Yuri Arcurs a blog about selling your photos online

Guesstimation will get you 40-50 percent of the way if you are good!

Doing research on what sells and shooting likewise is one of the reasons for my success in stock. During all my time spent on research I am constantly shocked by my inability to forecast and predict selling behavior of new material that I have just submitted. I can predict 40-50 percent max. The rest is out of my control. What this tells me is that Guesstimation will only go so far and the rest must be based on research or I will lose a potential 50-60 percent of sales. This calls for research!

So how do you do this? How do you do research on what sells?

The best estimates are not single images and their success, but rather whole shoots and their success. I use Dreamstime to calculate how a shoot is doing. I separate all the images from a shoot in a lightbox and look at the combined sales. Seeing the success of a lightbox is another smart little feature that Dreamstime gives us. Here is how you do it: Find the amount of income that Dreamstime account for compared to your total income. For me Dreamstime provides 1/16 of my total income. Then you go to your "Statistics page" and find the "RPD" (return per download) and this helps you to estimate how much money you have earned in average from the sales each lightbox has. The below excel sheet is based on a RPD of 1.3 USD. Next step: Find the date of when you images in your lightbox became online for sale (online date). Then find out how many days they have been online for sale by knowing the date of today (count date). Use the below document to fill out the rest: If you already have Google Docs: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pIRWgrSdo_2RrjLNU9BoqcQ&hl=en If you don’t have Google Docs: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pIRWgrSdo_2RrjLNU9BoqcQ Fill in all the gray slots and you should get a result in "Months it takes to get money back". (Only for people already with Google Docs.) If you have another distribution of sales for Dreamstime then I do, then you have to put in a ratio in the formula in L3. You will figure it out.

Why do this?

Last year, I had three shoots that never got the money back that I spent. This is valuable information to know and knowing it you are more careful in budgeting the different types of shoots. Another important thing, and probably the most important thing is forecasting. Start analyzing what shots you seem to be good at and start producing them more. There is a saying that goes, "Never change a winning team." Well this is just what you have to keep in mind and start producing your "winning" shoots! Good luck in 2009!