How to Make Buyers Come to You

One of the biggest problems we see when coaching wildlife photographers who are breaking into the business is the unspoken assumption that, “if you build it, they will come.”

In other words, so many people believe that simply having a website, simply putting your work up on Facebook and Instagram, is going to translate into sales.

But here is the hard truth: No matter how incredible your photography may be, you are not going to sell those photographs without ensuring the right person sees those photographs at exactly the right time.

But don’t mistake my words here. This doesn’t mean that you must go at this full time. It doesn’t mean that you must become a marketing expert. The thing about being an entrepreneur is you get to choose how much or how little time you want to put into something like this.

In the past few weeks, I have focused primarily on selling photography to magazines, and how our use of platforms like PhotoShelter can make this process so much easier. But if we go one step further during the post-processing workflow, we can turn each and every photograph we have online into major SEO machine.

For the record, SEO means Search Engine Optimization. This is marketing speak for having things set up online in such a way that keeps Google listing your stuff and makes it super simple for people to find you with these searches.

We talk a lot about the importance of keywords in our Mastering Lightroom workshops. These are incredibly important for being able to organize your files, to be able to find a specific photograph out of hundreds of thousands, and they are immensely important for stock photography.

But there is something that is even bigger.

There is something that is significantly more important when it comes to selling your photography.

And that something is captions.

I have to be honest with you here though. I used to ignore the captions until an editor asked me for one. At that point, the magazine was already committed to buying the image and so I would put in a little time to create a short and sweet caption.

Eventually I came to realize that captions played a role in photo buyer’s ability to find my work online. So, I started adding a sentence or two to the caption section in Lightroom and assumed that was good.

But now I know better. And now I see the tremendous error of my ways.

To understand the importance of captions though, it’s probably best that we start by understanding the functional difference between keywords and captions to begin with.

Keywords

Keywords are best viewed as large sweeping categories. Take the photograph of the bear here from Alaska. Keywords for this image are as follows: brown bear, Alaska, wilderness, Lake Clark National Park, predator, animal hunting, bear.

Although there is a lot of emphasis in the photography community, and at stock agencies like Getty, about the importance of having a thorough list of keywords with a photograph, with nature photography, and especially wildlife photography, I have found that the keywords themselves are always too vague to help people find my work.

Photojournalism is different in this respect. Commercial photography is different. Architectural, lifestyle, portraiture, etc. All different.

Most of the keywords you might come up with for a photograph will not even be one that is recognized by a stock agency like Getty. This is how ambiguous wildlife photography is in the market.

With wildlife photography, keywords are best thought of as broad 10,000 foot views of the photograph.

Captions

Captions are the details. Captions are the story behind the photograph. Captions are full sentences and complete paragraphs. Captions tell an editor or a photo buyer everything they could ever want to know about a photograph and more. Captions place a photograph in space and time and communicate the importance of that photograph to the world. And captions are where you have complete and full control over what you say and how you want your photograph to come up in searches.

Speaking with a now retired editor I once did a significant amount of work with, I asked them what they were looking for in captions. The response was journalistic: the who, what, where, when, why, and how of the photograph.

So, looking back at this bear photo again, my caption for this image looks like this:

“A brown bear, Ursus arctos, also known as a grizzly bear, runs through a river straight toward the camera. The coho / silver salmon run is at its peak and the bear is chasing after a large salmon that broke the water. Coastal brown bears depend upon the salmon run to put on enough weight before hibernation. This happens to occur just when bears begin to enter a seasonal hormonal phase known as hyperphagia, when they become 24/7 eating machines trying to consume upwards of 20,000 calories a day. As salmon are the lifeblood of the Alaskan wilderness, anything that impacts them, can have grave consequences to entire ecosystems, such as the Copper River Mine that threatens the largest and most importance salmon run in the world. Photo by Jared Lloyd.”

This is probably quite different from what you were expecting. It’s an entire story. And it’s one that has ancillary facts added to it in order to anchor the photograph into something larger than what you see here.

If we look at this from the perspective of a magazine, news agency, marketing firm, text book company, or any of the seemingly endless variety of companies that purchase wildlife photographs, however, we can quickly understand why such captions are important.

So, if a person is doing a search for a brown bear or grizzly bear, then this image will fit the bill. If the person needs the work for a more scientific or professional use, they will possibly do a search for the scientific name, which is included. If they are doing a search for anything to do with Alaska, wilderness, ecosystems, salmon, salmon runs, hibernation, hyperphagia, the Copper River Mine, or environmental threats, this photograph will also come up. If someone searches for “bear running toward camera,” my photograph will show up. And adding “Photo by Jared Lloyd” also means that I ensure I get a proper byline and add another layer for search engines to connect photographs with my name.

Additionally, the caption of the photograph makes an editor’s job easier. They don’t have to search for information. They have compelling copy to add to the story. And you will get sales simply because you had a detailed and fact rich caption with your photograph because it potentially means less work for the magazine down the road.

Photo buyers don’t always know exactly what they want. Maybe a news agency is running a story on the Copper River Mine in Alaska. Maybe they are only looking for photos of the proposed site, or drone photographs of the coastline. But when they do a search for Copper River Mine, my photo comes up. The editor reads the caption and suddenly realizes this is a powerful and compelling part of the story. It may be ancillary to what the piece is on exactly. But it’s connected. And that connection may turn into a sale for me when they were not even originally looking for a brown bear photograph.

One tip that I learned from my partner Annalise Kaylor, is that when it comes to captions, it’s best to keep a document containing all those captions as you write them so you can re-use later.

At first this didn’t make sense to me. But after nearly a decade of photojournalism assignments across 39 countries, I knew she was a bonified expert on handling metadata and so I should trust the process. And boy was she right in doing this.

Today, I keep a OneNote notebook on my computer of nothing but captions. It’s broken up into sections like Mammals > Bears > Brown Bears. And under Brown Bears, as I write new captions, I add them to the list.

Now, when I import new photographs that have similar themes as images I have written captions for in the past, I can simply copy and paste into the metadata. From there, I add a sentence or two to describe the situation more accurately.

Think of it this way: a brown bear running through the water is a brown bear running through the water. Do the work once, and you can use those captions over and over again. Maybe you add something about the mountains in the background. Maybe you add something about the fish hanging out of her mouth, or the gulls flying overhead, or the location in which you created the photograph. But the heavy lift is already done for you. And this means your workflow gets easier and easier with time.

Whether you want to sell your work through stock agencies, your own website, or even fine art prints, captions like these are what bring buyers directly to your photographs.

There are literally billions of photographs on the internet. How do you expect someone to find yours?

Search engines are not using artificial intelligence to deduce the who, what, where, when, why, and how of a photograph. Search engines are looking at metadata. And the more flushed out this metadata is, the more detailed your caption is, the more “findable” your photograph will be.

Like so many things, this all goes back to establishing a solid workflow up front.

Take your time with captions. Make them thorough. Tell a story with them. And you will watch your sales increase significantly.