The rule is simple : be where your customers are. Applying it is much harder.

Sure, you can have a twitter account, and Facebook, and Linkedin and all that . But is that where your customers are ? Not really. They don’t really follow you on Twitter because they don’t want to, nor do they wish to exchange personal stories with you on Facebook ( if they even know you), they log into Linkedin once every few months  to find a number and quite frankly would really appreciate if you would stop spamming them with your blast emails.

Sure, you have a website. But so does billions of other people/companies/schools/institutions/churches/ airline companies and so on. A drop in the ocean doesn’t even begin to describe where your website/blog is right now. You can make that two drops in the ocean if you have a really good SEO.

So what to do asks the wise man ? Well, there is a nifty smart why to put your images in the face of image buyers in a very subtle smart way. It’s called Image Exchange and it is brought to you by Israeli company Picscout, previously in the copyright infringement detection industry.

How does it work ? Very simple. You, the image creator, send small version of your images into their central servers where they are fingerprinted for detection. Image Buyers, on their side, download a small plug in for Firefox or Explorer ( Soon Chrome, hopefully). Every time your image is seen on any website at whatever format, a small “i” icon appears on top of it. All they have to to is click on it and they can be redirected to your website .

The huge misconception about Image Exchange is that  it only works with a Google Image search, which would be already not be too bad. But no, it works everywhere. Let’s say your friend post a link to an article that they like on Facebook. Automatically, a thumbnail of the picture on the page is rendered. Well, Image Exchange can recognize that image and tell you who the licensing right owner is.  Your images become viral and your best publicity without you doing a thing: Imagine that ! Wasn’t that one of the promises of the Internet ?

Image Exchange is somewhat free. They get paid for each recommendation that they bring to you after a certain amount of click-trough. You can purchase more, in advance, or stop whenever you want . That simple.

so, if you want your images to finally end up where your potential clients are, head on to Picscout and sign up.  You might actually see some more income without having to dump all your images into Istockphoto

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5 Thoughts on “Be there

  1. Great post, thank you. Newby just signed up. Keep up the good work. Picscout and Image Exchange just might fit into my scheme of things.

  2. Image Exchange sounds great on paper but has anyone actually seen some results as an individual photographer? I’ve had images sitting in ImageIRC ‘Pending Index’ for two months… still waiting.

  3. For you info, a lot of Microstock agencies have already been indexed and are showing up.
    Who else but a microstocker to bitch about a free service ?

  4. Personally, I love seeing that little blue logo on my images when i search the net…it gives me a little more confidence that people will know the images are being looked after and that they can find me if they want to use them….

    John Lund

  5. I’m not ‘bitching’ about the ‘free’ service. I’d just like to see it all working. sure there are lots of blue logos highlighting all the images that are on agencies sites (micros and macro), but I was looking for some feedback from other independent photographers if they have had their images indexed?

    as for it being free? they’ll be charging me once they start sending traffic to me (after that free allowance is used up) – I don’t mind that either, it effectively turns each and every one of my images used online into an ad for me, and only for those who have the plugin i.e. people who are likely to buy images! perfect.

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