A good way to increase views and sales of your images is by actively promoting your portfolio. If you can attract traffic to your images then your potential to sell them becomes greater. There are a couple of ways to do this and they vary from agency to agency, I will help explain a few of my favorites below.

123RF

At 123RF you can promote your portfolio by donating images to their free section. You also have the ability to limit the period that the images will be offered for free, therefore retaining them as $ earning files. Think of it as loaning the images for a period of time and while on loan they will direct people to your portfolio. Fotolia and Dreamstime also have a free section, but these files remain free and you cannot earn from them.

Shutterstock | Dreamstime

Social Networking has taken the world over in last few years and the team at Shutterstock knows it. They offer methods for their members to promote their work on the world’s most popular social networks . You have the ability to promote your work on Twitter and Facebook by using the Shuttertweet or Facebook Connect applications.  With Shuttertweet you can tweet details of your latest approved or sold images and link it to your portfolio. The Facebook Connect application allows you to display a selection of images that were recently approved or sold and link them through to your portfolio. Dreamstime also offers promotion through Facebook Connect.

iStockphoto

Promoting your work on iStockphoto is best done within the site via creating lightboxes and embedding links into photo descriptions. Agencies like Fotolia show buyers your images form the same series and images relating to a specific model. This is not so on iStockphoto and it is up to you to show buyers that there is more for them to choose from in your portfolio. Not everyone is privileged enough to know how to do this and I had to learn by asking some of the more established iStockphoto contributors. The trick is to embed a UBB code into your image description that displays an image linking buyers to more files in a series of a particular model. See below for my example

How to guide

The first thing you will need to do is create a lightbox. You can group certain images into lightboxes that you wish to promote. For example, business related images, images form the same shoot or images of a certain model. Once you have created the lightbox you can find the url that links to it. Example: http://www.istockphoto.com/my_lightbox_contents.php?lightboxID=8087791

The next step is to create an image that you want to display as your link. On iStockphoto the maximum width for the description field is 400 pixels. I prefer to work on 380. What you display is up to you.

Now you will need to host this image on a website that allows image hosting. I have found that one of the better ones to use is Onfinite. Here you can store your images. Once you have uploaded your image to Onfinite you will need to find the url that links to that image. Example: http://onfinite.com/libraries/1577744/cb5.jpg

Now you have the tools you need to complete the code. Go to edit your image description and enter the code beneath your description. The code looks like this.

[url=http://www.istockphoto.com/my_lightbox_contents.php?lightboxID=8087791][img=http://onfinite.com/libraries/1577744/cb5.jpg]

replace the red text with your unique lightbox number and image url.

These are just some of the promotion tools that you can use help to increase your sales. I hope that you have found this informative and helpful.