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I think we need 50 people with sales above 0 for the results to show. That might be a bit tough right now but when the results do show I am pretty sure that self hosted will be somewhere in the middle tier. That will definitely raise some eyebrows and create some heated discussions.
@shelma1 wrote:
Ok, thanks for all your help. I think we’ve determined four target audiences for now…the two primary being buyers and contributors, and secondary being developers and finance departments. I’ll concentrate on the first two for now, then move on to the others.
Question 1 assuming i’m a buyer:describe Symbiostock to me in one simple sentence.
Symbiostock is a collection of personal websites owned by photographers and illustrators who market their images direct to the customer in a mutually beneficial and service oriented manner.
As far as I’m concerned the biggest advantage to the customer is “me”. If they have a problem I am available to solve it for them. My customer service will exceed anything the micros can offer. I check my e-mail on my phone all of the time so my customer service is almost immediate. Even evenings and weekends.
Second benefit – all of my new images go here first.
I know, and I’m guilty of doing exactly what I shouldn’t have. I just couldn’t resist. This project is the most productive thing to come along since I started. I’m excited about it and hate to see it get slowed down by negativity.
For those of you who are following MSG this morning. You see what I mean? We can have 30 threads about how Istock sucks but one positive thread about symbio in the wrong category is getting a lot of feathers ruffled. If we want this to grow we need to be smarter about how we present ourselves. This is a backlash from the last 3 weeks of tech talk overwhelming MSG. I was in the middle of posting a positive response to Rons when the subject got hijacked about how we are dominating the forum. I deleted it because my post was all of the sudden of topic.
Thats why we need the polling results. People are simply not going to post a lot of sales when on the forums it is a lot more fun to complain about lack of sales. Right now on MSG there are 149 people on the site and 84 of them are guests. Thats a pretty loud microphone to say “Hey I know IS is screwing you and SS , DT and FT are paying you pennies for your work but look at me I’m doing great!”
I’ve only posted my sales twice ever! and both of those were in support of symbio because I thought other site owners would like to hear some good news. All I am saying is that this can work, and as a collective we need to be positive and patient. We need to basically disappear from MSG for a while. From what I am reading people are sick of Symbio. We need to make our posts over there more interesting, less abundant, and certainly much more positive.
@cathyslife stockphotos wrote:
I personally believe honesty is the best policy. SY shouldnt be promoted as an easy thing to set up, when it is not, for the average photographer.
You cant expect people to be beta testers for software and then complain when there are too many technical support threads on a public forum when things arent working correctly.
You cant expect people to jump on the bandwagon when most here have reported a few sales in months, and people hinting at steady sales wont even talk about it.
You can go ahead and whitewash things up front to get people in, but that never works in the end. You can muzzle people from talking bad about SY and now that there is an independent forum with moderators, you can even delete threads that dont toe the company line. Doesnt that sound like the very thing we were all trying to escape from the agencies?
I think that if main theme development stops and lets things settle in so that people can focus on shooting and uploading, instead of having to be web developers and fixing things that are broken on their site, might be the best advertising there is. Instead of the theme being more complicated and hidden things being added ( i am referring to the fact that now we dont just choose 10 network members, but friends of friends are now added, with no choice..l wasnt even told that was going to happen) things should be made easier…thats what you want to sell, no?
I’m not talking about whitewashing. If people want to know what is really going on they can come here and get the whole scoop. What I am suggesting is that we stop scaring people away with unnecessary posts about .php and .css changes and how they are breaking the whole system. I was in the process of building my site last month and even I stopped reading them.
I followed Amanda’s tutorial to the T and paid for the recommended hosting. Paid for the “clean theme” and did everything exactly as the tutorial recommended and it worked exactly right (I did have the white screen but that was easily solved and is no longer and issue). Overall I have had three issues (White Screen – Fixed, FTP upload problem after upgrade – Fixed by rebooting Symbiostock, and the HTML download thing.) Otherwise everything is working as it should.
Overall I would say that building a site using symbio was easier than I expected, not harder. That is not the impression the bulk of people at MSG are getting. I don’t like talking about sales because it is not good form to broadcast sales when other people are not as lucky but if you are wondering if it working here is my answer. Since I started my website on Aug 4th I have had 8 sales, including 4 yesterday. I made $39.00 on my symbio site yesterday. That was better than every site except Clipartof and Shutterstock. Maybe that was a fluke but I don’t think so. This works and we should stop scaring people away from it.
That is what I mean by making MSG a positive place for symbio.
MSG needs to be a positive place for symbiostock. We need to refrain from posting technical issues and problems but be active with posting first sales and other positive messages. I think the barrage of problem threads and tech issues in the last two weeks scared a lot of people away. If we want to grow we need to be careful about the message we are sending whether it is intentional or not.
The best way to improve participation would be to get a result in the MSG polling for self hosted. Everyone with a site needs to vote for September or even August if you haven’t already. If self hosted showed up among the low earners that would certainly gain some attention.
@christine wrote:
@chromaco wrote:
Other people’s sites – I sell primarily to youth sports and schools, I don’t have any of those types of images.
I just had a look, you have to put the exact keywords in that you do not wish to appear in searches on your site so for drugs you would need drug, drugs , tablet, tablets, medicine, pills etc. This would mean that many non drug images would not show up either such as tablet computer
That’s what I thought. The problem with that, is that it is much harder to come up with the keywords you don’t want than the ones you do. I suppose I will just hope that other site owners will make the small extra effort to rate their images. In the meantime I will wait for it to actually become an issue. I might be making a mountain out of a molehill and this will not be much of a problem at all.
Other people’s sites – I sell primarily to youth sports and schools, I don’t have any of those types of images.
Ok, no this doesn’t work that way. I excluded the word “drugs”. When I search “drugs” no images are shown, however if I search the word “pills” I get images with “drugs” in the keywords. I’m not sure how to edit out the adult images. Here is an example: if I sell football clipart I need “football” as a keyword but I really don’t want scantily dressed football cheerleaders showing up.
Any suggestions?
Thank you. Still a bit unclear on the promoted keywords.
Also, the adult content is really problematic for me. I understand I can exclude certain keywords. Does this mean I can exclude an image with that particular keyword even if that isn’t the search term?Like “nude” when the search term is “beach”
I thought this is why we have a rating system. I agree about the adult content. I sell to schools and those types of results could be really problematic. The issue with the rating system is that most of the images are not rated so when I chose the flilter I wasn’t getting any partner results.
