These are my ideas on how to promote our own sites. However, feel free to comment on my ideas or other ideas:

Write blogs on separate sites and point them towards our own site

Set up a flickr account and point towards our site. Not sure how possible that one is as what content would I upload to flickr. Do they allow watermarked images?

Use photos to create a video slide show with watermark and upload to you tube which then points towards our site.

Craigslist/gumtree ad/friday ad


Any other ideas?

My site is near completion so I'm now thinking of marketing.

Kind regards
Mark

Paid advertising of various kinds is by faaaaaaaar the most effective way how to find image buyers.

But also some free promotion that comes to my mind quickly:

1.) Post lower resolution (or watermarked) images from your website on social networks, such as on Facebook, Twitter, G+, etc. with links to respective image preview pages on your website.

2.) Have links to your website in forum signatures where allowed.

3.) If you are not English speaker mention your website in your local/mother tongue forums, blogs, etc. where you will explain how great Symbiostock system is and as a prove of your words you will give your website link there as working example.
This will also promote Symbiostock as whole as well as your website.

4.) Give some advantage (such as some discount) to buyers if they will link (with active click-able link) back to your website from their online projects where they placed images purchased from you.

5.) Similar can be with free images. Maybe you should allow your website's visitors to use your lower resolution images for free (such as up to 600px, etc.), with condition that they must provide backlink to your website.
Permanent and good quality backlinks can be sometimes much more valuable than some small $ price that would buyer pay for lower resolution image.

Overall � old truth � have good/quality on-site content, such as quality images, good blog articles (perhaps with topics and themes in which image buyers may be interested), etc. and people will do your promotion for free when they will spread links to your website by themselves.

Also another idea, maybe Symbiostock system should have (develop) some kind of quality affiliate/referral program that will motivate even more people in Symbiostock promotion.
I mean motivate people not from stock photography origin (people outside of this community) in Symbiostock promotion.

Create a ton of great images that can only be found on your site or a few trusted partners.

"if you build it they will come"  I am not sure if this is true in the digital world of today.

Promotion is the key to any business ( and the main thing I suck at)

Connecting with buyers and potential buyers of your images should be the goal of your marketing campaign.

In this thread
http://www.microstockgroup.com/symbiostock-seo-marketing/advertising/msg322752/#msg322752

Tinny and I bounced around ideas for press releases, but I tried and failed at putting a couple together.

I try and contact a few people every day both to submit and buy, I have sent out many emails, had a flurry of views on the site afterwards but only had one person actually reply

keep in mind the average conversion rate for digital products sold online is around 0.5-2.0% ... that's the range of sales i would expect from paid advertising.

so, you need 100 or 200 or even 400 people coming to your site to make a single sale.

Quote from: cthoman on June 20, 2013, 09:06

Create a ton of great images that can only be found on your site or a few trusted partners.

"if you build it they will come"  I am not sure if this is true in the digital world of today.

Promotion is the key to any business ( and the main thing I suck at)

Connecting with buyers and potential buyers of your images should be the goal of your marketing campaign.

It's been what has worked best for me. All the other stuff is great to try too, but content seems to be king.

If anyone does paid ads I will personally fly to your house and slap you with a rubber chicken

I may put up ads just to see this happen.... my house is a looooong way away.... 

Changing the subject back to the original topic....

Does anyone know people in the National Association of Photoshop Professionals - the producer of that glossy magazine Photoshop User? They often use stock photos in their various articles and tutorials (from Fotolia and iStock normally). If we could both get them interested in using Symbiostock for their example files (give them for free) and do an article about us - that would give a lot of visibility to the design community.

I'll volunteer to write the article (and I could just send it to the editor (Scott Kelby), I guess...)

Steve

One thing I've been doing on my symbiostock site - dogfordstudios.com - when I'm not uploading images, is writing some blog articles with stock image buyers in mind.

The thing that always bugged me about the blogs on say, Dreamstime, is that they are always written from photographers to other photographers - giving tips about equipment or bragging about a sale or something.

If you want to attract buyers you need to have info that they want.  Blogs gear towards designers on what RF is all about, how to use it, why they would want to buy directly from fellow artists etc.

I offered  Corry and Pete free images in exchange for a mention, details were passed onto their purchase department, but not heard any thing back since then, maybe other  members contacting them will remind them we exist?