Well, you can just release a product with promos and let the sites marketing team do their bit, but nothing stops you from starting a product thread to gain traction or add a promo vid showing the product in action. I have found that extra effort has really helped. People know before hand what is to come and it generates some hype instead of just being drawn to their attention when it is released in the stores. So yes, you do pay these sites to handle marketing for you, but nothing stops you from giving your work more exposure. That does require more effort, but that is strictly up to you if you feel it is worth it or not.

Exactly. If you're already a top vendor with a big reputation who got his/her foot in the door a decade or more ago, you CAN let the brokerage do all the work for you. But if you're just starting out, you're competing within your brokerage with all those top names.

I've read the Daz forums, where vendors complain that almost all of their sales come in the first couple of weeks, with very little after. Even Daz admins themselves admitted that they had a problem generating back catalog sales.

Daz is probably the best brokerage for its vendors, but it will only do so much. And one thing that it's shockingly bad at is helping customers FIND the stuff they want. Shopping there is sometimes like walking into a huge box store, where half the products are in the back room. I don't know how much time vendors spend looking for products, but it's probably far, far less time than I spend. And my experience is that it's really hard to find things. So those vendors who take the time (5 to 30 minutes) to create really good product descriptions will get more sales in their back catalogs than those who don't. People pooh-pooh the descriptions, but once you're off the front page, they're the only way a customer will find your product -- unless you're highlighted in a sale. And really while sales are nice, you make more money when you're not selling your entire catalog at 50% off. My post about descriptions and keywords was meant to address this issue.

Sure, you can make money from front page sales, always running on a treadmill, trying to push out product fast enough to keep in the limelight. But if spending a couple of hours a week on self-promotion helps you sell more, why is it any less valuable than pumping out more product? Aside from that, people spend inordinate amounts of time piddling around on the internet -- me and everyone in this thread is doing it right now, and I don't want to think about how much time some people waste on Facebook -- why not make that time work FOR you instead of against you by developing a promotion strategy that uses your internet time more efficiently for your benefit.

Moreover, if you have a smart phone, you can work on marketing anywhere -- public transportation, waiting at the doctor's office, when you first wake up and are fuzzy headedly drinking that first cup of coffee, while visiting your in-laws. You can't model or rig or texture on your smartphone. But you CAN sell.

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When I first started out creating the site from which I sold jewelry, it took A LOT of work to get it going. Months of work. (I didn't have a brokerage to drive sales to my door). But once my site ranked number one for the keywords I wanted, I got people all over the world making orders. After the initial work, I barely touched that aspect of it, and hundreds of these random people just kept buying, for YEARS after. 

A Poser content vendor wouldn't need to spend nearly the same amount of effort that I did because the brokerages herd the customers to the website. But an initial investment of time, with a few hours here and there to top it off, might well make a sizable difference. 

I'm tempted to take a vendor I really like and do as much of this stuff as I could for him/her. He/she wouldn't even have to know I was doing it. It'd be interesting to see if it pushed them into a top sales category. :D :D

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PoserPro 2014, PS CS5.5 Ext, Nikon D300. Win 8, i7-4770 @ 3.4 GHz, AMD Radeon 8570, 12 GB RAM.