My name is Csaba Fikker, I'm a photographer/Dp/Video Editor living in Los Angeles. I started this blog in hopes of helping myself and others about the path I'm taking to market myself and to create a brand for myself as a photographer online.

I have been shooting for close to 20 years, and in the last ten I have finally started to make some extra cash with my hobby. My biggest challenge was and still is organizing and key wording my massive library of images that is way over 100,000 images today. I use Adobe Lightroom for cataloging and organizing.

I sell stock photos at over a dozen micro stock photo websites, I manage and sustain over a dozen sites myself most of it which has to do with photography.

Probably like everyone else I used to google myself and my images and I ended up being frustrated so in the past couple of months I have really ramped up on my online presence in order to gain a bit of "fame". That would hopefully lead to more jobs and more income for the endless amount of photography toys I would like to acquire.

So today I have signed up with iSyndica a fantastic tool to upload your images once and distribute it to dozens and dozens of sites at the same time. Yes there is a free version but i firmly believe that $10 or if you need more power $40 (for practicaly unlimited usage) per month is a money well spent in order to save time.

So I'm looking at the channels that are available, right away I love that I can quickly promote myself and my images over my Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and the one i just signed up for today Picassa. I load picassa on one of my Macs and start loading in the massive library,

loving the fact that I can create quickly a 600 pixel sync to my Picassa album online and so on. Than I realize there is a button at the bottom of this ap to use any image for a blog, and tadaaamm... here I'm. I realized that not just the fact that there is another avenue for me to display my images but another avenue market myself is to run a regular blog ( i have been reading about this in Photography magazines for years now - but I was always on the "who the heck has time for this".

I have enough photos to submit to my stock agencies for the next year, I have built ( never really finished ) myself a nice full screen portfolio site, I run a massive smugmug (enter: PdevBPus4ADSg coupon to sign up with them) based site www.igotsnapped.com for my clients to download or to order prints, I have a flickr account, I Tweet, i Tumblr and who knows what else i do and i still I don't think its enough, never mid its so time consuming that I never have the time to shoot anymore ( thus the one year worth of image pile up ) But today my prayers were answered and iSyndica came to my rescue.

Here is the process i have figured out for myself as right now.

- I upload a batch of images to iSyndica - assuming they are key worded and ready to go

1) first I would send it to my www.igotsnapped.com trough the smugmug channel - from there my images will be picked up trough RSS or Atom Feed and sent to my clustershoot.com account - right here i have my images for sale on two locations and I make almost all the profit on them.

2) Than I send out the same batch but downsized to 600 pixels and custom watermarked to Twitter, Tumblr, facebook and finally to Flickr - i still need to figure out a way to mark these images in a way that potential customers can figure out where can they license these images from, like for example www.igotsnapped.com

3) and finally just blast out the batch of images to a dozen micro stock sites trough iSyndica - of course you still have to go into each individual micro stock site and do your thing with keywords and submissions etc. but overall this is substantially less time uploading to so many sites and so forth.

So I'm really happy about today's discovery and I really hope i can get those images out to earn money .They have been piling up for the past 3 years and because the lengthy process I always end up shooting more and selling less. But the change is around the corner and I hope within a couple of months I can upload and market all my worthy images and start creating new content sometime soon. By then these wheel will be greased and my "genius" monetizing my photos scheme will become fruitful.