The following is my response to a photographer friend from the UK who had some questions about photography website development. I thought my reply might be of help or interest to others so I have posted it here.
David,
Pertaining to your questions about my website, it has been a constant process of evolution over the past four or five years and it will be something I will work on my entire career, I suspect. I don’t have the money and time required to make it exactly what I envision all at once, either functionally or aesthetically, but it is slowly getting there in small increments.
I am currently getting about 6,000 to 9,000 visits per month, but it has taken me three years to get to that. Up until this time last year I was getting less than 1,000 visits per month. My goal is to get 20,000 to 40,000 visits per month eventually. My web designer and I have been implementing several different strategies. The large number of pages that are interlinked is one way. Large sites with a complex link structure and consistently new content look more important to search engines and get ranked higher. I have also done a careful job of placing key wording and metatags in various strategic places. My blog has also done a lot to increase traffic to my site. Most of it isn’t necessarily photo buyers, but at least it is creating exposure, reputation and name recognition. I also send out an email newsletter about once a month to an ever growing mailing list (up to about 600 people now).
I have also added some pages specifically for the purpose of attracting specific searches. For example, search engines were cataloging my site as an image or picture site, but not a photographer site. So, in searches for “southern Oregon photos” or “southern Oregon images” I would come up near the top, but if you searched for “southern Oregon photographer” then I was nowhere to be found. We added a random page with information about me as a photographer, where I photograph and what photography services I provide and linked it to every image in my site related to the southern Oregon region. Now when people search for a photographer in our region, my site comes up much closer to the top.
Initially, to create a large and complex page structure for my site I added tons of images, even ones that I felt were slightly sub-par. As my photography and reputation has grown, I have been slowly removing lesser images and replacing them with better ones. As I did this I realized that my website was shrinking instead of growing. This is where the idea for the stock archives came in. By creating a separate stock section I can now add tons of images that are fine for stock, but not up to the standard of “art”. I can now be much more selective about which images I place in “Signed Art” while still growing my site rapidly with “Stock”. I am just completing another round of removing about 50 lesser images from Signed Art, while adding only a few new ones, but my stock section always grows.
As I said, the main reason for adding the stock section was to increase site content, link structure and site relevance, but a side benefit has been that I now get a modest amount of stock image requests. I am by no means a stock shooter, which is why I have not pursued any of the large stock agencies like Almay. With tens of millions of images in these agencies, a stock shooter has to be producing thousands of new images a month and be willing to shoot whatever is selling in order to make a living. At one point the formula was that a good stock shooter could make an average of $1 per stock image per year. So, to make $30,000, 30,000 stock images would need to be on file and constantly updated. Now, with all the royalty free stock, it is probably far more than that. I’m not interested in going that route. Instead, my stock is targeted at a very narrow population, but one which often has difficulty finding the specific images that I have. Specifically, most of the images I license are of the local Pacific Northwest region and I license them to local or regional businesses and publishers. Even on a big site like Almay it is hard to find a good quality image of the city of Ashland or the Rogue River, so they end up finding my site and coming to me. So, the stock is a way to make my site more relevant to search engines, and it also gets me some extra income. At this point I probably license about $2,000 to $5,000 per year. As my business grows I hope that will increase.
The reason I am negotiating each stock image separately is because I haven’t been able to afford to have an automated system built for me, but hopefully that will be coming. Ideally I would make most of my images royalty free and then users could download them directly from my site. The price would be determined by the resolution and size of the image file. There may also be third party software that I could use for this for not much expense, but I haven’t had time to research it too much yet. I try to curb the time I spend working on the computer so that I remain a photographer and don’t accidentally become a web programmer.
Hope that info helps. I’m sure there are better ways of going about all this, but I just keep forging ahead without much of a blueprint. For me it is fun to experiment and see what happens. I’m in this for the long haul, so I don’t mind seeing things slowly grow and making lots of mistakes. I’m steadily becoming more known and more and more people are familiar with my work. It will be fun to see where I am in ten or twenty years.