Fabio, i personally think you are correct with quality vs.quantity. Smug is good to send your clients to view your stuff without having to see you in person but cold sales is not great on this site. If you want to sell more put your stuff in more sites. Zazzle red bubble are free and you can set up a store and everything at no cost to you. I sell pretty good on those sites and I am in Canada and the majority of buyers are overseas. I keep my smugmug site for clients to look at that already know my work and they contact me personally if they want something. Spread your work around rather than increasing volume. This of course is just my opinion but to put all your eggs in one basket is never a good idea, I think very few people make a decent profit with only 1 site unless you go stock. Good luck to you.

Hi deb22
thanks for helping!
You add another interesting point of view.
Only, I am wondering that spreading my presence between different sale channels before I have well established it through SmugMug, as many are suggesting, risks to become, rather than helping, a further burden of work.
I am not saying at all it's a bad idea, only that I may better need a step by step well achieved development rather than a "be everywhere quickly" strategy.
Besides that, how should I manage offering the same products on different websites? I mean, how can I differentiate my offer? Prices? Features? Subjects?

I am going to make a recap of what has come out of the discussion till now.
- Stats: I started the thread from the consideration that 1 sale from 27.000 yearly visits sounds as a disappointing result to me. I then found out it's a rather standard average. QT Luong states in his blog he needs 21.000 visits to achieve a sale and he's work is way ahead (6.4 M visitors per year!!!!!!) of what I am doing at the moment. So maybe I shouldn't be so depressed by my figures and, instead, I should look at them as an encouraging starting point rather than as a disappointing result.
- Offering more images: I do believe, and I can repeat, that to rely on quantity is rarely a good choice. However, I have to agree with those members who have highlighted the issue about the extremely limited number of images I am offering at the moment. Perhaps I should say 24 photos is not the goal I had in mind when I started, I have been lazy along the way; my original idea was, and still is, to have some 80-100 images (to be renewed regularly).
- Subjects/places: some of you think I should offer a wider variety of subjects and locations rather than keeping focused on Venice only. The idea, as it seems to me, is that having a broader range of images, in terms of places photographed, could allow me to attract a larger audience to visit my website and therefore to increase chances that some of them would eventually make a purchase. This certainly makes sense from a statistic point of view and can't be denied. The downside of this approach could be, in my opinion, the risk of having, as a result, a weaker identity on the web market filled as it is with so many generalist offers so similar each other.
- Attractiveness of images: this is very subjective and I'm not going to applaud those who have enjoyed my pictures nor to criticize those who have judged them trivial. I would only like to say that I am trying, with my pictures, to assert a different way of depicting a city that is quite often photographed with that WOW approach which makes so many pictures amazing but quite repetitive.
- Limited sales channels + poor marketing: this is true under every point of view. As an average moron, I did the common mistake to think that having a pretty website was enough to start a profitable online business about photography . To my excuse I can only add that I have been distracted from the burden of struggling for my traditional offline photography business which is, given the economic climate, rather difficult to carry on.

I am surely missing other important points, but this is already a lot to work about
I'd like you all have your say on this anyway!

Originally Posted by fabthi Hi Sam Thanks for your contribution! Yes, I know and it seems, from other posts too, we all agree on this truth. But, I'd like to hear your opinion about how to achieve, or at least making a try, the results many of us would be glad to reach. Fabio

Fabthi,

I am directing my comments to primarily fine art prints.

With out going into a long drawn out explanation a website is more similar to a business card than a retail store. You / we need to have one to demonstrate credibility and to show our style and who we are, but don't expect any real volume of sales until you become famous.

Even the best known fine art photographers sell most of their work through galleries, face to face meetings and other real world outlets.

Photo hosting websites are best suited for event type sales where you have a captured audience looking for a relitively inexpencive photo of a specific event.

To sell fine art prints I think you need to place you and your work in front of prospective clients. You could try art and wine festivals, galleries, art walks. Anything in the real world.

As an example I have many people tell me my work is wonderful, amazing, etc. (I tell you this as an example, not to toot my own horn.) While I do appreciate that people like my photography, it does not translate into immediate sales.

Sam

Sounds like you have the jest of it pretty well.
I will go against the grain and suggest you specialize...if you can become the GO TO guy for pictures of Venice that is a niche where you can excel....not that many people on the internet will be competing against you.
Finding a niche these days is much better that dabbling in a little bit of everything.

Good luck to you!

Originally Posted by zoomer I will go against the grain and suggest you specialize...

I do agree with this, definitely

Originally Posted by zoomer ...if you can become the GO TO guy for pictures of Venice that is a niche where you can excel.... Finding a niche these days is much better that dabbling in a little bit of everything.

Not least because the above are, besides other considerations, very good reasons for being specialized

Originally Posted by Sam .............Even the best known fine art photographers sell most of their work through galleries, face to face meetings and other real world outlets. ..................To sell fine art prints I think you need to place you and your work in front of prospective clients. You could try art and wine festivals, galleries, art walks. Anything in the real world.

There is something I feel the need to say about this option of using different channels to promote and sell my printed works, as Sam and other members are suggesting . While I do believe it is certainly a good advice which I have no problem to agree with (I was born as photographer back in film age, when "real" contacts with people were everyday routine), I have to say it's something very difficult if not impossible) to achieve in Italy. There are very few galleries specialized about photography and they are used to exhibit only "stars", meaning people as, just to say, Elliott Erwitt, James Natchwey, Sebastiao Salgado and so on. If you really want to exhibit your work, you have to arrange on your own for space and marketing with chances to sell close to 0. Art fairs: same as for galleries, there are no fairs where photographers are supposed to exhibit their work, nor an audience willing to look for them.
Art photography for sale is just a non-existing market in Italy.

Originally Posted by fabthi Stats say I had about 27.000 views of my images since October 2010

So there's no problem getting visitors to your site - well done SmugMug!

However there are millions of photographers trying to sell images over the Internet. Yours must be very, very, very special to result in sales. Are they really that good - really?

Originally Posted by W.W. Webster So there's no problem getting visitors to your site - well done SmugMug!

I never said its' a problem originated by SmugMug, in fact I titled the thread "Where am I wrong?"

Originally Posted by W.W. Webster However there are millions of photographers trying to sell images over the Internet. Yours must be very, very, very special to result in sales. Are they really that good - really?

I can't judge my own images; some think they are nice, some other average, some not WOW at all. The good thing of photography is that is very subjective
That said however, the intrinsic quality of pictures doesn't seem to be the biggest issue when it comes to selling; it's very interesting reading QT Luong blog, as suggested by OffTopic, where he highlights the fact that a huge amount of traffic is necessary to actually achieve a significant number of print sales. He has verified a sales/visits ratio of 1/21.000, I am at 1/27.000 so I should consider myself on the right path , unfortunately I have 27.000 visits as overall total at the moment!
But, again, besides that, if you have a look at Terragalleria website you will see he has, among few awesome images, a lot of well taken descriptive average images (obviously in a infinitely higher proportion of mine) and, moreover, that there are literally thousands images of the same topic available for sale on the web.
http://www.terragalleria.com/pacific...hawa33374.html
http://www.terragalleria.com/pacific...aust20293.html
http://www.terragalleria.com/europe/...belg10494.html
The above are surely amazing pictures but, honestly, are they really really unique - really?
Don't take me wrong, I am not diminishing at all QT Luong work, which is extraordinary under every point of view, but he doesn't have the reputation and popularity of famous professionals we all know; despite that, he actually makes good sales of his work thanks to an extremely effective web marketing.

Originally Posted by fabthi But I don't understand, what kind of images you are selling for 1K (1.000$?)?

I licensed a beauty photo of a model to Unilever in India last December for significantly more than $1K. Didn't give up my copyright but did agree not to license to anyone else.

Oh - and while I do have a SM website, these days it's used for archiving and delivering files to clients. I personally found SM wasn't quite up to the professional look I wanted to present to the public.

Anyway, the key to selling photos is not to try to get random strangers to buy them. Figure out who is using photos similar to what you shoot and then market to them.

Michael Katz (Blue Penguin) put it this way in a recent seminar. If you email your mother, chances are about 100-percent she'll open it no matter the subject. If you email a stranger, odds are they won't even open your email. So you need to network and find the people who will open your email.

Some prominent photography consultants (Leslie Burns - Burns Auto Parts) even go so far as to recommend you don't even worry about SEO. Use those efforts on marketing and networking instead. People like to do business with people they know.

Wonder why people don't advertise more? Last time I was in Venice I used venezia.net for some tourist info, shops, etc. No idea what it costs to have a link on their site to your smugmug shop - just a thought.

By the way, Venezia is a tag you should be using.

Originally Posted by chrisjohnson Wonder why people don't advertise more? Last time I was in Venice I used venezia.net for some tourist info, shops, etc. No idea what it costs to have a link on their site to your smugmug shop - just a thought.

I have no idea either but, to be honest, to the same extent (infos about Venice) there are several websites where it could be worth advertising but this way is going to be rather expensive and difficult to optimize. Advertising should be made on sites relevant, for some reasons, to my target (selling photos); is a tourist info website the right place?