After few years working in the Royalty Free stock footage industry, we learned one important thing. You can’t predict sales. There are some evidence, that constant shooting and uploading will increase opportunity to sell stock footage from your portfolio, but that’s all we can confirm. What counts is improving your style and variety of themes you shoot.
Promoting Royalty Free Stock Footage to get sales
Increasing possibility to get sales from selected stock footage is only by marketing them. Use Facebook and Youtube to drive viewers on your files, add URL of selected footage under the description and post links on your wall adding some funfacts or something. There is a wide variety of how you can promote your own footage. Make short interesting showreels with free Youtube music. Not just stacking few clips together, but make a story or even add some interesting text in it. That way videos will be more appealing.
Take care of title, description and keywords
Our initial uploads to stock agencies were very sloppy tagged and that hurts our sales today. It’s a fact that good title and description will eventually help customers finding your Royalty Free Stock Footage. You’ll find out soon, that title has to include almost all video details, while description is secondary and should include technical details. Some agencies don’t need description, that’s why it’s important to have good titles. Keywords are important too, but guess what, less keywords is better. Be careful about the agency you are using too, there are many of them, but the best stock video agencies are those that count as best reference for sales. While other sites will sell less than 10 files a month, the top ones will get you 100 sales.
Brainstorm, plan, shoot, edit, upload, repeat!
Don’t be naive and think that after uploading you have all the free time. It will take at least thousand of clips to get some proper income and making such number of footage take time and a lot of brainstorming. After a year of constant working you will already automatically plan new stock shoots and see world with new eyes. You will only see interesting stock themes. And that is what will bring you constant sales.
It’s a fact that royalty free stock footage is constantly being updated and you should be a part of that. Technology is changing, view angles of the world are changing, social conditions are changing and buyers are demanding more creative works. If you don’t get any sales, find a new strategy and improve everything we pointed out. And beware of the temptation of dropping prices on your stock footage. This might sound absurd, but higher priced stock footage sell better. And don’t worry about the equipment you are using, as long as you like the footage you shoot.
