Making more money

Andy Favors

Ok, I'm not doing so well on making much money on my site. I make quite a bit on the side selling photos in person, but have practically $0 in sales on the site. Most of what I have made was at the launch of the site. I would think my photos are just horrible, but since I sell so much in person, I know that can't be the case. So I am looking for suggestions on what I should be doing to increase my sales from the people that do sell a lot. What do you do? How do you promote? Are my prices too high? Please give me all the suggestions you can think of. At the rate I'm going, the site doesn't pay for itself. Please and thank you.

http://www.andyfavors.com

denisegoldberg

Unfortunately for all of us, just posting photos online does little (if anything) to sell them.

You have keyworded your photos, and that's a good starting point. To take that a step further, adding gallery descriptions might be good.

Your bio tells me little about the type of photography you do; an update there might be helpful. What do you think would interest a potential buyer? Your current location could be important, but where you are born is likely not.

On the laptop that I'm using right now, all I see on your homepage is your bio and most of a slideshow. I know, not everyone is using a laptop, but I would expect a lot of folks to be using one.

I don't see anything on your site that highlights a gallery or a set of photos. It starts with a bio and a slideshow. Clicking on the slideshow opens a gallery containing only 3 photos.

Do you have any links inbound to your site? A blog?
See http://www.smugmug.com/help/search-engines.

--- Denise

Andy Favors

I think you are right on the bio and slideshow. I took the slideshow off, and will rework the bio soon. The main page does have different galleries, but the image on the slideshow you clicked was probably a lightning from the sound of it, which has the least amount of photos in it. As for inbound links, I do have a facebook fan page with over 400 fans. Plus forums I post on all have my site address in my signature. I'll work more on the layout of the home page to see what I can come up with. Are there any other suggestions that you may give? I appreciate all the helps so far.

denisegoldberg

Andy Favors wrote: »

Are there any other suggestions that you may give?

The first thing you need to do is make sure you have good inbound links. Yes, you said you have links in your signature on forums, but I don't believe that is enough. Are you posting photos on forums to give potential viewers both an introduction to your work and a link to the gallery in which the posted photo resides? Have you considered a blog? (Of course a blog is only good if you intend to update it frequently...)

Then, step back and look at your site as a visitor might see it. You are using the standard smugmug layout with a background. You haven't put much of a personal touch on it, and there isn't anything there that stands out to pull the viewer in.

Look at some other smugmug sites for ideas, pick the things that cause the sites to stand out for you, implement changes to your site based on those ideas.

Use good names for your galleries. You have a gallery named "Photos". That's pretty generic and to my mind a useless name.

Clean up your keywords. It looks like you are using the option to create keywords based on your photo names. That's a good thing if your photos are all have meaningful names. It's not a good thing if your photos have the standard straight out of the camera names - a keyword like 1376 is meaningless. For example, look at the keywords in your Eureka Springs Railroad gallery - the fact that the photo is tonemapped may be of interest to you and possibly to other photographers, but I don't believe most people who are looking for photos to buy are going to search for that. Why aren't you using keywords related to the subject of the photo?

--- Denise

OffTopic

One thing I noticed is that all of your photos I looked at are 2:3 aspect ratio, but you do not have any prints offered in that ratio. I tried playing around with several of your train images and they can't be cropped by the customer in the shopping cart to fit 8x10 or any of the other print sizes you offer without completely destroying the image. You might want to consider offering 8x12 prints and other sizes that correspond with the aspect ratio of your images, or reworking the images yourself to 4:5 (if that is what you want to offer) when possible and uploading the new files. You need to make sure that the print sizes you are offering will work with the images on your site.