Design and Photography Highlights

So you are sitting there trying to think about what to title your newest photo. You want it to be seen by potential buyers but how important is the title and what are some good rules of thumb to go by when selecting a good title. Dennis spoke about the description a few weeks back in a brilliantly written post and now I will do my best to help you with the title.

1. At Cutcaster, the title you give your image is turned into the page title for search engine reasons. It is so important. The page title is a very powerful source of information for all search engines and is a way for potential buyers to find your image from the many others that are out there.

Names like “I can see you”, “flower” or “time to go” all sound pretty good but don’t help you getting found. For a lot of reasons, its important to be more logical, direct and specific when we title/name our images if they are going to be found and sold.

Try this test. Type in a search request on Google/Yahoo/Ask/MSN and put yourself into the position of a potential buyer. Most buyers from the ones we spoke with told us that they will specify the subject (machine, pizza, dog, etc) and then most likely an action (dog eating pizza, referee blowing a whistle. Try this and see what comes up.
Because you don’t have time to check all the links that pop up for one of those searches you might be more specific and search for an image of a “yellow lab eating pepperoni pizza.” hahaha. I don’t know what but you get the picture or will be able to find one similar the more direct you are. Google places a lot of emphasis on the keywords in your page titles when ranking listings and that is why we added them to the site so buyers can organically find your awesome work. So pick descriptive and direct image titles!

Some pointers to help you because not everyone is an expert including me:

1. Try to use 3-7 descriptive words for your image title

2. Try to avoid non-searchable words. For example after all, about, an, also, and, another, any, are, as, at, be, because, been, before, being, between, both, but…. etc.

3. Don’t include key words such as “stock image”, “stock photo”, “picture of” etc. We will do it on the back end for you.

4. 80 characters is a good number and about the max you want to go up to for an image title.

5. Do NOT add in symbols to the titles because google won’t recognize them for SEO purposes and it sometimes breaks our pages ;-(. Here are some examples: ^, !, *, &, /, &, # etc

Click here or email us at upload AT cutcaster DOT com and ask us for the FTP instructions.

These instructions should help you move through the five tabs in the upload area.

It’s time to gettttt paiiidddddddddd!!!

The “MyPayout” area is up and running in the MyStudio section under the “Transactions” tab. There you can request a payout either through PayPal or Moneybookers or by check but the others are more preferable but only after your account reaches $20. Let us know what you think and if you see any issues with it updating. And hopefully you guys will be using this feature a lottt…

More changes to come very soon like the Cutcaster Cooler “our forum,” adding friends so we have some cool circles, sending messages, updating the ClipFolders, uploading vectors, offering RM images, creating a new pricing calculator, a new watermark and getting video back. Can’t wait and we are very close to releasing all of these within the next week. Please keep all the feedback coming and its really helping to shape up the site and make it better for everyone.

There are also a few other exciting things that will be popping up which we will tell you as we roll them out but that is a secret for now

And remember to use your affiliate links so we can start to grow even more. We need everyones help inviting both buyers and sellers. This is a nice way to make extra money and can be found in your studio area.

I’m very happy with the progress and some of the amazing emails I have been getting from people. It makes me very happy and proud to be a part of all your lives. Thanks for all the reinforcement.

John

We have three ways of paying out users of which two, Paypal and Moneybookers, I will outline below. The other option is payout by check.

The Paypal solution of payment is used on the Cutcaster web site for three reasons:

For those countries not approved under Paypal you should sign up for a Moneybookers account.

Depending on your country, you can send and receive funds via checks, bank accounts and even credit cards. Fees are outlined here.

Register in Money booker

Moneybookers is available in many languages among them English, German, French, Italian, Spanish and many more. Registration only takes but a few minutes. Moneybookers is a British company based in London used by more than 1.5 millions people.

[MoneyBookers.com]

Get paid money via Paypal or Moneybookers

At Cutcaster, you can easily get your payouts using Paypal or Moneybookers. You must click the “Transactions” tab in the Mystudio area and then click on the “My Payouts” section. Your account must contain at least 20 dollars to request a payout. You must register with Paypal or Moneybookers before getting paid out. As soon as money has arrived to your account you will be notified by email from Paypal or Moneybookers.

Be sure the email address entered in the registration page at Cutcaster.com matches exactly to your email address in your Paypal and Moneybooker’s account.

One of our dedicated members Dennis Thomsen brought up the issue of describing our images in the Cutcaster marketplace to us and we felt that Dennis, as a former photo journalist and newspaper editor, would be an ideal person to share his experience as to why describing your images is so important for image buyers and those that want to sell their images.

Below is a little post he wrote about the best way to describe your content and why it is so important. Enjoy and please add any comments at the end. Thank you so much Dennis for passing on some education to all of us.

Like many of our members, I like to check out the Cutcaster collection to see what is being submitted, and to look for holes in the collection. I’ve also been checking out the new and improved search engine (more changes coming according to John). My examination of the collection led to this guest blog. The goal is to share with the Cutcaster community what this former photo-journalist and newspaper editor views as a big concern if our images (and Cutcaster) are going to get serious consideration from buyers.

Is a picture always worth a thousand words? Photographers and artists would like to think this is the case, but it is not always true. We are in the business of marketing our images, and buyers are looking for images which fit their needs. Do they care about descriptions (captions)? The answer from most buyers is YES! Descriptive captions are part of the marketing information buyers use in the decision making process.

When we go through the Cutcaster image submission process we are required to title, keyword and price our images. It is optional whether we describe (caption) images. In fact, we can leave this field blank if we so choose. What I’ve observed is many image descriptions are too short, lacking detail, or completely missing. If our goal is to sell our images or increase our sales, this may be a big mistake.

Many high end buyers we hope Cutcaster will attract in the upcoming marketing and advertising campaign need what is referred to as the “five W’s and H” in the descriptions. This information, the who, what, when, where, why, and how, of an image should not be ignored when you go through the upload process. Few images can stand alone. Those descriptions (captions) provide details buyers need in the decision process. It may help your sales figures if you review your photo descriptions with an eye toward checking and editing for present tense, active verbs, and the five Ws. Captioning is not always easy and it can be time consuming. It is a skill that develops with practice, just like keywording!

If you want to learn more about this photo caption (description) process, there is plenty of help available on the internet. You might want to check out some of these sites for caption writing basics:

“What Makes a Good Caption?” which is a good starting primer -

http://www.notrain-nogain.org/train/res/Write/caps.asp

Photo Caption Checklist site which provides more captioning thoughts

http://www.americanpressinstitute.org/content/318.cfm

and the following site is also worth visiting – Writing Photo Captions which summarizes the AP stylebook guidelines:

http://mysite.verizon.net/res8dhka/mcpaul/caps.html

The above are a great starting point if you are new to captioning or want to work on improving your image descriptions. Books have been written on this subject. This is just the tip of the iceberg. Hope you find something useful here and your comments are welcome.

Check out images belonging to Dennis here:
http://www.cutcaster.com/studio/pub/739083431