Getting Started
MickelsenPhotography
Registered Users Posts: 3 Beginner grinner
I've finally finished up graduate school and I am loving getting back into photography after I had to put it aside for several years. My question is, what has been your most useful tool for marketing? I am doing my smugmug website just on the side and for fun so not looking to make a ton of money but I think it would be fun if I made a couple of bucks here and there. Any suggestions for how to promote your site when first getting started?
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Comments
First get rid of the smugmug header. Same with footer. All branding on your website should be yours.
Second, while I am a huge fan of watermarks, yours is a bit large and distracting. Make a tad smaller.
Third, if you are going to allow visitors share your images (share button), what is going to make them buy the image?
Fourth, your prices are set at the minimum, this needs to change. (I would also limit the options a bit. In my experience, too many options hurt sales).
Lastly on the website part, it isn't intuitive. You have a ton of pics on the homepage, but no links to galleries, nothing that makes it obvious that you sell images or that you have the desire to do so.
For the marketing side, you mention that you do this for fun. Those two things do not go together. Yes it is possible to do something for fun and make a few dollars at the same time, but it is significantly harder.
I'm guessing that you want to take pretty pictures, throw them up on your website and hope that someone stumbles across the site and buys something.
Sure it could happen, but the odds are not good.
General "art" photography is probably the toughest part of the business to make money in to begin with, as everyone that has a camera can do it. No they all don't do it well, but they can do it. So you are competing in a huge section of the market.
However if you wish to be in that category, there are some things that you can do to improve the odds of selling the occasional print.
You could post images on some of the photo sharing sites and hope someone stumbles across something that they like.
You could make prints and get them hung in businesses in your area and hope that someone likes it.
You could make prints and rent a spot in a local gallery or flea market and hope that someone likes it.
You could take out ads in popular photography or travel magazines and hope that someone likes it.
I'm not trying to discourage you, but the vast majority of people who buy a camera want to sell an occasional picture and that in and of itself makes it very difficult. Selling by nature is the business side of photography and rarely if ever works for someone who wants to have fun. It really is a job. Every professional spends far more time on the business side than they do taking pictures, because taking pictures is the easy part. Getting people to spend money is hard and takes time.
Website
Make sure that you do an "about me" page and a "contact page" also for anyone who wants to get in touch.
Website
Joining Steve's suggestion about the 'About me' and 'Contact' pages
I thought you might find our help pages useful to create those:
How to create a page:
http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/1210637-how-do-i-create-and-customize-pages-?b_id=1644
How to create a contact page:
http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/1248294-create-a-contact-page
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