Author Topic: Creating your own stock agency - software question (Read 11801 times)

Aviation-Stock · « **on:** December 22, 2016, 15:58 »

Hello Microstockers,

during the next months I am planning to create my own stock photo agency in a niche (aviation). Now I am in the process of finding the right software solution.

I found out that there is even a WordPress theme for selling your own photos, it is called „Stocky“: newbielink:https://themeforest.net/item/stocky-a-stock-photography-marketplace-theme/8087525?s_rank=1 [nonactive]
Anyone here who tried it out and may share his thoughts or show a result? It has almost 1000 downloads.

Those of you who run an own agency: Did you use a software or is it self-coded?

Markus

steheap · « **Reply #1 on:** December 22, 2016, 17:45 »

New Symbiostock for me

Steve

50% · « **Reply #2 on:** December 23, 2016, 04:11 »

What is your experience with the new Symbiostock? Ah I see you made a blog post about it (one year old) but I'm gonna read this first...

steheap · « **Reply #3 on:** December 23, 2016, 08:44 »

My experiences - as a piece of software and a solution for hosting and selling your images online, it has been great. No issues, easy to use (once you are online and that is easier if you actually follow the instructions), easy to add photos to and the SEO seems to be good in that my images get good placement on Google alongside the major agencies.

Sales have been few and far between though. I think Vector people do better, and some of the Symbio people seem to be doing OK, but they tend to do more social media stuff about their sites. I'm a bit lazy there.

As I think I said in my blog, I see it more as a vanity project and if the world shifts more to buying from smaller unique agencies, I will be there and ready!

Steve

YadaYadaYada · « **Reply #4 on:** December 23, 2016, 15:00 »

Does the new Symbio have better support for install and working problems? Leo looked at mine and couldn't figure out why it wasn't working, and he's the genius who wrote the original. I mean that as the compliment he deserves.

I don't know if it was my host or something I mucked up in the code or a plugin or what. Never worked right, I removed it. Could have been wordpress version was bad.

Anything other then Symbio that anybody likes and works? what about that photostore or ktools or what it's called?

PaulieWalnuts · « **Reply #5 on:** December 23, 2016, 20:27 »

I use Photodeck and really like it. They offer free trials.

pixel8 · « **Reply #6 on:** December 23, 2016, 21:11 »

Buy a Domain name right now for your Niche then put together a basic site that is optimized and then see if you can get it to rank on Google 1st or 2nd page before you put a lot of work into it. If you can't be found then its pointless unless you plan to spend a lot of money marketing online and offline to drive traffic to your site.

Not trying to discourage you but Stock Photos and keywords related to the industry is very competitive and hard to rank for in the organic search on Google so that is why you should do a trial run if you plan to run your own site.

No traffic means no sales no sales means your in the hole for time, and cost of making and operating the site.

steheap · « **Reply #7 on:** December 24, 2016, 09:28 »

Quote

Does the new Symbio have better support for install and working problems?

Yes, we don't seem to have very many. The forum is pretty quiet, which is probably a good thing.

The advice on testing Google ranking is a good one, although I have found that unless your images are pretty unique, even getting into position 1 or 2 on Google Images doesn't guarantee sales. You might get some views, but the people looking on Google Images rarely want to pay and the ones that are willing to pay often have accounts on the bigger commercial agencies. So I do get views on my images, but that rarely translates into a sale.

Steve

cascoly · « **Reply #9 on:** December 25, 2016, 15:33 »

I've had enough traffic on my original symbio site to qualify for Google's matched content ads which display your pages in among other adwords paid ads (eg http://cascoly-images.com/pix/ to see the resulting ads) -- that generates enough income to preserve the site and I'm moving some of my travel and science pages to this WP site

however, sales have been nil, even with 150K views per month - I think google images and ms agencies just present too big a hurdle for the average self hosted site to be worth it anymore - since I haven't seen anyone post real sales numbers to disprove this hypothesis my conclusion is good SEO just isn't being converted into sales

steheap · « **Reply #10 on:** December 25, 2016, 17:36 »

Steve

I agree - you can have a great site with great SEO, but people aren't willing to pay even 99c! By the way, I clicked on one of the financial ads on your site - those pay best!

Amazing number of visits though!

Steve

unnonimus · « **Reply #11 on:** December 27, 2016, 01:15 »

I own cmsaccount and there is also ktools.

cmsaccount will do the job for you but it is not perfect.

some of them will allow you to search your portfolio on sites like shutterstock.