There's two primary reasons people post their photos online, to get them seen and to get them sold. I'm going to show you my strategy to make those two things happen.
I've been posting my travel and landscape photos online for about 10 years now and I've had a lot of successes and probably even more failures, but through that I've come up with a strategy that really works for me for posting my photos online.
Before I get into my strategy, I really need to define what my goals are. My primary goal is to share my travel experiences and the beautiful places that I see as well as I really like to inspire other people to travel to those places. However, as I got better at photography, I added another goal where I would like to make enough money from my photos to pay for all my camera equipment as well as pay for my travels.
One of the important things to note here is that for me, those goals are in order, meaning that it was really more important for me to create beautiful photos and share them with people online than it is to make money.
My strategy is to:
Regularly upload single photos to many popular websites with full data so they can be found.
Now what I'm going to do is break down each of those items.
The reason that I say to upload single photos regularly can really be summed up in two words: Social media. If you think of what a social media platform like Instagram or Facebook, most people are going to initially discover your content by going through and looking at a feed. Now when they go through and look at a feed, they're primarily going to be shown one image so it doesn't make sense to go and put them in a carousel and Instagram or add them to a gallery and Facebook because as they're scrolling through and only see the first image.
Most people won't click into look at the big gallery, so if you have four photos that are similar, it's often best to upload those four photos on four separate days as single photos as opposed to uploading them as a gallery because you'll get more exposure that way.
The second point in the strategy is to upload to many different sites. Some people may disagree on this depending on their goals. If your goal is to build a community around your photos and around your photography, then it may be a better idea to focus on one site and put all of your energy into uploading and building the community on one site before moving to multiple sites. However, if you want your photos just get seen by a lot of people and to be found by a lot of people, I find it's much better to upload them to a lot of different sites.
Different types of people are going to use different sites. So if you really want to get the most out of people seeing your photos, you need to upload them a lot of different places.
That brings us to the last point in the strategy and that's to make sure you include metadata in your photos and if you don't know what metadata is, it's just data that describes other data.
So in the case of photography, what you want to make sure you do is that you have captions and descriptions and keywords associated to all of your images. Also, if you're posting them on social media sites, you want to make sure you've also got them tagged with different hashtags.
The reason this is important is that when people go looking for your photos, what the search engines do is they use this metadata to decide which photos to show them.
Let me show you an example. If I type in Galiano island stock photography in Google search, you can see that a number of these photos here on my photos and I know from experience that people do search on this, find my photos, and then we'll go in and purchase purchase licenses.
So it's really important to include this metadata in all of your photos. Also, one thing to note, if you're doing outside photography or travel landscape photography, another piece of metadata that's really good to include is the geotagging information and that's it. That's my strategy for posting photos online. Here the YouTube video for this post.
