did Ron go?
Sorry for the lack of posts! August is our planning month. Every year, we dedicate about 2 weeks to reviewing our digital process, testing new software and making content strategy plans. While good pre-pro for an individual shoot can maximize the number images, having an overall plan for the next 6-12 months helps us keep production flowing along.
Our long term content planning involves both data and trend research. We look at our best selling images to determine if we need to “refresh” a category or if we need to alter the demographics for the next shoot. We think about overall production in terms of general keywords. Keywords are the “real estate” of the stock photo industry. Do we have enough images in the “family” or “business” section? What makes one image sell more than a similar from the same shoot? Do we need to change our cropping? These are all fun questions to ask! Sara, our senior editor did a fantastic job of pulling together lots of info for us.
We manage our stock collection much like a “financial” stock portfolio. Diversification is good. We diversify both by having images in the different licensing alternatives such as rights-managed and royalty-free, as well as images that cover a wide variety of keywords.
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This is what I need to learn the most about, I think, as I start shooting stock. When just starting out, it’s easy to just imagine being out, shooting, and forget that it’s a business, and that the actual photography, while it has to be good, is only a mere fraction of the whole…In just the last 24 hours I have had so many random thoughts about possible subjects, I need to keep a notebook…and I also thought about the diversification, as you mentioned - making sure you cover as many of the categories of stock as you can, while maintaining quality. Great post!
Hello, Ron.
Great blog, thanks a lot. But - do you know, there is some issues in your rss feed on this site, if you’ll take a look at this link http://www.ronshoots.com/feed you can see error message on the top of page, so my aggregator client don’t suck posts in :o(