Increasing Traffic

Khaos

I'm moving slow, but I'm almost finished with a new logo, this one original without borrowed parts like the one I have now. That will get me to the point of at least getting business cards being made and put out there.

The website will be next, the main one that will link to my smug mug galleries and vice versa.

There will be even T-shirts and stuff. I will begin market blitzing.:D

My question is about actual unadvertised traffic.

At FM there have been a couple of threads on pic hosting. I've sang my praise for smug mug as have others, but one common thing that comes up is that pbase seems to generate more traffic.

Personally, I feel smug mug is a much better deal and I don't care to leave, but I'm wondering about traffic generation.

Is it that pbase has such a large membership and they all love to visit each other's pages? Do search engines give more hits for them than other pic hosting sites? I've posted regulary here on dgrin and I've gotten many positive comments, but it definately hasn't spurred enough interest for people to check out my galleries.

I can see the writing on the wall with smug mug, and it reads rather well. I have an idea that with your upcoming changes and stated but not in detail potential partnerships that smug mug is working to get higher traffic and more recognition.

Any comments? I'm up for suggestions also. I know I need more pics. I've only had my camera since December. With learning curve and the fact I haven't even had it for a full year hurts along with my stupid job sucking up over 50 hours a week. Any advice can't hurt though.

Thanks.

colourbox

Although I'm sticking irrevocably with smugmug, pbase does some interesting things to encourage casual browsing traffic.

Random gallery/photo search
Much more extensive popular keyword browser
Popular galleries
Recent galleries
World database (browse by location)
Camera database (browse by camera)
Tree view of a member's galleries

It is just so much more fun to see what other photographers (and camera types) are up to on pbase. They leverage the metadata a bit more from the viewer side.

But smugmug's member features were more important to me, so I'm here. I expect that smugmug will add more browsing flexibility at some point, since they are so obviously into adding all kinds of cool stuff for us all the time. If they have traded off browsing features in favor of implementing member gallery improvements first, then I agree with that.

igoforit

smugmug is perhaps a different public?
I have the impression that smugmug attracts people who want their photo website in a somewhat tailored way.
I don't visit pbase so often, but if I compare with photo.net, it looks to me like a quite different public. Photo.net is a photographer's community who like to discuss photos (with supposed artistic qualities). I don't see that happening much on smugmug.
Photo.net offers pretty well developed features like scoring pictures, ranking and searching, submitting them for scoring en where participation in scoring gives a user extra rights, Smugmug hardly has these kind of features.
I can't see how I could make a photosite as good looking as what I have achieved with smugmug with photo.net. On the other hand, there are no traffic generating features in smugmug, you will have to get your photos still out on other photosites or forums. The smugmug communities are a very small first step, but we are still very far away from the active photographic communities.
Just my 2c