How to increase sales?

[frodojrr]

We've had our SmugMug account for over a year now, and need ideas for increasing sales. Our primary photographer, Wendy Heise, is excellent -- but how can we convince people to buy? We need to increase our bottom line.

We are a news source, and would like people to buy our photographs as well.

With digital photography so prevalent and camera phones everywhere, how can we convince people to buy professional photographs?

Anyone here have some successful marketing ideas for photographers?

SmugMug site is at http://enewspf.smugmug.com and the primary site is at http://www.enewspf.com

Thanks!

[Blaker]

Are you talking about selling news photos to other newspapers or selling the photos to the general public?
Most people are not apt to buy prints of local news photos- unless I am misunderstanding what you are selling and who you are selling to?


We've had our SmugMug account for over a year now, and need ideas for increasing sales. Our primary photographer, Wendy Heise, is excellent -- but how can we convince people to buy? We need to increase our bottom line.

We are a news source, and would like people to buy our photographs as well.

With digital photography so prevalent and camera phones everywhere, how can we convince people to buy professional photographs?

Anyone here have some successful marketing ideas for photographers?

SmugMug site is at http://enewspf.smugmug.com and the primary site is at http://www.enewspf.com

Thanks!

[frodojrr]

Are you talking about selling news photos to other newspapers or selling the photos to the general public?
Most people are not apt to buy prints of local news photos- unless I am misunderstanding what you are selling and who you are selling to?
Well, we wouldn't mind selling our prints to the general public. If you look at our galleries, we have a lot of community events up there. We usually don't do a gallery for news events -- except for the tornado that hit a local town a few months back, and another recent news event involving several police officers.

Actually sold a print of one of the County's Deputy Sheriffs.

I know we wouldn't mind selling our photographs to others in the media as well. Compared to other photojournalism sites, our digital license prints are also very, very reasonable.

Guess we just need to sit down and reassess our marketing strategy on photographs.

[jonh68]

There isn't a way to convince people to buy your pics. If you are a news agency, cover local sports. If you take great pictures of people kids and put them in a paper with a link printed in the cutline, you might get more hits.

[denisegoldberg]

Unfortunately for all of us, people don't just gravitate to web sites to purchase photos.

But - your smugmug site could do with some organization. When I look at it now I see a sea of galleries. I find that overwhelming, and I probably wouldn't look too far to find a gallery that interested me, too confusing. It looks like they are arranged in date sequence, but I suspect they would be more useful in some type of subject categorization. I'd recommend starting by switching the view on your home page from galleries to categories. You'll probably also need to review the categories you are using to make sure they make sense if used in a lead in to the galleries.

--- Denise

[KMCC]

How much traffic are you seeing through your galleries?

My belief is that you have to actively market and promote the existance your galleries. You need to find some way to ensure that folks who would be interested in those photographs know that the gallery exists. Google and other search engines are great, but are not that effective in pushing traffic through specific individual galleries.

If you have a gallery pertaining to a specific interest group or organization, send an e-mail to that organization's officers letting them know about the gallery and providing a direct link to the gallery (not to the front page of your web site - to Denise's point, bypass the front page and get them right into the gallery that you want them to see). Then ask them to forward the link on to anyone else who might be interested in viewing the photographs.

If there isn't a specific organization, try to find an internet forum (Google Groups) that will have members who will be interested in the photographs. Post the link to the gallery there.

The bottom line is that you can't assume that potential customers will find your galleries on their own. You need to do all that you can to put the gallery link into the computers of those who may be interested.