rgbstock
How to promote RGB
1. mzacha8 February 2010, 15:48 GMT +01:00
Well, the site has enough pictures to attract more user. Right now I think it is more uploaders here than downloaders and this should change.
Since couple of days I have a special signature on my sxc-mail, promoting this site, and every time I receive the e-mail about my photos, I just send it. I hope it help.
But it is not enough...
2. crisderaud8 February 2010, 16:03 GMT +01:00
we are doing everything we can think of to get our site known.
There is a newsletter going out. Members are writing their old contacts inviting them to come here.
I have signed us up with every search engine and directory I can find.
Direct contact is the most effective means by which we can get people to come here and see what we have to offer.
We encourage members to take the time to send a note to contacts from the past who have used or requested your pictures. They are usually delighted to hear about our site as a new source for images.
3. krayker8 February 2010, 16:37 GMT +01:00
@1 yeah, we have more uploaders than downloaders. what a blissful situation to be in! you cant find yourself in such a situation a little later. SXC got to that point with an active community, and years of word of mouth. We need to be patient I suppose. a couple of months and we have a good collection of images. I remind myself to be patient :)
4. weirdvis8 February 2010, 16:42 GMT +01:00
Actually, nearly 70% of the members are downloaders. The message is slowly getting out.
We need both uploaders and downloaders. The more of each, the better the site will become. It's still early days yet but if everyone does their bit to spread the word the message audience will grow exponentially.
5. krayker8 February 2010, 17:39 GMT +01:00
@4, that's true too. I contribute, because I have an obligation - I download a lot of images! many contributors here are Designers, and would find each others images valuable. maybe we need a sticker on blogs that will lead people to RGBstock. We first need a logo, blog owners could then display RGBstock banners!
6. xymonau9 February 2010, 1:53 GMT +01:00
You need to keep doing what you're doing. Word of mouth over all the sites we are involved with will pay off. We have lots of downloaders. Count the number of photographers and take it from the total on the front page, and you'll see there's a big difference. I've had a few comments and requests from downloaders (no galleries) so far. Can I say, one of the most important things you can do is to check each image, and improve all your keywords. These are vital to people seeing images. Use online thesauruses, paid stock sites with similar images, etc, if you are not inspired or if your English needs help. When the downloaders arrive, they need to find what they're looking for.
And if non-English speakers can place the link on sites in their own language, that is a huge help. I can't speak a second language - even if the Americans and Brits think I do! LOL
7. krayker9 February 2010, 3:54 GMT +01:00
@6. xymonau
yeah tags, refinement. That's big on my agenda :) I do it when i have nothing else to do. Thesaurus is definitely a good idea! I check the paid stock sites too - and they usually have done a lot of work in tagging in a very detailed way.
Speaking of second language, being multi-lingual is routine here, most people in India can speak at least 3 languages, and in south 3-5 is normal, and a few sales and marketing people manage more than that!
8. xymonau9 February 2010, 10:21 GMT +01:00
English speakers are so lazy. They can get by, as it's now the lingua franca of choice in most countries. I love Indian people. They speak English so precisely. And Indian women are the most beautiful in the world! I love watching Bollywood movies. And I had a crush on one of the major stars - Shahruk Khan - after seeing him in a late night movie on our SBS - ethnic - channel. He's gorgeous!
9. xymonau9 February 2010, 10:37 GMT +01:00
Have you seen his movie, "My Name is Khan"? The trailers look good.
10. krayker9 February 2010, 14:09 GMT +01:00
@ 9.
unfortunately, I'm not a regular movie buff, its mostly sci-fi, action or some offbeat hindi movie (read= not regular pop movies by bollywood, but with some story in it). I did watch the 3 idiots. I liked shah rukh's Chak De. apart from that, i really am not into his mainstream movies :)
11. xymonau9 February 2010, 14:18 GMT +01:00
I don't watch movies at all these days. I used to prefer reading, anyway. Good quality science fiction used to be my favourite.
12. xymonau10 February 2010, 2:50 GMT +01:00
Today I saw a classic example of keywording problems. One of the requested images was "tea cup" and there were zero images. I typed in "cup", and got lots. Not one of the tea cups was called "tea cup". The person searching may have gone away thinking we're a pretty poor stock site if we don't even have a tea cup here. Check your keywords!
13. krayker10 February 2010, 7:08 GMT +01:00
yeah - the keyword search being reflected in the frontpage is very useful!
14. mzacha10 February 2010, 13:34 GMT +01:00
Well, I reached 100 downloads, this is something ;).
Xymonau - it is all because "tea,cup" is not enough. You have to put there "tea,cup,tea cup, red cup,tasty tea, drink tea" and billion other combinations :(. That is not good.
15. xymonau10 February 2010, 15:33 GMT +01:00
But that's what attracts people to your images. Without keywords, they hardly ever show up.
Congratulations on your first hundred. On our new site, that's excellent!
I wanted to say that my emails to people requesting images on the other place have been successful. I've already had several who wrote back and downloaded the image from here instead. Try contacting those who comment on your images elsewhere and let them know you have a gallery here.
16. lennie10 February 2010, 20:48 GMT +01:00
This is one of the problems with search we are working hard on solving. We just haven't been as successful as with the other issues. :-/ We actually ignored some of the other things just to dedicate time to search.
We are working on this.
Just to be clear, we are making progress, but it's not as fast as we hoped.
17. Columbine11 February 2010, 7:04 GMT +01:00
So... on the subject of getting the word out there on this site, maybe a facebook ap would help.
18. Ayla8711 February 2010, 12:55 GMT +01:00
I just stumbled about this way of getting photos displayed:
http://www.cooliris.com/
or
http://www.cooliris.com/express/
Wouldn't this be a nice variation of how to promote our photos over here?
It would work only if e.g. the previews of the recently added images (preferably in their mouseover-size) could be fed as an rss media stream.
Generally this throws up the question if it wouldn't be a nice idea to add rss-feeding capacities to our galleries?
Michael
19. crisderaud11 February 2010, 15:05 GMT +01:00
Cooliris is a portal. They don't have a gallery of the pictures, they just help you find them and direct you to them. Some of our biggest competitors are portals that have been around for years.
I'll check this site for traffic and see if people are using it.
20. Ayla8711 February 2010, 15:39 GMT +01:00
Thanks for checking it, Cris.
As far as I have understood, everybody is able to create his own facebook-app. with rgb-photos using cooliris - as long as our gallery-thumbnails (or the compilation of recently added images) are available as media rss feeds.
I think this would allow for some pretty dynamic rgb-promotion (with lots of changing photos to show what rgb has to offer) rather than static links.
Perhaps cooliris might also be a nice way to get an even more dynamic start page on rgb.
Michael
21. crisderaud12 February 2010, 18:06 GMT +01:00
Here is the link to Alexa showing the list of sites linking to us. I know the list is longer but this is what Alexa shows.
http://www.alexa.com/site/linksin/rgbstock.com
Today our banner will be added to http://psdmag.org/ which is a free Photoshop tools and techniques online publication.
Tweet away at our Twitter address: http://twitter.com/rgbstock
Become a fan at our Facebook public group: http://www.facebook.com/n/?pages%2FRGB-Stock%2F297092662735&mid=1df22f8G3c7433f3G15d2d0fG4c
22. mzacha15 February 2010, 13:28 GMT +01:00
I put the links wherever I can. And I hope the site will be growing :-).
23. crisderaud15 February 2010, 14:11 GMT +01:00
The links you have placed are showing up Michal. Links are showing up in lots of places. We've managed to grow in one month what took sxc well over a year to do when they began.
We are the fastest growing, highest quality, independent free stock site on the internet. Our largest competitors have been around for many years and they are usually associated with a paid site. We are gaining on them very quickly.
We have passed over 5 million websites on the internet for the amount of traffic and we are about to catch the top million sometime this week or next.
Independent websites just don't get this big this fast, but we are doing it.
24. saavem16 February 2010, 21:41 GMT +01:00
I added RGBStock.com to the wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rgbstock.com
