When you begin selling overseas, you will want to review the check cashing policies of your bank. In twenty-five years I have had eleven bank accounts in various countries and for different reasons. One reason I changed financial institutions was because my original bank, the First National Bank of Tennessee, insisted on charging me exaggerated rates for cashing international checks (including those from Canada).
WHICH BANK?
What you will want is a bank that charges no fees, or minimal fees, to cash foreign checks. Because some clients abroad will offer you the option of payment by international bank transfer, you may want to ask the charges, if any, for such transactions.
A few years ago, for example, I received a $100 transfer from Germany and the U.S. bank charged me a $25 service fee. And when I transferred $12,000 from my U.S. bank account into my account at an Italian bank, my U.S. bank charged me $120, and when the money got to Italy, another $90 was subtracted by the receiving Italian bank.
Bank fees are one consideration. Naturally, you want the lowest fee possible for foreign check cashing and incoming wire transfers. Another issue will be taxes on foreign-earned income.
Tax issues on money earned through foreign sources is not all that complicated in the USA, though there are a few items, such as double taxation in some countries, that you should be aware of. For free help, Julian Block, noted expert and author of several best-selling tax books, and tax columnist for PhotoStockNotes suggests the following IRS publications: Publication 17, Your Federal Income Tax; Publication 334, Tax Guide for Small Businesses; and Publication 910, Guide to Tax Services.
To obtain these, you can call the IRS toll-free at (800) TAX-FORMS. More information and tips on taxes for independent businesspeople can be found at the following Internet Web sites:
www.irs.ustreas.gov
www.dtonline.com
www.hrblock.com/tax/refund
www.1040.com
Michael Sedge is author of THE WRITER'S AND PHOTOGRAPHER'S GUIDE TO GLOBAL MARKETS and MARKETING STRATEGIES FOR WRITERS, available from www.allworth.com. Questions can be sent to pp10013@cybernet.it
Welcome
to UsedDigitalPhotos.com. Here's where you'll
find information about photographer finances, selling photos, stock photo agencies, royalty payments, and the photography business.
A Few Words per Day Means…
Bonus Income
In today’s Internet, photobuyers choose to search for that “just right” picture, not by going to an on-line gallery first, but by going to a search engine. There are many available: Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Ask Jeeves.
Keep in mind that the kind of photobuyer I’m talking about here is not the graphic artist or corporate photobuyer who is looking for a generic picture that will serve to enhance and advertising layout.
I’m referring to the editorial photobuyer (the focus of Photosource International) who searches for a photo to match the article they are publishing about a specific travel destination, the medical problem of a family pet, or an ethnically-balanced children’s playground.
Photobuyers coinsider themselves successful if they can visually match the book or magazine author’s text descriptions.
If you have keyworded the selection of representative images on your website or on-line gallery, correctly, you are going to make sales. By the way, keywords are not what we used to call, “captions.” Captions told who, what, why, where, and when. But they left out, the emotional, nostalgic, passionate, or sentimental side of the picture.
By adding a few key words each day to your website or on-line galley you are making deposits to your bank account? How so?
Let’s figure it this way to get you motivated. If you're new to marketing your photos, getting inspired to add keywords to your photos could be a problem for you. Writing keywords takes time, and it also takes time to get your website “web crawled” by the major search engines, plus getting other websites to link to your site.
If you still have a day job, it can be difficult to clear enough time for this. One way to motivate yourself to create the keywords is to calculate how much you are losing from your website* each year.
First, estimate what you could be earning if more photobuyers were visiting your site and as a result purchasing your photos. The difference will give you a good idea of how much money you are missing out on by NOT creating keywords for your photos to be indexed by the major (or minor) search engines.
Let's take an example. Let's say that you have 1,000 photos on your site that are earning you $500 a month. That means, when you average it out, that each photo is making you, fifty cents per month, or $6,000 per year.
$6,000 per year is not much. You have to step it up. Here’s how. Let's say that you created one full set of keywords and keyphrases every three days to a photo on your site and got a few links to your website (you can exchange links with other similar websites), 365 days in a year. That means that in one year you will have added keywords to about 122 additional photos on your site. (3 x 122 =366.)
Let’s say those 122 keyworded photos increased you average to $1.00 average per year for all of the photos on your webiste. 122 pages of content times $1,000 per year is $1,464
that you are missing out on every year because you
are not creating new keywords and keyphrases.
Now, let's say that you can add new keywords and make new links to your website one photo per day. That's 365 pages per year, or $4,380 per year.
Do the math with that number, and you'll see that
adding and linking one page ever 3 days will earn
you an extra $12,200 per year. Writing one page per
day will earn you an extra $36,500 per year!
And keep in mind that every year you will add
additional content, which means that your earnings
will grow and grow as time goes on. If you focus on the right keywords, you could make much more per year or
more!
Once you start creating a lot of photos and corresponding keywords and getting a few links to your website, the initial traffic of photobuyers will start to spread the word about your site. Next thing you know your site will be getting hundreds of links from the Internet, both foreign and domestic, and you didn't have to ask for them!
Traffic will start to build, your search engine
rankings will improve, and in time you will be earning
sums of money that you didn't dream of before--all
because you took a few hours a week to devote to
creating keywords and keyphrases for each of your photos.
Adopt a long-term routine for keywording your current photos as well as your new ones and you will reap the rewards.
And it doesn’t end there. Remember, if you specialize on a certain subject, not the general generic pictures, you’ll find that photobuyers you never heard of will be landing on your site because they didn’t know you existed until they used a search engine to find you. You’ll not only begin making sales from that buyer, but also establish a long-term relation ship with that photobuyer because your collection of images matches the theme of their publishing house. Very often you might only sell four or five images a year to that photobuyer, totaling say, $1,000. Not m much, but when you consider you will stay with that same publishing house (they rarely change the subject of their theme) for ten years, that means you have found a client worth $10,000 –and all because you pout some time to adding keywords and keyphrases to each of your images.
Rohn Engh, veteran stock photographer and best-selling author of "Sell & ReSell Your Photos" and "sellphotos.com," has helped scores of photographers launch their careers. For access to great information on making money from pictures you like to take, and to receive this free report: "8 Steps to Becoming a Published Photographer," visit http://www.sellphotos.com
Business
Notepad
Search Engine Optimization for Flash
It used to be that if you used flash in the pogramming of your website, you wouldn’t get many visits from customers who were using a search engine to find you. . A major misconception has been that Flash-based applications are SEO-unfriendly and can't be indexed by search engines such as Google. That is the myth Flash expert Todd Perkins has dispelled in his new Adobe Developer Library book, Search ... Full
Story
Program maintains it's easy to earn extra
funds by establishing a photo business out of your home and
photographing local businesses, corporations, churches, schools,
sports teams, and families in your community.
Precluded from deductible IRA?
Precluded from using a traditional deductible IRA? Check on whether your mate meets the requirements for a traditional spousal IRA. The AGI cap is way higher for a deductible contribution to a spousal IRA by someone who's not employed but whose spouse is covered by some kind of retirement plan. The deduction phase-out starts only after their combined AGI surpasses $150,000. After $160,000, the deduction disappears.
Under these rules, a stay-at-home spouse who's jobless can make a deductible contribution of as much as $3,000 ($3,500 if age 50 or older). This is the case whether that spouse is unemployed, never worked or retired. Also, the spouse has to be under age 70 1/2.
What you will want is a bank that charges a minimal fee to cash foreign checks. Because some publications abroad will offer you the option of payment by bank transfer, you may want to ask the charges, if any, for such operations.
When you begin selling overseas, you will want to review the check-cashing policies of your bank. In twenty years I have had eleven bank accounts in various countries and for different reasons. One reason I changed financial institutions was because the First National Bank of Tennessee insisted on charging me exaggerated rates for cashing Canadian checks. Opening an account in New York resolved this problem. I'm told this is because the state borders Canada.
Last year I received a $100 transfer from Germany, and the U.S. bank took a $25 fee. In the same respect, I transferred $12,000 from my U.S. bank account into my Italian account. On the U.S. side, a $120 fee was charged, and when the money got to Italy, another $90 was subtracted.
Bank fees are one consideration. Naturally, you want the lowest fee possible for foreign check cashing and incoming wire transfers. Another issue will be taxes on foreign-earned income.
Michael Sedge is author of THE WRITER'S AND PHOTOGRAPHER'S GUIDE TO GLOBAL MARKETS http://www.photosourcefolio.com /bookstore.htm#1581150024 and
MARKETING STRATEGIES FOR WRITERS http://www.photosourcefolio.com /bookstore.htm#1581150407
Of
Interest
Marketing Tips
DEADLINES are a necessary bind to photographers.
Here at PhotoSource International we request photo editors to send us their listings as far in advance as possible. However, photobuyers, because of the nature of the publishing world, often need pictures "now".
If you see an "immediate" deadline listed in the PHOTOLETTER or PHOTODAILY, and you can supply the specific picture(s), use a light box and send a selection to the photobuyer. He or she may be able to extend the deadline a few days to be able to consider your picture.
LISTINGS: Are they aimed to give you leads for self-assignment, -- to go out and TAKE the pictures needed? Yes, if the deadline allows and if you want to add that kind of picture to your stock files.
However, in this industry, photo editors share a common bond: a definite tendency to decide on the picture needed at the last moment.
Thus the short deadlines that are a hazard of the ... Full
Story
COST OF TRAVEL OVERSEAS is always prohibitive for the stock photographer
just starting out. One way to skirt around this problem is to become a
Travel Agent.
OLD-TYME FLIX -- National Geographic snaps up BBC Photography series, “Genius of Photography”. Outright Distribution has sold BBC2 documentary series to National Geographic Channels International (NGCI) as part of a raft of other post-MipTV sales. Produced by Wall to Wall, the series offered a comprehensive history of photography and was originally produced for BBC2 and BBC4.
http://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/news/2009/05/nat_geo_snaps_up_bbc_photography_series.html
SIGHT UNSEEN. -- Visually impaired photographers display mind-boggling shots. Twelve visually impaired artists, a few of whom are totally blind, recently showed some amazing images as part of an exhibit called Sight Unseen at the University of California at Riverside.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10238900-1.html?tag=mncol
TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE. -- "Free software for your Mac that helps you organize, share, and enjoy your photos based on the people who are in them." But the terms of service provide: In order for Blue Lava to make the Service available to you, you hereby grant Blue Lava a royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide right and license....
http://www.photoattorney.com/2009/05/sharing-love-and-your-photos.html
