Using Fotobroker’s ‘Gallery’ feature and .jpgs made from nearly 250 ‘Baby Grad’ announcements – and a targeted marketing campaign – the Daily Tar Heel at the University of North Carolina has come up with a clearly successful way to close out the first term of 2010. Traffic and sales statistics would indicate that this is an idea whose time has come. But don’t take our word for it – see the gallery at photos.dailytarheel.com for yourself.

Kudos to Kevin S. and Stacy W. at the Tar Heel for coming up with – and successfully executing – this idea. Aside from the business angle of a successful promotion, we’re always happy to see someone making the most of their Fotobroker account.

Detroit Softworks will be traveling to the annual Western Association of University Publications Managers conference next week, down in San Antonio, and we’ll be looking around for more good ideas like this one to share with you. If you’re a Fotobroker or Gryphon user, and you’ll be at WAUPM next week, please come and see us. We’d love to hear what’s working for you.

Not to rush the end of anyone’s summer… but as we all begin preparing for the back-to-school rush, we would like to remind our Fotobroker customers about an underutilized service that we’ve always offered: merchandise and prints from your images, at wholesale cost.

To assist our users in promoting and marketing their reprint sites, owners can place at-cost orders for any image their paper (or company) owns. Interested? Let us know.

Buying wholesale is certainly the best way for you to try out new merchandise products and print sizes… and nothing drives the sale of big, beautiful prints like having a half-dozen of them on the wall for your visitors to see.

If you’ve taken a look at the front page of The Daily Tar Heel’s site in the past day or so, you might have noticed something a little different going on.

We’ve just completed work on a few new templates that make this sort of "featured images" functionality easy to set up and manage. Both the large "Photo of the Week" and the gallery of thumbnails below are populated by searching the database of images for a specific piece of metadata info. Any piece, really — keyword, credit line, location, category …

One of the more common usages would be to assign a unique IPTC keyword to images you’d like to appear on the page. Do that right in Photoshop or your favorite piece of image management software (or in Fotobroker’s administration area) and the template is updated automatically as soon as the new images are imported. That means your "featured images" can be rotated out as often as every day.

In an innovative move, the good folks at the New York Times Regional Media Group have harnessed Fotobroker’s powerful metadata search capabilities to display a "Buy photo" link below images on their news sites, which automatically pulls up a Fotobroker search for recent photos by the same photographer.

You can see the technique in action now at The Ocala Star-Banner’s site $#8212; ocala.com, and it’s likely to spread to other NYT sites soon. Though it’s still early to report any solid numbers, we think this is the kind of idea that could potentially drive a substantial amount of new traffic (and sales) to your reprints site.

When it comes to using metadata, the sky is the limit. If you’re interested in doing something similar on your own site, drop us a line and we’d be happy to talk about the options.

If you’re already offering reprints of your hi-res PDF daily page files, then you’re probably not having any trouble dealing with the flood of readers asking for reprints of November 5th’s historic front page. If you’re not already set up for pages - and you’d like to offer this page - we can get your PDF up on your site for you. Just drop us a line to get the ball rolling.

Just in time for the holidays, we have four new products aimed at boosting your bottom line. There’s a new 18 oz. mug and ceramic tiles, as well as laminated photo tags and clipboards. Both the tags and clipboards are spectacular - really nicely printed on a hard, coated glossy laminate surface - and both items are printed on both sides. We’re expecting the tags to be big with high school athletics fans, but please let us know if you come up with other great ideas.

Everyone should have gotten an update about this in our last newsletter, but if we missed you or it got lost in the shuffle, just drop us a line. Same goes for anyone who has questions about how to roll these items out to your customers - or if you’d like to place a wholesale order to see the item(s) for yourself. Watch for more product information from us soon as we expand our connections with the best suppliers in the country.

If you’re a manager or a photo editor struggling to get a photo staff (especially a collegiate staff) to maintain a consistent approach to the metadata and upload tasks for your Fotobroker site, we have some advice for you.

• Make it Official – As consistent usage of your Fotobroker site yields both an excellent online archive and a revenue stream, we can say with confidence that it’s worth the time to do it. We’ve seen some papers get better compliance simply by writing the upload and archive process into the job description as a mandatory part of the responsibility. For college papers struggling with this, it’s worth noting that your photographers will likely be expected to archive (and probably upload for resale as well) once they get to a “real-world” newspaper staff.
• Set an example – Visible administration support for the site can go a long way… If you’re running a vigorous and consistent program of promoting your site, it’s harder for your staffers to “forget” about uploading and archiving tasks. A strong presence for the site internally (framed sample prints in your front office, for example, or coffee mugs for the receptionists) can make a big difference – for both “staffer awareness” and your sales.

Well, you already know you need to help your customers find your reprint site, so a link from your main site to your reprint site is an obvious first order of business. What isn’t as obvious, though, is how much easier it is to catch the eye with a pretty picture, rather than just a text link that says "Order Reprints."

For example, the Oregon Daily Emerald is running web promos like the one pictured here. A simple, classic frame combined with several strong images can really drive traffic to your site.

Daily Emerald General Manager Judy R. says that they’ve found that adding "Published photos may be purchased at www.dailyemerald.com" to the reverse of their photographers" business cards has been effective, too.

Purdue University’s Exponent has an unusual version of the "Latest Images" search running on their front page these days. Instead of thumbnails, they’ve chosen to go with a single, larger preview of the newest photo, which looks pretty good, I think.

You can see their new front door on the Exponent’s reprint site.

Food for thought.

Don’t forget to reserve a little advertising space for your reprint site this holiday season! In print or on the web, reminding your readers of the service is key. You don’t need to have a sale, but it can sure help.

For example, take a look at the image, from the print edition of The State News at Michigan State U (used with permission).

Well, it’s almost that time again. School is about to start back up, and we just wanted to remind our collegiate media customers: Please ask for assistance in getting your new staff up to speed if needed. We appreciate the difficulties involved with a revolving door staff and are here to help you in your annual gear-up. To those of you who ran right through the summer without interruption, we tip our collective hat to you. I know for some schools, sales were much better than expected. Congrats!

On a clerical note, If you have updates for us, (esp. regarding your mailing address or the emailed admin reports) please let us know. We take a special joy in getting it right.

p.s. If you look close at that graphic, you’ll see a couple of names we haven’t mentioned yet, but... soon.

Summer, for a lot of brick and mortar retailers, means slow sales - which has lead to a perception that the same rules apply to online retail as well. They don’t. Not exactly, anyway.

To prove my point, I direct you to the sites of The Tuscaloosa News in Alabama and The State News in East Lansing, Michigan. The Tuscaloosa paper is one of our newer New York Times Media Group clients - and they’ve made an impressive start in less than a year. The latter is the paper of record for Michigan State University - and one of our first clients - and they’ve always had pretty impressive sales. Both papers, though, have this in common:

They never stop. Or perhaps more accurately, they never quit... looking for ways to keep their photo reprint site in front of their readers. Consequently, they have consistent sales even during traditional "slow times." If your sales aren’t what you think they should be, we’d suggest taking a look at what successful sites are doing - both in print and online - or give us a call.

Every now and then, someone asks "what’s the minimum I can do, caption-wise, and still sell imagery online?" Well, statistics indicate that even a name in the caption field goes a long way towards keeping the ball rolling.

But... if we can’t convince you to mark up your files for the convenience of your online customers, expect us to continue to try to convince you to do it for yourselves. Because plainly stated, if you can’t find it again, you can’t use it again, and it’s just wasting space on a hard drive somewhere. A hard drive that you paid for, in all probability.

OK, here’s the deal: at a bare minimum - to upload photos, we need:

Yes, that’s a Molly Hatchet reference. Won’t happen again. It’s just that we’re kind of psyched over how The Ledger (Lakeland), and The Gainesville Sun have reacted so quickly to the Gators basketball championship. (It’s like they were reading this blog!)

Note how they’ve moved at web speed to be able to greet Florida Gator fans with commemorative page fronts the day after. This is not your father’s newspaper. Of course, any of our customers could make PDF pages available right after they were published - it’s a basic feature of Fotobroker - it’s coordinating that with house advertising and a marketing arm that really makes a sales opportunity sing. Nice job, guys.

A big thanks to Calvin K. (Lakeland) and Jim T. (Gainesville) for their cooperation and assistance in making these things happen - and all the fine people (and s w e e t page designers and photogs) at our Gator-Flavor Florida papers. Congrats on the Chomp, Chomp.

I’ve sure become convinced of the power of a strong street and lobby-level presence for reprint sales. It’s pretty easy to see the correlation between strong sales and a lobby presence when you watch ten orders in a row come in from "Daily News Receptionist."

Do you have room in your waiting area for a computer set to display your reprint site? We’d call that a "kiosk, " but if you take an old laptop and a web browser and duct tape it to the wall, we can call that a kiosk too, if you want. If there’s no room for that - create a web site account for your receptionists and show them how to place an order for walk-in customers.

Put some big prints on the wall or in the windows, some merchandise in your display case, maybe get your receptionist a coffee mug with a local sports image. The easier you make it for customers to find out about what you do, well... you can take it from here.

The Republican American newspaper in Waterbury, Connecticut sells more prints – consistently – than many of our papers twice their size. We talked with Assistant Managing Editor Bob Falcetti last week to find out how they do that.

The thing that stood out to us right away was the consistency of their approach. Turns out that’s no accident.

A few things we learned from Bob that might help you:

Let’s get started with a fact: Most of our print media clients see their best sales from sports related prints and posters. The fastest way to get word of your site to your community’s sports fans is through your local coaches and athletes. A few well-chosen framed gifts, with your business card incorporated into the framing, can generate lots of traffic in a hurry. One of our collegiate newspaper clients has several framed prints - with their web site name visible - in their school’s Athletic Director’s office, which keeps their site in the eyes of a lot of their potential customers. The best part is that it’s both inexpensive and good public relations, too.

Local art galleries, public spaces and coffee shops are good places to display your work, as well as your street facing windows, if you have them. Several of our clients have had strong responses from street level displays. Be prepared to sell the ones you put in the window, because passers-by will be asking. Your photo and design departments will love you for it too - and isn’t everyone happier when the artists are happy?

Does your area have an active online community? A simple truth of e-commerce is the more links lead to you, the better your sales will be. This can be as simple as a posting on a message board to let a special interest group know of your service. It can be as complex as a trade agreement for web advertising with a ring of local web sites. It’s up your imagination and skill at persuasion.

Some sites might be willing to trade web ads with you. Many are inexpensive enough to arrange for a longer term presence. As we’ve mentioned before, if your content includes sports related imagery, make sure your local online sports fans know of it.

A house ad on your main web site, running in rotation with your other customers, is a smart investment too. It’s worthwhile to make yourself some ad templates, if you can, to react to local events like sports championships.

For our customers with more work to do than staff to do it, here’s a Photoshop template you can use to quickly create a new look for the front of your site. You’ll need to know a little Photoshop, as the parts are on different Layers in the file, but you can just drag or paste your images into the open file.

(Edit-->Transform-->Scale will be helpful to get your files to the proper size - you can hold the Shift key to constrain the scaling proportionally. The template is a Photoshop CS2 file saved for Maximum Compatibility.)

The template is already the right size for our standard front door graphic - 450 pixels by 350 pixels. Just replace the images and logo with yours, change the text if you like, then "Save for Web" as a jpeg. You can either replace the graphic on the site yourself, or send it to us and we’ll put it up for you.

Do a lot of your sales come from a particular kind of content? Using the "keywords" in your file data can help you - and your viewers - round up their favorite related content in a special gallery you can link to. Once you’re logged into your site as an administrator, you can use the site’s "Searches" feature to create a a custom link you can insert into your html anywhere you like.

For example, The State News at Michigan State frequently changes their front page graphic to link to special galleries. When the sports season changes, so does the graphic. The Gainesville Sun had one early this year that gathered pages related to the Florida Gators" national collegiate football championship. No national championship team? Don’t fret. With a little help from you, your local dog show or Kiwanis Convention can do pretty well too.

To do something like this, you just need to add a common keyword to the files you’d like to group together. You can do this when logged in an as an administrator using the "Manage" feature, but it’s faster to add them beforehand - or automate this process during the upload with a "scenario" file.* Of course, if you’re already adding keywords as a part of your archiving or file management, you can take advantage of the work you’ve already done.