 So, Shutterstock just released a new contributors profile page that has some surprising new features. One of them could get you more stock buyers as followers on your social media. In this video, I'm going to walk you through how you can use these new features to get more photo sales from your portfolio. First off, if you're not familiar with what the Shutterstock profile page is, it's a public page on the Shutterstock site that you can customize. Now, they just released a new version and you can take a look. This is what the old version looked like. And here's the new version. So, as you can see, the new one has kind of a more modern look and feel, but there's also some kind of key changes in what's on the actual page. Now, the first big change is that now you've actually got a tab for your videos, so if you do sell videos and photos on Shutterstock, this can be really useful. I don't have a lot of videos up on Shutterstock, but I can totally see how if a buyer was interested in some of my photos, they may want to also go take a look at my videos and fights versa. So I think this could really help some people who have a lot of photos and videos get more sales on Shutterstock. There's some other small changes that kind of make the profile page look a bit more like social media. You get a longer bio, so you can write a bit more about yourself. And there's a larger, you know, photo of yourself. But I'm not sure if these are actually going to translate into more sales. However, the biggest change, the one that I really want to talk about is that now they're allowing you to link to your social media sites as well as another link to your portfolio, which could be your own website. Now, this is a pretty big change for Shutterstock. They've never really allowed you to do this before. So the reason this is surprising is that Shutterstock and most stock photography sites see themselves as like a middleman between stock photo buyers and photographers, right? So they don't really want to give up their competitive advantage by allowing the buyers to easily figure out who they're buying the photos off of because they don't want the buyers to go directly to the photographers. And then also they make it really difficult or impossible really for the photographers to figure out who's buying their photos. So this is really a change in thinking. And to be honest, most of the people that use Shutterstock really use it as a search engine, right? They use it as a search engine to search for photos on many different photographers' portfolios. So there actually isn't a huge risk to Shutterstock for the buyers to go to directly to the photographers in most cases because most of these buyers want to be able to search across multiple portfolios. So, but that's not the way they've thought in the past. This is actually kind of forward thinking to them to realize that this is the case and because of that, being able to link to your social media from your profile page. Now that being said, it's been my experience that there's certain types of stock photography buyers that are going to want to follow you on social media, right? Now, like if you think about someone, let's say someone goes and searches for landscape photos Canada, right? And they're doing that for a specific article they're writing and they need and they go and they purchase a photo. Well, that person isn't likely going to think, okay, well, I'm going to need more photos from this photographer and go and look at my profile and maybe follow me on Instagram. However, let's say there's a real estate agent and they're looking for some photos for their social media and they go into Shutterstock and they find me. Now, they're in my area and they may find some photos in my era. So for those particular people, what I found is often what they will do is they'll go and they'll try to find me on social media like on Twitter or on Instagram and then they'll follow me, right? Because as I publish more photos, they want to be able to see them so that they can go in and purchase those photos because they need an ongoing supply of photos of their area. So I do find that you do get those types of followers on social media and when you get them, as they see photos they like, it does turn into more sales because it'll drive people back to your portfolio and buy them because they're seeing them more often. So before this profile update, it was actually pretty hard for the buyers to come and follow me. What I did was I actually put a little note in my bio that said if you want to find me outside of Shutterstock, search for souvenirpixels because I have souvenirpixels.com and that's an easy way for them to find me because I know I'm going to be number one in the search results, right? But now, if somebody is searching on Shutterstock and they see something they like and they want to follow me, they can just click on my name, which will take them to my profile and on my profile, it links to my Facebook page and it also links to my Twitter and my Instagram and my LinkedIn. Although I don't post a lot of photos on LinkedIn. So it makes it much easier for them to find me. They can also go in and look at my profile page and they can actually link directly to souvenirpixels.com where they can actually purchase photos. And they could purchase photos that might not be up on Shutterstock. So it might be worthwhile for them to go in and check this out. So again, this is just going to make it easier for them. I'm really looking forward to seeing how many people actually go through and click these links. But I can see getting some stock photography buyers that are Shutterstock customers becoming followers on my social media. And those are by far the most valuable followers you have. I know a lot of photographers kind of go back and forth on whether social media is worth it. There's definitely people that you post on Twitter and you can have like 100,000 followers on Twitter and it translates into zero sales because they may just follow you because they like your photos or they like your style, but they never purchase a photo because they're not actually stock photo buyers. So those followers, although they're good for getting you more followers like that and getting you more likes, they don't actually translate into much revenue, whereas stock photography buyers that go on there and there's people that do this, there's people that have to buy photos and they need fresh photos all the time. They'll go and they'll, in their Instagram, they will follow photographers who photos they may want to purchase in the future. And I would much rather have 100 stock photography buyers following me on Instagram than 100,000 people that just like my photos, right? It's great and I love to share my photos and I like when I get the likes, but I like it more when my photos actually get used for a commercial purpose and I get a bit of revenue from it. Now, obviously, if you want people to follow you on social media, you got to have your photos uploaded there as well. If they click on the link to your Instagram account from your Shutterstock profile and they get to Instagram and they see that you haven't uploaded any photos there or you haven't uploaded a photo in a year, they're probably not going to follow you because people want to follow people on social media who are active on those social media platforms. So if you do want to use these links, you do need to make sure that you're uploading your photos to Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and all the link sites that you have there so that people want to follow you. Now, if you've been following this channel, you know that every photo that I upload to Shutterstock, I also upload to Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. And the way that I do that is with the website that we've created, PhotoLoo. So what you can do in PhotoLoo is when I upload a photo to Shutterstock, I can also upload it to all the other social media sites all at once. I don't have to go in and upload the photo everywhere. So this really saves me a lot of time. Now, if you're interested in what that workflow looks like, you can look at some of the other videos on the channel or you can just go in and sign up for a free PhotoLoo account. I'll put a link up here somewhere where you can go and do that. Now again, if this is your first time to the channel, make sure you subscribe. If you found this video useful, make sure you like it. Best of luck selling your photos online.