Boosting Print Sales using Social Media
Way back in September last year, I wrote about my experiences in trying, really hard, to use Social Media to boost my sales of prints on Fine Art America in particular. That post also links back to three earlier articles from when I started this effort at the early part of 2021. Now, after more than a year at this effort, has it been worthwhile?
I wish I had a clear answer to that question. I did sell more prints and other products in 2021 than in previous years, so at that very high level, yes it has been worthwhile.
Visitors to my prints on Fine Art America
In the years before 2021, I just used to upload images to FAA with the same keywords that they would have for stock agencies and then do nothing else. So previous years are perhaps quite a record in their own right. Most contributors to the forum over there are very clear that FAA gives you a store, and they do give you some exposure through Google Ads, but essentially you need to market your own work. They have a chart with the number of visitors, many of which are actually search engine bots on the site. I didn’t actually record my numbers last year, but I think it was perhaps 110,000 visitors since I started in 2011. I thought that was OK, but I did see that the bigger sellers had 2-3M visitors. After my efforts on social media, I now have just over 200,000 visitors and add about 3500 a week now, so I am getting more notice.
Adding more prints to my portfolio
I also added many more images to my portfolio. Before I started this, I had about 900 or 1000 images online. By May, and the first article about my social media efforts, I had 1450 and now I have 2584. Where did these all come from, you may wonder! I simply worked backwards through my portfolio looking at the images that were flagged for stock photos and thinking whether someone might like that as a print. Quite often I would do a bit of reprocessing because, in retrospect, I think many of my stock images are a little too true to life. People these days seem to want a print to be in their face (or at least it seems so to me). So, I have added more drama to a lot of my prints. For a time, I tried to check if I had the image already on the site, but there weren’t too many and so I stopped checking. As a result, I have some duplicates, but they are processed differently and so if someone prefers the muted look, they may well find it.
Each week I would go through these older files and import them, creating new collections as needed and generally organizing my work by destination rather than subject matter. I noticed that visitor counts go up just by adding a new set of files as search engines find them, which is to be expected. I probably added 40-50 images most weeks.
I’m currently at July 2012 in my progress backwards through my life! So I probably have another 5 or 6 years’ worth of pretty reasonable photographs before we get to the early days of digital cameras! I’m sure I will find another 1000 or so images to add.
Selling more “other products” on FAA
Of the $1067 sales in 2021, $1004 came from print sales, and I’m seeing a pickup in the sales of other products such as greeting cards, puzzles, mugs and the like.
This is not, in itself, a bad thing, although I do have a big sigh after opening an email from FAA about a new sale and seeing that it is for $4 profit!
So that is the background. Now on to what I have been doing on social media, what I think has been working, and what I plan to do going forward. As you can see, I am not giving up!
Experiences with the different Social Media platforms – Pinterest
Firstly, Pinterest has been a big waste of time (and a fair amount of money to be honest). I took a course on understanding Pinterest back last Spring and I did learn a lot. No problems with the course, it is Pinterest that really frustrated me. I also bought an annual plan for Tailwind, which is the top posting application for Pinterest and to Instagram. The App is great – it is integrated with Canva so that you can create Pins easily with your own images and have them link back to your website and for a lot of 2021 I was posting at least 5 pins a day. My followers went up a bit, the number of impressions (people seeing the pin on a page of others), but positive results went nowhere.
The thing I wanted most was for people to see some wall art and click through to my site. Here is the graph of that for Pinterest:
I tried every sort of pin, created mockups of my images in frames in rooms, bought mockup packs to make the creation of these easier, reposted pins from time to time, but basically nothing!
It is very clear that platforms like Facebook are not helping you spread the message about your art and trying to link people back to either a page on your own blog, perhaps, or a link to the product itself when you post in either your personal account or business page. After a year, I have got many more “follows” on my business page, but when I post something with a link in it, it hardly goes anywhere. I used Buffer to post to Facebook more easily – again, it works, but I’m not impressed with the results.
However, what did work for me were the Facebook groups. I haven’t been as active as I need to be in finding appropriate groups, but I did join two that were of people who either grew up where I lived, or now live in the area. There are 15K in each, although there must be overlap. I just posted nice photos of the area with an explanation of where it was – no links and got the usual likes and loves. As I built more of a reputation as a good photographer not wanting to just sell stuff, things got friendlier, and I was able to post the occasional link back to my gallery of Morgantown images and got more visits there. Finally, I received a direct message from the admin of one of the groups asking to buy a print of my work, but before I got back to him, he had already been to FAA and bought a large, framed print of a local beauty spot. He contacted me after it arrived and was very impressed with it and has now introduced me to others in his circle as a great local photographer. I also was approached by a team building a local website for permission to use my images on the site (for payment), have been approached by two others for the use of photos for their businesses and also did well selling my local calendar to members of these groups. So, if you take the time to build up a rapport, you can use these groups to your advantage.
I was never much of a user of Instagram, so I just used Buffer to put stuff there! I should have been more watchful because when I looked at it this week, I saw a message from someone 9 months ago, asking if they could buy prints of my work!
I did nothing here either, except to make use of the auto twitter post from FAA whenever I uploaded a new image (which went nowhere on twitter).
I used Buffer to send my photos and posts to LinkedIn as well. I did get some interest there, some nice comments, likes etc. and it does spread my work a bit wider, but I don’t think I could tie a sale to any of that. I did learn that LinkedIn, like Facebook, does not like to see posts which sends one of their “readers” off the site. So, they don’t tend to show those posts as widely. I noticed recently that you could write longer pieces directly on LinkedIn (just copying text from a blog post, for example) and then putting the link in the first column. Those got much greater reach on the platform.
So, what is the plan?
As I said, I never give up! I’ve been honing down my approach to one that makes sense to me.
Firstly, I started to take a pretty expensive marketing course with David duChemin. He is a very persuasive photographer and writer (really like his weekly emails), and I took the first 5 weeks of what is a 10 or 12 week course. With all my background in stock and the “pile them high” philosophy that we use there, there was not a great fit with what he was explaining, and I decided to cancel. But one thing stuck with me. The social networks are in this for themselves, not for you. You need to create your own environment for people that like your work so that you can communicate directly with them via the site and via email.
Building my website for people who like my work
As a result, I totally reworked my portfolio site, BackyardImage, to be more about stories and articles about my work that a buyer or follower might like. I had a ton of old portfolio pages from 10 years ago, and all that went to give a much sleeker design. I am now actively trying to get people to sign up to my own mailing list (with Mailchimp) and then I will be able to talk to them directly. I have three now (!), but those are people who actually really like what I do.
I have been writing relatively short stories illustrated by my work and setting it up so that clicking the image allows them to see a bigger version of it, but in the caption under the image, I include a link to that print my personal FAA site. I also added my own URL to the site so that I could add a watermark on each image saying “SteveHeap.com” which should be easy for someone to remember. I’m writing 4 or so blog articles each week at the moment. I’m also in a Bloggers supporting Bloggers group on FAA. One thing that adds to a website’s value in Google’s eyes are the number of backlinks. But backlinks from comments on other sites (including FAA) or in forums are almost always marked “no follow” for search engines. In this FAA group, we added a plugin that allows search engines to follow each other’s comments back to our sites and hence collectively increase our site ranking.
I also put a list of all my posts in the Print page of this website to help get a bit of extra traction towards BackyardImage!
Increasing efforts on Instagram and Twitter
There is another group on FAA who are sharing the same tag on Twitter and Instagram (and Pinterest I think) which is currently #SpringForArt. We each retweet each other’s artwork and posts what have that tag and get much great reach. I’m new at it, but it has massively increased the reach of my posts on Twitter. So, I am going to build a plan to post all of my new stories from my website onto Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Pinterest, and then post individual image posts just on Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest from the images in those stories. The stories posts will link back to BackyardImage to hopefully collect some new members over time, the image posts will go to my FAA site to the specific print page to maybe get some sales.
How am I going to do that without a lot of effort? Well, someone in the Bloggers group mentioned a neat plugin called Blog2Social. It is far more than normal plugins though – seems almost like a full application that runs within WordPress. Basically, in the free version you can turn any of your posts or the images on your site into customized social media posts, with templates that include your favored tags, whether to summarize the content of the post, or use the Excerpt, and you can see a preview of what the post will look like. You can form groups of networks as I structured them above so that only certain social media places get the post. In the paid version, you can add Instagram but more importantly schedule the posts in advance and have them submitted at the best time to get some traction. With things like Twitter, you can schedule reports as well. Creating these posts is pretty easy and I really like the way I can use one of my images from the site that already has my watermarks with my website embedded. I’m on the free trial at the moment, but am definitely going to sign up for the annual plan. I did set up an affiliate link for them – so if you are interested in finding out more please use this link to the Blog2Social plugin.
Something to avoid
Finally, if you are a stock photographer, I found something to definitely avoid. I always uploaded everything to the stock sites and then chose images to upload to FAA as prints. I did that partly because it was easier and partly because some of my good landscape shots really sell well on the stock sites. However, I noticed that I was getting reasonably regular earnings of $19 or so from Canstock, which is well out of the ordinary. When I searched online for prints of places I have images, I found that almost always I would find my own images at Fine Art America, but just as often, I would see a company called BareWalls that sold the same thing. They sold prints for a fraction of the cost of mine on FAA and their supplier is Canstock. So, each of these $19 earnings probably cost me $100 in lost sales on FAA. I’m trying to see if I can get out of that distribution arrangement and if not, will just close the Canstock account.
This has been a long post, but for those interested in selling prints, hopefully an interesting and useful one. If you got this far, let me know what is working for you!
I’m not pursuing Print sales at this time. Your insight, analysis and hard work is always inspiring.
I enjoy the print work – more like real photography to me!
Interesting post. Facebook groups is a good tip. I clients that basically say the same thing – Pinterest produces respectable traffic but 0 results.
Yes, I am going to focus on Facebook groups and find more of them in places where I have a lot of images. The places like Pinterest will simply get posts without any real effort on my behalf, so I will continue to use them, but never really spend time or effort on them.
Long but very informative article. Thank you for sharing your experience. Did you still use the same Keywords on FAA as in stockphotos?
Hi Michalakis (hope I got that right). Thanks for the comments – it was long, but hopefully useful. Yes, I do use the same keywords. I sometimes change the description, but not too often and the stock photo description works well.
For me the social media looks like a big waste of time, especially now as a beginner. You are not supposed to work to make connections on social media and to try to do like 4 like, follow 4 follow, and things like that. The social media should be working for you. You only had to upload your images and the link. But unfortunately, this is not working anymore. Social media giants make the reach almost impossible in the recent years. Posting the images on your blog with links to the sale page is much better to get up in Google search than posting on social media. I wonder what social media sites are the best to be used as backlinks for the sale pages.
Yes, most of the social media sites have made this very difficult. In essence you cannot build a business on the back of a company that has totally different aims to you – hence the focus on my own site and hopefully my own “social media” group of followers. I will use external social media to try to find those people and get them interested in my work and my new website, but I will interact with them via my own site and via email, not via Facebook likes and comments!
I’ve noticed that what works for one fine art photographer fails for another. It is a bit of a crap shoot to be honest. I post to about dozen or more Facebook groups almost daily, to Instagram also about daily, recently started participating in a Twitter promotion, and post to Pinterest a few times a week. Add in blogging, photo contests and various group promos inside FAA and I doubt there are many that put more effort into marketing their work. I feel like the quality of my work is good enough, better than many. I offer a variety of subjects and have around 1000 pieces available to purchase. Still I sit pretty stagnant at 1 sale per month. I’ve also experimented with a couple other POD sites with zero sales from them. I’m not giving up but it sure can be discouraging at times.
I hear you, Bob. That is why I am really trying for this group interested in me and my work. The theory behind David duChemin’s own work is that you only need 1000 people willing to spend $100 on you to be OK. And 1000 people out of the world is not a lot. You just need to find them! In the stock world I have a group who have been premium members of this site for 18 months now – so people that want to know what you have to say do exist. I also separate what I do for photographers from what I do for buyers. I think that is important, but we will see!
After a year of blogging every week, I have added zero sales to my stash. I also post photos on facebook and instagram. Zero. Nada. I did have a few sales last year on FAA, but that’s not the work I promote in my blog. My sales on FAA were not even sufficient to pay for my membership there. So Steve, you are in a good place, although you don’t realize it! You go, man!
At this juncture I have to admit that my work must be pure crap, since no one seems to be interested in purchasing any of it. To add insult to injury, a musician contacted me today asking me if he can use one of my photos in his “non-commercial clip”. I answered with a link where he can license the photo, and asked him if he, instead, would like to let me use one of his songs in exchange for my picture, in my non-commercial blog. I never heard back.
Alessandra – I wondered when you would reply! I know, and I feel really sorry for you in doing all the work you have done and have got nowhere. Your work is good, really good, and are real art in many cases. Mine are very good photographs, which is different! That is one of the reasons I gave up on the David DuChemin course – he was much more about finding a group of people where you make a difference to their lives and you needed to identify who those people are and why you make a difference. With my work, I found that hard, even impossible, to envisage. I take a good photo, that’s all and some people like them! The story of the musician is just par for the course, isn’t it! However, I was approached by someone who found me via a photo on Dreamstime, who asked for permission to use my photo as the inspiration for a piece they are commissioning from a local artist and how much would that cost! Now that is a different world, indeed!
Steve, thanks for the kind words. I suspect that you underestimate yourself. Your photos are really beautiful, and that you have sold so many, proves that. A gallery owner I spoke with not long ago insisted that people like photos that elicit some nostalgia in them, photos of places they have been, and which remind them of places they have visited, even if just in their dreams. So I believe that you are in a good place with respect to that.
How to sell prints will remain a mystery I think for most artists.
There have been many recent changes with social media. Those that used to get me at last some traffic, like Facebook and Instagram, now give priority to artists who pay to boost their posts. Furthermore, Meta is pushing for clips now, to compete with Tik Tok. Reeds and stories are given a lot of exposure, as opposed to regular feed posts.
My sites rank on first page if you google my name, but it is hard to find my blog if you are looking for something specific I have posted about. I’m almost convinced that one needs to pick one single subject and blog about that ad nauseam, to be able to rank high on google, and for us that can’t be “photography”, because photographers want to sell, not buy, prints. For example, if I want to sell botanical prints, I probably need to direct my blog posts to gardeners, decorators, etc, but I don’t know how because I don’t master those subjects.
I joined an arts marketing program for a while, particularly trying to find out how can I find customers who are in their acquisition years of buying houses, decorating zoom offices etc. I still don’t know how to achieve that. Then the part that I offer something to people so I can capture their e-mails felt disingenuous, and the rest of the course was old fashioned stuff like networking in person with potential buyers, visiting galleries and fairs. I work full time, so how much of this stuff I can do is limited.
I look forward to more of your insights on selling online!
Thanks for your kind comments! I do agree – I think I take very good pictures of places and my whole aim on my new site is to talk about those places and illustrate with my best images and get to those people who want to relive them. I don’t have the same feeling about the email mailing list – I think that will allow me to offer people special discounts on my work and perhaps get an interested group of people who like what I do. You can get likes on Facebook, but after that you might as well be invisible! Still, we will see how it goes. The most successful photographers in business terms are the ones that sell things to other photographers, not to the general public!
The most successful photographers in business terms are the ones that sell things to other photographers, not to the general public!
Seriously??.
There are some great ones – Peter Lik – who sell stuff for thousands and more. But the average professional landscape or travel photographer, say, sells more to other photographers in terms of workshops, books and affiliate sales than they probably do selling prints to the general public. That is what I meant. So, David duChemin makes more on selling courses and workshops to other artists than he does (I’m guessing) selling his prints. I may be wrong, of course!
That makes sense !
Have you tried promoting your work on TikTok? I’ve heard many success stories of people promoting their digital sales on Etsy for example when posts go viral. And the platform has a much wider reach than Facebook and other social media. May be something to consider. Good luck.
No – I haven’t, although I have heard of people using TikTok for that. I’m not sure – buyers of my work tend to be older (I think) and so this might not be a good venue for me? Etsy – yes, I do see those and I think that might be worth investigating! I’ll write about it if I do!
Etsy may be a good option. I think they allow you to advertise for your products on their site, just like Amazon KDP, so you may have bigger chances of having your work seen by more people. But I think they charge fees for posting and for other things as well. Good luck.
Thanks – I have started my Etsy store now. But I have a lot to learn! I bought one digital download from an Australian couple and it contained files for all the different potential crops and huge (ie 22000 pixel wide) jpeg files. The whole thing was 1.3G in a zip file. And it cost me $7.60. Worse that stock agencies!!