Fine Art America – trying for new sales…

I mentioned last month that I was trying to work on developing more traction on my Fine Art Portfolio on Fine Art America. I had around 800 images over there and as I have reported here, have had occasional sales. I tried an experiment to lower my prices, but that did nothing much at all, and so I put them back to more reasonable levels:

Then, in early December, I decided to spend time trying to get more traffic to my images and also try to influence the positioning of my images in the internal search engine. I think there are probably three paths to a print sale – a google search ending up at FAA, someone on FAA searching for a particular type of image and, finally, someone seeing one of my posts somewhere and going to FAA to investigate it. I don’t know how to influence the google search and so I concentrated on the latter two. I also spent time increasing the number of images I have on the site by working backwards through my portfolio and uploading images that I like the look of, but have never got round to uploading. So, as of today, I have 1075 images over there and many, many months worth of images still to go through. I did find out that FAA uses the title of the image to give it a URL, and occasionally strange things happen if you have several images with the same title, and so I now check first that the title makes sense (they do crop it) and also the title is unique among my images.

Fine Art America groups and contests

I’ve always known that FAA has an active contributor community with many groups and many of those hold contests. So my start was to join some groups that aim to boost your position in the search order by offering to “like and favorite” images in exchange for you doing the same to their images. Others ask you to comment on the five images above you in the discussion and still others just ask you to look at all the images above you that have been posted to the discussion in the past 24 hours. Measuring views is something that FAA do, and presumably use it for search order in some way! So since early December, I have been an active member of those groups and have amassed many likes and comments on my images. I focused on images around WVU and Morgantown at first to see if I could see some measurable change in my position in a search.

I chose this because it would make a good graduation gift for a WVU student or new faculty member and also I could search for WVU or Woodburn Hall on FAA and see where my image appears. Before I started it was on page 2 of the searches. Now with 22 comments and 71 likes, it is halfway down the first page. What is interesting is that my other images of this same place (taken with the snow in December) are also ranked better (I think) and I have quite a grouping that appears on this first page. I do know the artist whose image appears at the top of these searches and he can’t really explain it – he maybe got there early, and it is definitely a great image, but he didn’t do anything special to get this position. I think Sales are an important part of this and maybe sales across your portfolio, but it isn’t at all clear! So it does appear that taking part in these exercises on a regular basis is worthwhile.

I also entered some contests. I found that the ones that were judged by the general public or other FAA members were very hit and miss and probably depended on getting friends to vote for you, but I did have better luck on the juried ones, earning a first place with one of my images. No prizes, but a bit more visibility. Also entering contests is easy and little effort. I think I will just stick with juried ones in future – at least you know someone will see your work and judge it!

External Links

I then started posting one of my images with a link back to the FAA page on my personal Facebook account. I tried to publish one image each day and generally get the usual likes and some comments. Finally, I started adding one image every day (or so) to my business LinkedIn account. I’ve had some clicks through to the image on FAA and some comments saying it is nice to see a good photo rather than the boring stuff they normally see in their feeds!

But the $64,000 question – did I sell anything? A couple of masks in December, but apart from that, no! So it is hard to say if this is a success or not! I guess January is a slow month for prints, and so I shouldn’t judge things too quickly. So my plan is to continue with this. If you want to form a group to cross promote our work, please “follow” me and I’ll comment back on your work.

What sells on FAA?

I wish I knew the answer to this! I have thought that an image of a specific place must have some advantages. This is not because these sort of images sell better than more artistic ones of flowers, say, or abstracts. I think that keywording an image of a place is relatively specific. We know what people will be searching for and so can do our best to get those keywords included and also craft a description to attract them. Keywording an abstract image is very hard (at least for me) and I have no idea what people would search for. Flowers are similar – there are so many of them that getting yours seen must be quite hard. So I’ve tended to focus on uploading images of places and hope that some buyers are searching a memento of that place. Time will tell if I am right!