Today, I thought I might just make a few humble suggestions to all of those major microstock players out there.  The ones that we respect and love to work with.  Without you all, we wouldn’t have a way to easily market ourselves to the world.  Obviously all might not agree with me, but I hope what I say here is helpful insight. Some of the microstock agencies have already implemented some of these things, but not all.  Stock agencies are constantly making suggestions about what they expect of us, so I just thought that today I’d share a few things I personally expect from them.  The following are things I’d like to see at all of the agencies I market my work through:

1.  Implement simple “share” links for twitter, facebook, and other social bookmarking sites. 

Social media is huge, and there are tons of potential buyers out there.  Why not enable the option to freely and easily encourage viral marketing and promotion?  This is such a simple thing, and yet 9 out of 10 microstock agencies do not seem to take advantage of this simple code.  Some agencies have recently created great new features to share recent sales, uploads, etc on facebook or twitter.  What about general share links on each and every image page?  In this sea of social media every tweet, status update, or posted link has the potential to display a watermarked image, not only getting your brand out there, but also the free advertising. 

This is just good business practice.  It’s not hard to do.  Sure, it’s a lot of money to pay a sea of contributors, but guess what?  That money should already be in the appropriate accounts, and ready to send off, seeing that most of the credit card payments from buyers should have more than cleared by the end of the month.  Try to pay contributors within 5-7 days, heck, even sooner.  Most agencies have this down pat, and I applaud you.  The rest, it’s something to work on.  You have the money that we helped you make – all we want is our small cut so that we can pay our bills, too.  We don’t all get regular weekly paychecks like most people, so when it’s time to request our monthly cashout via check or paypal, please make sure you’re on the ball.  When you do this, you’re not only saying “thank you” to your contributors, you’re also helping to gain and hold onto more of their trust.  Contributors that trust you are going to continue a steady flow of increasingly creative images. 

Let’s face it – in recent years there has been an influx of microstockers and contributing photographers.  Just at Shutterstock, I think I heard that there are now over 200,000.  Not all of them are full timers, and many of them are overlooked due to their smaller portfolio sizes.  Some are full timers in the top 100 earners, that are continually producing a steady stream of fresh images.  Featuring contributors regularly helps them to feel warm and fuzzy, but it also increases sub-brand awareness.  Designers are going to return to a site to look for a specific artist, if in fact, they have the chance to become acquainted.  This doesn’t have to be a huge section of the homepage, but it is definitely much appreciated when artists get some sort of recognition.

Like I said, some sites have all of these four points down pat – high five!  Others might not have them all nailed just yet.  Not that they’re going to read my crummy little blog, but if this will help turn on any light bulbs, anywhere at all, then I will feel like I’ve done my part to help the microstock universe.

If I’ve missed anything that you, as contributors would like to suggest, go ahead and chime in with a comment below.