I quote here some updates coming from the Vivozoom contributor e-mail of the end of December, with a 2009 review and planning for the future.

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Overall Sales Progress

Sales have been progressing well, but not as fast as we would like, largely because of the difficult market conditions and some increasingly aggressive competition.
To address this we are investing in more viral marketing.  Driving this forward is our PR company who are delivering a lot of good coverage in the USA (see attached) and ramping up public relations in the UK as well.  Also, to take advantage of various social networking sites, we have set up vivozoom Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts.  Keeping our contributors as well as our clients informed is extremely important to us. Remember we have an excellent Affiliate program you can participate in to earn money and drive business to the site.

vivozoom clippings - Click to Zoom Out

Royalties

I am delighted to let you know that vivozoom’s first batch of royalty payments were paid out recently.  With continued efforts focused on marketing the benefits of vivozoom as well as re-invigorating our online advertising campaign, we anticipate a steady increase in royalties over the next several months.  Please make sure you file you W8-BEN with us (for non-US citizens) to avoid delays in receiving your royalty payments.

Site Developments

Given that one of our main selling points to our clients is a premium collection with relevant searches, our editors have spent the last several months improving image keywords on the vivozoom site.  During this project, we have found that several contributors are keyword “spamming” (attaching irrelevant keywords to images just so they will pull up in searches).  Please keep all captions short and sweet and only include relevant keywords.

We have many new (mostly customer facing) changes coming to the site, including some exciting browse functionality!

Social Networking…

As I mentioned earlier, vivozoom can be found on some of the most popular social networking sites. You can now follow vivozoom on Twitter, become a fan of vivozoom on Facebook and a company blog is currently in the works.  We hope to keep all of our contributors up to date on company news and information including content needs, trends, industry news and general information.

Content Needs

With the holidays surrounding us all at this time of year it is a great opportunity to focus on holiday images.  Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza and New Year’s Eve are just a few of the holidays celebrated in December alone.  These images would be great additions to the vivozoom archive for next year.  Now is also the time to focus on spring holidays, which are just around the corner.  Chinese New Year, Valentine’s Day, Mardi Gras, St. Patrick’s Day, Easter, and Passover are some of the more common holiday images requested by clients. Lifestyle and still life images representing these holidays will be next on clients’ project lists.

Also, the Winter Olympics and World Cup Soccer will both take place in 2010, so requests for winter sports and soccer images will surely be on the rise over the next several months.  So, start shooting.

Stacey Goldberg
Creative Director

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