Sell Your Photos Online - Step 4
Getting Visitors to your site...
So, you've built your brand new image gallery website but there are very few visitors. If your website and business are going to be sustainable you need to do something about that!
There are a number of simple things that you can do that will result in an increase in traffic. By targeting the right sort of visitors to your site and having fresh high quality content your visitors will keep coming back time and time again.
Get your site Indexed
You need to get your website indexed by all the major search engines. At the time of writing this article (and my experience over the past couple of years), google and google images will be the most important to you.
You may be asking - how do I do that? Well, you can submit them by hand to each of the search engines. This is not only time consuming but, there are no guarantees that they will even index your site - if they do it will usually take some time.
A better approach may be to get some inbound links to your site from high quality sites that have already been indexed and show up in SERP's. As the robots/spiders visit these sites they will follow the links to your site.
I am not suggesting links from web directories that have lots of outbound links to other websites that you will be competing against (I get very little traffic from web directories)! Links from contextual content are a much better approach.
Writing Articles
Write yourself a few good quality articles (around 200 words should do) about your site and what makes you different - keep it interesting! Remember to use your key words and your website title in these articles.
Once you are happy with them start looking for sites that will be willing to publish them for you (be prepared to pay for your submissions). Photography blogs and photography forums are a good place to start. There are blogs around (like ours) that specialise in promoting other people websites and services.
The good thing about submitting to a blog rather that a forum is that most blogs have an RSS News Feed of the articles. This will result in your article being picked up and published by other sites around the internet.
Online Advertising
If your budget permits consider some on-line advertising. This could be a way to generate some traffic fairly quickly!
Emails and Stationary
Make sure that whenever you send an email, letter or invoice that is business related that is has your website URL listed. This will help to re-enforce your brand.
Don't send unsolicited email to people you consider to be potential clients. This is a great way of getting your website blacklisted! Only send emails to an established client base or people who have indicated that they are happy to receive emails from you - this could be from a mailing list which people can sign up to on your website.
Measure your Success
Once you start to receive some traffic it is a good idea to know where it has come from. This will help you to refine your promotional techniques and target your audience more appropriately.
Study your website logs - your hosting provider should supply you with the tools that you need to analyse your log files in a human readable format. Awstats is a good example of such a tool. You will be able to learn where your traffic is coming from, what keywords people are searching to get to your site and how many page views and unique visitors you are getting each month.
Stay tuned for the conclusion!