Update on how buyers find my prints

I’ve written a few times about attracting buyers to my fine art prints and hopefully drive sales that way! I’ve also been bemused over the past two years about why I don’t seem to be able to get more sales from Pictorem. I have my work on Fine Art America and Pictorem in the USA and Photo4Me in the UK, and for most of those past two years I have been preferentially focusing Social Media efforts on Pictorem. Why? Partly because they seem really nice and competent people! Partly because they have free shipping in the USA and Canada and partly to build up alternative ways to market in case one of them decides to change its approach or even close down.

Pictorem as a chosen Print on Demand site

Pictorem has a lot going for it in my mind. The annual fee is $60 or so, which is higher than FAA, but they do seem to be open to suggestions about improvements to the site (of which they have accepted some of my ideas) and recently I needed 6 large acrylic prints created in the few days before the 4th July holiday. I called them, got immediately through to a very nice and helpful person in Customer service who listened to my requirement, went to talk to her boss and to the production department and guaranteed to get all six created and shipped in four days. In fact, they did it in three days and they were out with DHL and on their way to me with free shipping. The prices were great as well – $158 for a 36×24 inch acrylic print. I opened them today in the exhibition gallery I am being displayed in, and both the packing and the quality was great!

Their upload process is very easy – in fact, just select any number of files and click upload and that is everything you need to do. The files are read, categories can be specified in advance and the new image pages are created. You are told the name, address and email of the person who bought the print, in case you want to add them to some marketing of your own. They even have a referral system which pays out 15% of any purchases (including new photographers signing up) and that can be worthwhile if someone goes to the site and decided to buy someone else’s print instead. You can link to your images with the broader site still visible, or you can have a site that only shows your images, and you can use your own URL. So SteveHeap.com takes you just to my images, but this link takes you to my images plus the wider site with my referral link. If you are thinking of signing up, please use this link!

There is also an active debate on the FAA forum that seems to be showing that FAA is not supplying a sitemap for all the images on the site to Google and other search engines, and so not all your images (in fact a small proportion) are actually indexed and come up in searches. I recently checked the indexing of SteveHeap.com and found that 3350 links are indexed on Pictorem and a further 2700 are not, because they are indexed under another URL (the Pictorem one I assume). But it does show a healthy number of links. I can’t do that for FAA, as I haven’t had a URL of my own pointed to that site until recently. I recently acquired SteveHeapPhotos.com and pointed it to FAA, so in the future I should be able to see what is indexed.

So with all these positive points, why I have I only made $895 (in profit) from them in 2022 and 2023 when I have made almost $3000 in profit from Fine Art America? And $578 of the Pictorem total was from three large sales in the first 2 months that my account was open when I had relatively few images uploaded! I still have no idea how those three sales occurred so soon after starting the site.

It isn’t for lack of visibility in search results either. I have heard that they had some technical issues with Google indexing in 2022, but when I look now, I see Pictorem results popping up as often as FAA results. So even though most of my links from social media and my own Fine Art website, BackyardImage, go to Pictorem, the sales are from FAA. And there is free shipping! This is still a conundrum to me, to be honest!

My recent sales

I sold two large framed prints in June (from FAA of course) and so I decided to work out, if I could, just how the person had found them. They were both of waterfalls on a local small river called Deckers Creek. If I search for Deckers Creek Waterfall Print on Google, I see this:

Ten of these results are actually my images and Pictorem comes up 7 times (once as SteveHeap.com). Fine Art America comes up twice and lower in the results. So, if the buyer was following these results, you would think Pictorem would have been the destination. This search was done in Incognito mode to make sure that Google doesn’t tell me what it thinks I want to know!

What is interesting though is that BackyardImage.com comes up twice, in both first and second positions in the search results. This is my article about the waterfalls on Deckers Creek that is illustrated with my images. When I checked the links in the article, they did, in fact go to FAA – because I wrote it before I opened my Pictorem account.

I then checked my Google Analytics for the site and, sure enough, in the week prior to the sale, I had 11 visits to the page from 8 different users and there was an outgoing click from the page. In that week, I only had 5 clicks from the whole of the site and so I think it is interesting that one of them was from the page that leads to the sale.

Conclusions on getting these sales

The buyer of these prints comes from a town about 25 miles from here and so is probably aware of the waterfalls in question and may have seen my name on the Facebook groups I’m in that are focused on this area of the country. But I don’t think I have posted these pictures recently and so a Google search is the most likely way they were found. As FAA is pretty low down the results, that suggests (together with the click) that they followed the link to my article, and then from the image they liked to the FAA site.

I’ve been following a strategy of writing articles about places that I have visited and trying to tie them to a Facebook group or other set of interested people by posting the link to the article if I can, or just mentioning that I have written “one of my illustrated articles” and then including some photos in the Facebook post. People can then look at my profile and see my own post of the article with the link. When I do that, I get a marked increase in visitors for that new article which suggests that people are finding their way there. A few sign up to receive emails about future posts, but not a lot to be honest.

I do put the articles on Twitter and Mastodon as well, but I’m not sure how well that works in terms of people actually following the link. I don’t tend to get many clicks there.

If I find out more, I’ll continue to post it here.