IM for photographers- membership stock photo site?

Idea #1: personal stock photography membership site.
Make a website and offer a low monthly membership cost for access to all photos for stock photography licensing purposes. Or maybe just sell stock photo "bundles" for certain categories. Promote the site using SEO for keywords related to stock photography.
To me, thinking like an internet marketer, this seems like a much better idea then just submitting your work to istockphoto or wherever. But how would the legalities of a site like this work, would I have to get a lawyer to work out contracts?
It would be easy to write copy and advertising for the site, it would just say something like "why pay x dollars for stock photography off of istockphoto for individual photos, when you could just pay 4.99 a month for complete access to hundreds of stock photos from a professional photographer, with new photos being added constantly" What do you guys think of this idea.

Idea #2 have a traditional photography site offering services like senior photos and weddings and promote that site for my local area using SEO and google. Use a mailing list to capture clients and leads offering exclusive discounts and sales for people who join the list.

Idea #3 make prints and postcards and sell them at local craft fairs. Give away business cards to everyone with links to buy prints online and the photographer website offering senior pictures and traditional photography services.

Idea #4 sell prints and postcards on Etsy or on another website designed specifically for selling prints and promoted with SEO. Which would be better?


If you read the last post on this thread by me it goes into a bit more detail
http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...otography.html

Ill even take it a bit further. Local craft shows, etsy, your own site, yes small prints and post cards would be a nice edition, as long as you have $200 large prints for sale. Yes they like the image, but they cant afford $200, so they will buy the 4.95 card.

How to really make money selling prints. Going the online route, you really don't have to have inventory, you can find a place locally that does hi quality prints for a reasonable price. You want to ensure that you are getting UV prints vs dye ink prints. Once you can afford it, you want to get your own large format printer. Get as large as you can afford. a decent 24 inch plotter is about $1500.00. Your first 10 $200.00 prints will more than pay for it.

You really want to buy the largest plotter you can get your hands on I personally have a 42 and 60 plotter(s). Within the first week of having each of them I ran enough work through to pay for the expense. DO some research on the cost of paper, and you will be blown away. I use matte presentation paper for most of the prints I do for clients, and its like $30.00 per 100 foot roll. Its kinda silly really! On a 42" doing 16x20 prints you are looking at about 12 feet of paper for 10 prints to give you an idea.


If you have any questions by all means ask.

hope that helps!

phonetools - I think all your ideas are good. I would also think offline marketing for a wedding portrait business. You need to meet and do deals with places people frequent especially for weddings. You need to have party planners, caterers, florists etc. recommend your services to their clients. It makes the photographers job a little easier.

I also agree that a good image rights policy is needed if your going to sell the images on the internet. This way there is no confusion as to what is allowed and not allowed as to how a buyer can use the photos. For example: who owns copyright, can buyers resell, put their name on images, porn sites etc.

An advantage of going with an online stock site over doing it yourself is that they already have a client base and they heavily promote to them. The downside is you normally don't make much money unless you sell a very large quantity of images.

aceriker - you need a good DAM (digital asset management) tool/shopping cart. It acts like a members site but for images. A number of my friends have used Imagefolio to self host their own images. Imagefolio is also a shopping cart so that perspective buyers can buy and download images, photos, videos. They are a few versions at different price ranges. Imagefolio will track downloads and can notify you by email when something is downloaded or purchased.

There are also many online shopping carts for photographs like Photobiz,Photoshelter, PicturesPro, Zenfolio and others. Also, they already have the disk space and proper server configuration.

I know there are Wordpress plugins, but I have never used them so I really can't recommend any.

Another thing you must decide is what image size you are going to sell/rent the photos at. 72dpi for internet or 300dpi for print. Then you can decide how much disk space you will require. I usually recommend VPS hosting for photo sites with thousands of images. And you need to consider how much photos you will be uploading in the future so you no how much disk space will be needed. Too much initially is costly and too little will force you to move your database of images to another server later on which can be expensive.