Let me quote myself.

I am not going to stick around and pretend to be something I’m not.  Too many people set goals and fail to reach them, yet still continue the journey unfazed.  I often share my experiences and ideas in hopes of helping you.  If I can’t help myself first, I can’t help you.

If I fail to reach both goals (10k images, $25k for the year) by 12/31/09, NiltoMil.com will close for good whether I continue to shoot microstock or not.

At this point in the year it is obvious that I will not reach 10k approved images OR $25,000 this year.

I am modifying what I wrote above.  I am not going to destroy or delete Nil. I am going to stop posting earnings, stop posting ideas until they are working better.  I AM going to keep Nil up for the archives and the posts that often get referenced.  I AM going to continue to put up posts of interest to me – whether that’s of interest to anyone else or not.  My journey will continue.

I need to help myself first.  I need to figure out the steps I should be taking to reach my goal  and when I do, I’ll be back full force with the full effort I can give Nil.  Until then, expect sporadic updates on what I’m doing, how stock is going and what I am trying to do to improve.

(chart taken from StockXpert top portfolios)

Figuring out where I rank on stock sites is a curiosity more than a necessity.  I don’t need to know – my goal is $1,000,000 regardless of whether Yuri or Lise has made $55,000,000 or what Lumaxart is doing.  However, it’s interesting to compare progress and see where we’re at and where we reach in what time periods.

Here are the tracking tools I’m aware of:

Istock Charts

Bigstock Gallery Size Listing

StockXpert Gallery Size Listing

(Araminta Studios has a great listing but it’s currently offline.)

As far as my own rankings are concerned, I only  have rough estimates of past results and all of today’s current data.  These rankings are for GALLERY SIZE only.

IStock – last time I looked, I was roughly 7900th.  Today I’m 7213th.

Bigstock – last time I looked, I was on page 9 ranked roughly 420th.   Today I’m ranked 267th and on page 6.

StockXpert – last time I looked, I was roughly 750th.  Today I’m ranked 338th.

So it looks like there are roughly 350ish photographers with  larger galleries than I have online.

What would it take to make progress?

On IStock, just 100 new images would raise my ranking from 7213 to 4480.
Also on Istock, just 300 new images would raise my ranking from 7213 to 2375.
Real progress would be 369 new images and top 2000.

On Bigstock, just 130 images raises me to page 5 and rank #240. 
On Bigstock, just 750 images would raise our ranking from 267th to 144th.
Real progress would be 1360 new images, bringing us in the top 100.

On StockXpert, just 100 images would raise us from 338 to 295th.
On StockXpert, just 620 images would raise us from 338 to 200th.
Real progress would be 1738 images and would take us from 338 to 100th.

3000 new accepted images (my goal for 2/28/09) would give us the following rankings:

Istock (140 new images max) – 3180th.
Bigstock (3000 new images) – 43rd.
StockXpert (3000 new images) – 60th.

So that Istock one may be a bit of a reach – but top 100 on the other sites?  Totally doable.  Where do you rank?  Post below and you’ll always have it to look back on – and compare to!

The Internet isn’t as organized as say the NFL or Miss America. To know who’s “winning” requires some amount of research into a few things:

1) on what are blogs ranked?

2) how do you track that stuff?

3) who’s winning?

4) how much do we care?

This is Part 4 – How much do we care?

The last question is how high you want to go. This isn’t as difficult as it seems. There are 5 levels of bloggers according to Technorati and they are ranked according to Authority like this:

A List Blogs – 500+ Authority
B List Blogs – 100-499 Authority
C List Blogs – 10-99 Authority
D List Blogs – 3-9 Authority
E List Blogs – 0-2 Authority

Just for the record, that’ll probably change soon. The #1 blog has an authority of 29,213 as of today. To qualify for the top 100, you need Authority of 2451.

Where do YOU need to be for your market? A quick search shows that our Picture Infinity Blog is the #1 blog for Syracuse Wedding Photographer with an Authority of 5. This will be different everywhere. If you search Los Angeles wedding photographer, you need a 60 to be fourth place. First place is Jessica Claire with a 527 Authority.

For most markets, using your blog as a means of advertising means being a C List Blogger. D list works sometimes. C a lot more frequently. Being a B List blogger means you’re “usually” tops in your market.

SEO & Technorati, Part 1
SEO & Technorati, Part 2
SEO & Technorati, Part 3
SEO & Technorati, Part 4

The Internet isn’t as organized as say the NFL or Miss America. To know who’s “winning” requires some amount of research into a few things:

1) on what are blogs ranked?

2) how do you track that stuff?

3) who’s winning?

4) how much do we care?

This is Part 3 – Who’s Winning?

The “Who’s Winning” of blogs can be summarized very easily: multiple bloggers using one portal and a “newspaper” type interface. They are winning and easily. For your own blog, as a small business or solo photographer, winning isn’t as important as “beating your direct competition.” You’re not in competition with Huffington Post or Gizmodo.

What good does it do? Technorati Authority is based on a similar concept as Google’s Pagerank – how many incoming links go to this and how relevant are those links? This was easy in the past. I’d collect a list of links from each of you, we’d all post them, boom, instant Authority, rank and Pagerank. Good all around. Google now PENALIZES against “excessive link exchanges” – which really has no definition other than “if you have to create a link directory for it, it’s probably excessive.”

Who’s winning your market? Do a couple of searches on Technorati and see what you find. After you do an initial search (results will be in “Posts”) click “Blogs” to get results for which blogs hold high rankings in your particular set of keywords. See, it can function like Google too – but with the added knowledge of WHY someone is ranked so well.

SEO & Technorati, Part 1
SEO & Technorati, Part 2
SEO & Technorati, Part 3
SEO & Technorati, Part 4

The Internet isn’t as organized as say the NFL or Miss America. To know who’s “winning” requires some amount of research into a few things:

1) on what are blogs ranked?

2) how do you track that stuff?

3) who’s winning?

4) how much do we care?

This is Part 2 – How do we track it?

To track your blog on Technorati, you will want to claim your blog. You can do that by clicking the Blogs tab and then at the bottom of the page inserting your blog URL and following the steps from there. The important thing as far as having a Technorati account is simply having a way to monitor your progress and your current authority.

Once you have claimed your blog and logged into Technorati you will see the blogs you have claimed on the right under “My Blogs.” Click “manage my blogs” Here you can edit your settings (mainly description and tags). You can also grab the code to add faves but faves are a Technorati-only thing and do not help your Authority or ranking.

On the other tabs in Manage My Blog you may also change your Bio, Photos and such.

SEO & Technorati, Part 1
SEO & Technorati, Part 2
SEO & Technorati, Part 3
SEO & Technorati, Part 4

The Internet isn’t as organized as say the NFL or Miss America. To know who’s “winning” requires some amount of research into a few things:

1) on what are blogs ranked?

2) how do you track that stuff?

3) who’s winning?

4) how much do we care?

This is Part 1 – On what are blogs ranked?

The current standard for ranking blogs is Technorati (http://www.technorati.com). As of June 2008, Technorati indexes 112.8 million blogs. Technorati is THE ranking system for blogs. So let’s check it out. Technorati measures a blog on:

#1 – Technorati authority

#2 – Technorati rank

Authority is the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months.
Rank is calculated based on how far you are from the top.

If you click on a technorati link for a blog you find out both.
http://www.technorati.com/blogs/niltomil.com

You can see that NiltoMil.com has an Authority: 8 and Rank: 709,835. The lowest ranked blogs, those with no authority, are 4,704,172.

Blogs can be ranked on Google but you have to take into consideration keywords then and your results will vary. For “microstock blog” NiltoMil is ranked #4. For “microstock blogger” though, we are #1. You can use Google to determine a lot about your rating in that system but Technorati gives you an exact placement.

SEO & Technorati, Part 1
SEO & Technorati, Part 2
SEO & Technorati, Part 3
SEO & Technorati, Part 4