Alrighty, folks! We are back today with one of my biggest trying-to-sell-things-online tips.

Watermark all your photos.

What’s that? Watermark my photos? That sounds like a lot of extra work and-

Watermark all your photos.

But, I’m just going to toss this one up on Faceboo-

Watermark all your photos.

I always include links to my stuff, so I don’t really need to-

Oh my god, just trust me. Watermark all your photos.

Here’s the thing. The minute you post any  photo online, you have lost all control of it.

People with save photos of your work to their computers for inspiration and then months later will find it in a random desktop folder and won’t remember where it came from.

People will pin your photos to their Pinterest as a photo without a link and other folks will see it and have idea where to go for the pattern.

People will share your photo on Facebook and others will save it or Pin it or share it and the rabbit trail never ends, but eventually your photo will end up separated from your information somehow and your work will be floating around the internet with no credit.

How do we fix this?

Make your credit part of the photo by adding your logo to it.

So, first things first you can use a logo or just your name or shop name. I made my logo into a little image that I can attach to my photos as a layer in Photoshop, but there are lots of ways to do it.

This is my logo. It’s veeeeery simple and not totally centered. Oops.

I’ve found that having a grayscale logo that’s really simple makes it easy to use on both dark and light photo backgrounds, since I can just invert the colors.

Now, of course this isn’t technically “watermarking”. That would look something more like this:

But that’s just hideous and you can’t see the bead work, so don’t actually watermark the photos. Just make sure your logo or text is easily readable on your photo.

But, honestly, you could just add text with a basic photo editor instead of plastering your logo all over everything like I do. Just make sure that whatever you write on your photos helps people find you.

The basic idea is that a person can type whatever is on your photo into google and find you easily. That way, even if your photo gets separated from your info, an interested buyer can find you by googling the info on your photo.

With an iPhone (that has iOS 10) you can take a photo and add text from your Edit Photo screen before posting it anywhere. I go old school and use Photoshop because A) I don’t have a smart phone and B) I like to do some color correction and brightness tweaking anyway. But there are tons of easy photo editing apps out there and adding your info to a photo can be as easy or complicated as you want it to be.

So, kids, what have we learned today?

If you want credit for your work – put your name on it!