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We could have a separate thread for illustrators, as I think there are marked differences between the success rate of sales of illustrations from photos – hence the title.
I wondered how the general feeling on sales from our sites has developed over the year. For me, I seem to get good placement in Google images for appropriate keywords, not very many site visits (about 75 sessions a week on average). Most of those sessions have two page views on average. About 30% of my sessions come in to the home page, about 10% come in to the social sharing buttons (not sure what that is about) and then I have a very long tail of sessions landing on specific pages – presumably from the Google searches.
However, sales are almost zero. I did have someone contact me as he had to make a 48 inch print for a client and he liked one of my panoramas. After much discussion on email, he did license a full size file for $35. That has been it for several months.
So as a business venture, my site definitely does not pay its way!
How about you?
Steve
My site is running for a year. Not many sales but well enough to pay my web hosting fee. So I will keep the site running.
Some findings during this year:
Social media promotion is not effective for business. It turns out most people are fans of beautiful photos but not intent to buy anything. Daily promotion has no visual effect on my site. Business clients seldom find me through social medias.
Link exchange is effective for SEO. We all know this in past posts and experiments we did.
Stock agencies brought clients to my site. That is the big part of sales and targeted customers.
Google search plays some role in sales. I have 30% sales from google.
Steve,
How did you monitor the site traffic? This confuses me as google statistics seems missing some visits and my WP statistics plug in recording more than should-be visits including bots.
For the numbers, I looked at Google analytics. I think you need to register your site with them (with a bit of code you put in a file) and then they start monitoring all sorts of things about your visitors (including their ages somehow!). WordPress gives you page views. Google Analytics gives you sessions and then various measures about those sessions – time spent on the site, pages viewed, landing page etc.
BTW – great news about covering your costs with your sales. Not for me, unfortunately. How do the stock agencies lead people to your site – do you put your site URL in the profile on those agencies that allow that?
Steve
I use google analytics too. I might go deeper into the result to understand them.
Yes, most agencies allow you put your site URL in profile, such as shutterstock, istock, dreamstime, and other small ones. Some clients search my name in google. If they want find you, there is always a way.
Thanks George.
For some reason just saw your reply. You got very good point. I am still doing daily social media promotion. I have now a bit regular traffic from pinterest. Need dig more with social medias.
Nope so far my prints business is not ready. I am working with my partner fine-tuning products. Hopefully couple of months later it will be online.
One SEO question here…
I put one new photo each day in my blog section as promotion. Following my SEO plug-in suggestion (Yoast SEO trying to get as few red lights as possible…) and here is the thing:
It suggest minimun 300 text words while I found it hard to do that in my daily photo description (yes I can write an long article but too much for a daily work). My question is, how much does it impact SEO? Anyone has experiences?
I ask this since our image in shop has normally less than 50 words in description, and we have hundreds or thousands of product pages. If it matters, that would be huge.
Thanks George. One photo a day does bring some traffic to my site as long as people click the image thumb in social medias.
I found recently for some unkown reasons my google rank drops quite a bit. It was even worse than the time we don’t have link exchange widget. I didn’t recall doing anything except posting daily photos. That is where my doubt comes from.
I tested by temporarily closing my blog section but did not see any impact on ranking. Strange.
Good suggestion! I will dig into the dead links.
The traffic from pinterest is due to one of my photos being pinned by someone to 1k+ board. That shot is lucky but it happens sometime.
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