Selling from your website.

[richard_baumer1]

There must be over a hundred (probably over a thousand) photographers

who sell prints and, in some cases, calendars from their websites. I

am curious if any of these ventures ever make noticable amounts of

money. So, my question is: Are any members of Photo.net selling

images from their websites and do you make any money at it? I am

actually thinking of selling a celendar from a website.

 

Thanks

[keith_laban]

<a href="http://www.keithlaban.co.uk">Keith Laban Photography</a><p><i>"There must be over a hundred (probably over a thousand) photographers who sell prints and, in some cases, calendars from their websites"</i><p>Richard, I think you need to add at least one nought to that figure and possibly two or three.<p>The fact is that there are far more artists/photographers selling their work online than there are people buying. It <b>is</b> possible to make money, I do so myself, but there are far easier ways to make money with a camera.

[mark_warren1]

It's all about page hit rates. You need to drive people to your site in droves, and then, MAYBE .5% will buy something.

 

What kind of traffic does your site get each month? Where are they coming from? What search engines are referring viewers to your site?

How will customers purchase the calendar?

 

 

If you were to buy a calendar, wouldn't you want to touch it, feel it, see every photo on each month? The web doesn't provide that tactile experience.

 

Things to consider

[qtluong]

In my experience the ratio of buyers to visitors is in the 1/10,000 to 1/100,000 range, but since I have 300,000+/month to my

<a href = "http://terragalleria.com/">photography website</a>, I do make a "noticeable" amount of money.

[scott_robertson1]

<p>Yes, you can make a little money selling prints from your web site. Mark is absolutely correct about the need to drive lots of traffic to your site if you have any hope of making sales - assuming you have saleable photos to showcase. Using <a href="http://www.slrobertson.com">my own stock photo web site</a> as an example, I currently sell a print for about every 30,000 unique visitors to the site. That's .003% sales conversion. At this rate I will need to increase my site's traffic by another order of magnitude in order to get steady monthly sales (ie. 8-12 prints per month). I think this is entirely possible, but it's hard work. See <a href="http://www.danheller.com">danheller.com</a> and <a href="http://www.terragalleria.com">terragalleria.com</a>.</p>

<p>

Scott Robertson<br>

<a href="http://www.slrobertson.com">www.slrobertson.com</a>

</p>

[kevin_hundsnurscher]

There really isn't a whole lot of money to be made unless you either have a more personal relationship with the visitors to your site or can drive a lot of traffic to it.

[ted_marcus1]

I do make sales of prints and licenses for digital images from <a href="http://www.tedsimages.com">my site</a>, but it hardly qualifies as substantial income. The site is mainly intended as a way to show off my work (which would otherwise rot away in a closet) to people from around the world. The "payoff" comes from seeing log reports with many visitors from many places, so any actual sales are just icing on the cake (and sometimes seemingly more trouble than they're worth by the time I'm done making, packing, and shipping prints).

 

<p>By design my site is rather low-key when it comes to selling. I don't have a shopping cart or price list, but merely a note on each page that the pictures are available and a link to a form through which a user can contact me about it. Maybe I could get more sales if I had a shopping cart, but I'm not convinced of that.

 

<p>One thing I do get (which nobody has mentioned) is many inquiries about using my pictures for free. These usually come from churches or religious groups who (for example) want a picture of a Hawaiian beach for a poster advertising a raffle or a picture of Indian ruins that's "just the thing" for a pamphlet on their missionary outreach program for Indian reservations. One inquiry was from the author of a series of (self-published) Christian adventure stories who thought one of my pictures would be "perfect" for the cover, but his budget is too low to pay me for it; he thought I might be willing to donate it because it helps to spread the Gospel (while presumably bringing him as much of Mammon's wares as possible). After privately cursing their ignorance (there's nothing anywhere on my site about my religious beliefs, which regardless are not Christian), I send a prompt and courteous reply that I don't give away my pictures for free, and suggest they look up inexpensive royalty free stock images.

 

<p>Another more common situation is when I get genuine inquiries about buying a print or a license, to which I reply with a price quote that's generally lower than the stock sources I have bookmarked. The minority of times the reply is asking about payment options. The majority of times there's either no reply or a "thanks but I can't afford that." That's also a factor in "sales conversions."

 

<p>One interesting thing I've noticed is that these inquiries (productive or otherwise) always seem to come in bunches, between which weeks or months will elapse. I have no explanation for this phenomenon.

 

<p>So to answer your question, the income is "noticeable," enough to give me additional hassles come April 15 (Tax Time in the U.S.). Other than giving me an opportunity to make a minuscule contribution to federal and state treasuries, it provides me with the occasional dinner out and, most recently, a new hard drive for my computer. But if I didn't have a regular job that paid decently, I would never consider a photographic Web site as a way to make a living. At best it's a source of an occasional, usually unexpected windfall.

[raghu]

Hi Richard,

<P>How much do you mean when you say 'noticeable'? I am about ready to notice even $50.

<P>

Like Ted says, your website is a place for people to see all your images. Not all might buy prints. Some might want to license an image. This might be rarer but it usually pays more

<P>

How do the rest of you - Keith or QT or Scott - drive traffic to your website? Any secrets you might be willing to share?

<P>

<a href="http://www.indospectrum.com">Indospectrum.com</a>

[qtluong]

If you hang out at webmasterworld.com as much as photo.net you'll learn

a thing or two about promoting your site.

[keith_laban]

<a href="http://www.keithlaban.co.uk">Keith Laban Photography</a><p>Raghu, I'm really not sure what the "secret" is in driving traffic to a website. Apart from a Google AdWords campaign, which only targets a small specific audience, I do very little to actively attract visitors and yet have seen traffic to my website increasing at an amazing and unexpected rate.<p>I'm currently selling one print for approximately every 5000 unique visitors. My experience of selling image rights for publication is rather strange, tending to get the more prestigious sales via my own website, rather than the bread and butter sales which tend to come from images I have placed with other outlets. Why???<p>Ted is right about the number of enquiries for free use of images. I look at these on a case by case basis, but frankly only occasionally allow a free use with strict conditions attached and usually when there's something in it for me ;-)

[scott_robertson1]

Here are a few things you can do to drive more traffic to your photo site via public search engines like Google: 1. Design your site without URL parameters (i.e. URLs like www.site.com/page.php?param=43). This implies having a plain, static HTML site or, if you really must use a database to host your images, rewrite your URLs to appear static. 2. Use HTML meta tags for page descriptions and keywords. 3. Showcase lots and lots of your best work and include proper titles and keywords for each image. 4. Get other important sites to link to yours. You might define "important" as having a high Google PageRank. 5. Include other interesting content in addition to images. Write articles or reviews, for instance.

<p>You should probably make it clear that you sell prints and/or license images and you should have some sort of inquiry form, even a simple email form, if not a shopping cart and virtual light table. Be diligent about responding to your visitors' questions and comments. Reading up on "search engine optimization" and, as QT says, hanging around webmasterworld.com will help as well.</p>

<p>I used to get a lot of "free use" requests, but ever since I implemented a licensing request page and list the conditions under which I will license images, I get far fewer of these. I still get the occasional request from a student working on a paper or presentation, in which case I always grant free use, but most everyone else at least expects to pay something, though not everyone has a realistic notion of what stock photo licensing fees should be :-).</p>

<p>I haven't tried a Google AdWords campaign to promote my prints or stock library, and I'm not convinced it would help much anyway, but I have recently tried it to promote a new slide scanning service I'm offering. The enormous time sink of scanning slides on my old, slow Polaroid scanner and then cloning out dust spots in the scans has been a great impediment to populating my site with more images so I finally broke down and bought a Nikon Coolscan 5000 and bulk slide loader. In order to help pay for it (my print and licensing sales are just "noticeable" at this stage) I decided to try offering to scan others' slides for a reasonable, but profitable, fee. In a month's time with the AdWords campaign I've landed enough slide scanning jobs to more than pay for the scanner. The problem now is that I'm spending more time scanning everyone else's slides than my own!</p>

Scott Robertson

[ted_marcus1]

<i>I used to get a lot of "free use" requests, but ever since I implemented a licensing request page and list the conditions under which I will license images, I get far fewer of these. I still get the occasional request from a student working on a paper or presentation, in which case I always grant free use, but most everyone else at least expects to pay something, though not everyone has a realistic notion of what stock photo licensing fees should be :-).</i>

 

<p>I'm usually happy to grant free use requests from students and teachers, if only to reward them for asking permission rather than just stealing pictures (or worse, "leeching") pictures from my site. I have a standard effusive e-mail explaining how nice it is that they're honest and informed. But I've seen several school-district sites whose administrators aren't so honest or informed. I found out about them because they somehow thought that including a credit/link would make it okay to copy my pictures. None of them have responded to my "cease-and-desist" e-mails, and I don't think it's either feasible or worthwhile to take legal action. But that's a whole 'nother topic.

 

<p>I have thought about including a licensing price list, but decided against it. Each inquiry I get sends me searching through my bookmarks of stock sites that do include price lists. But only once have I been able to find something on any of them that fit the requested use. Since I inevitably have to make it up as I go along, a price list wouldn't seem very helpful. I do quote a standard price for prints, but even there it would be difficult to post it because most such requests come from outside the United States. The different international shipping options plus the extra time and hassle of filling in bill of lading forms means I can't list a single standard price.

 

<p>Most of my licensing requests come from local newspapers in places I've photographed, amazingly enough. They're looking for "stock" images appropriate for special advertorial sections. I usually quote them a price about half of what my bookmarked stock sites list because their circulation numbers tend to be "beneath the radar" of those lists. If I get a reply at all after quoting the price, it's usually something like "that's outrageous." But there is the occasional corporation willing to pay a nice price (usually determined by the cost of some piece of hardware or software I've been craving) for a picture they need right away for a sales presentation or internal publication. Alas, that's doesn't happen often.

[raghu]

Scott,

<p>

I try to do most of what you suggest, except #4. I guess the best thing to do is to start writing the webmasters and asking for a link.

<P>

Keith,

<P>

I wish I had a mystery like yours on my hands!

<P>

Ted,

<P>

I have granted free use to some students and other groups and I appreciate that they asked. Others have blissfully linked to my images without asking for my permission but luckily their sites are so unpopular that I hardly feel the bandwidth pinch.

<P>

Thanks all for sharing your experiences.

[richard_baumer1]

I just wanted to thank everyone for their responses. Very informative, and some really great sites!!

 

Thanks

[rob_valine]

Richard,

I'm sort of in the same situation as you are.I'm very interested in getting into Editorial Stock and Fine Art photography. I've had a web site set up for over a year with no print or stock sales at all. The only thing that I seem to be getting calls for is Wedding and Portrait work. I have 400 images on my site and have outgrown the site. I need a bigger site. It's hard to justify when there are no sales coming in. Although another site may have more traffic and I'm looking into other sites. I sold a few prints in local galleries and have actually sold quite a few on E-bay.You might want to give E-bay a try. You might be surprised. To check out my site, Go to RobValine.Imageculture.com

Good Luck,

Rob Valine