Five practical tips to help increase your Alamy Rank
photo credit: Gaetan Lee
OK so you’ve discovered your Alamy Rank and where your work sits in the grand scheme of things. You want to get off page 45 so you can get some views, zooms and increase your CTR. You want sales of course! Fed up with languishing in the division three of search returns? Then you need PP’s 5 practical tips to get up that ranking ladder….
Before we go any further. If you haven’t done so already - make a note of where your pseudonym sits compared to others by reading BHZ and how to find your Alamy Rank
done that? Made a note of your position? Let’s get the numero uno, supreme, first, most important, ultimate tip out of the way first (this isn’t in the five!):
Supreme Tip of Tips: Shoot more saleable images
No seriously, do that and you will sell. What the 5 tips below are going to help you do is improve where you are already. But you aren’t going to sell jack if you are shooting pics of cats and rulers….i.e. you need to have some idea about shooting for stock. There’s no free lunch but Alamy will reward hard work. If you have got a half decent folio of saleable images but they’re caught languishing a few pages down in search returns then it could be your approach to how Alamy works that is wrong.
TIP #1: Edit edit edit your collection….
There’s nothing quite as good as killing off your CTR with a huge number of similar images. If you have one shot of the Eifel Tower then great. Two or three is fine too if you are exploring different angles. But 34?
Ha! You might laugh - I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Unless your extras are adding something then get rid of them. Keeping them on the off chance that a photo editor is going to need frame 26 rather than frame 25 because you moved 1″ to the left is pure fantasy.
Cull them I say! Keeping them means that on a basic CTR calculation you’re 34 views down before you even started when someone searches for our little Parisien monument. Remember, Bad CTR = bad Alamy Rank = no sales. So my 8 frames per second addicts; imagine each shot is costing you $20 to produce and slow down and edit your captures, and only upload the best. It’ll help in the long run. Trust me.
See here if you’re wondering how to effectively delete an image off Alamy immediately.
TIP #2: Keyword efficiently
What is efficiently? Remember that every word you use could pull up your image for that term. So describe the image accurately but don’t copy Roget’s Thesaurus or Wikipedia into the keyword fields. Use the three-tiered keywording system Alamy provides to separate your keywords into order of importance.
If there’s a small duck in the scene yet the subject is a riverboat in the foreground don’t put “duck” as a keyword unless the buyer knowing a duck is in the scene is crucial. I saw a shot once (the one I’m describing) where the duck even had its latin name keyworded. That’s plain nuts if you want a good Alamy Rank. Remember views are no good without zooms and sales. Get viewed a lot and not zoomed or sold and your rank will plummet faster than you can say Alamy Discount… ;)
TIP #3: Alamy Measures is your friend
I often see people referring to Alamy Measures (Alamy’s beta of a statistical information tool for contributors) as “can’t be bothered with that” or “its all wrong anyway” or even “waste of time”. How wrong they are. If you are doing something and spending money and time doing it and someone could show you for free where you are going wrong then you’d be a bit stupid not to listen, right?
So take notice of your Alamy Measures statistics. They’re easy to understand. If you need a refresher or are new to Alamy then I wrote a post on understanding Alamy Measures so go take a look.
Use Alamy Measures to constantly tweak your keywording and see where you are getting “false views” i.e. you are being seen for a search term you match but your image is not really what the buyer wants. You must address these false returns. This normally means you’ve over-keyworded or have been a bit loose on your description of the image in the keywords.
Including words that are really only on the outer edges of what the image is conveying is going to result in views with no zooms. Sometimes you may have keyworded correctly but didn’t get a zoom. Don’t worry! Be glad you are being viewed for the correct terms - else tweak those keywords until you get it right.
You should look at Alamy Measures as often as possible. Constant keyword refinement will pay off over time.
TIP #4: Consider adding another Pseudonym
Why? People create Pseudonyms for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes they shoot material they’d rather not have their real name associated with. So they shoot under a pseudonym just like a writer may choose to write a novel not in their regular genre under a pen-name. Other people use pseudonyms to categorise their collection so if a buyer clicks the link that takes them to your collection they will see similar images i.e. a pseudonym for architectural work, one for lifestyle, one for travel images etc. one for RF images only perhaps.
Having multiple pseudonyms can also (by using Alamy Measures) show you what your most popular genre is. Experiment but remember that all new pseudonyms created are given a median rank (at least they were last time I created one). So if you’re near the top then you may drop back in Alamy Rank with a pseudonym change.
TIP #5: Be patient
Nothing at Alamy changes overnight (except keyword revisions..!). Your Alamy Rank is based upon the last 300 days of Alamy Measures activity ans Alamy Rank is updated roughly every 100 days (though earlier this year they updated twice in a fortninght.) So any changes to keywording you make today will go live tomorrow but your “BHZ” Rank will not change until the next Alamy Rank update.
What will change (if you are watching your Measures) is that as you cull excessive similars, move to new pseudonyms, revise and tweak your keywords - you should see your zooms increase and CTR rise; you may even see more sales!
But patience dear contributor is the key. Stock photography is a long term game - requiring patience, stamina and in the case of submitting to Alamy, constant revision. Its a game you must play else you’ll sink without a trace; and in a sea of 12 million images, the bottom is a very long way down….
PP
