A Blog Experiment To Bring In More Traffic...and Customers.

A blog experiment to bring in more traffic...and customers for my funny animal photos (this traffic photo is from rush hour traffic in Beijing).

A Blog For Funny Animal Pictures
In my never-ending quest to garner traffic, and clients, for my funny animal photos (and all the various imprinted merchandise, prints and so forth that go along with that work), I am undertaking an experiment. I have started a new blog oriented for people looking for the humorous animal and pet pictures I do for my "Animal Antics" collection. Unlike this photography blog, the entries are brief, only a couple of sentences to go with the pix , and the text is not about the photography business. The blog is simply an attempt to help people find what they are looking for.if they are searching for funny animal pictures.

Google, Indexing and Pet Lovers
I have noticed that Google indexes my blog very quickly, usually within minutes. With my web site it can take months for a page to be indexed. This new blog is an attempt to both speed up the process and more precisely target the audience of pet lovers and bored business people looking for humor and killing time on their computers.

Web Sites, Blogs, and Showcasing Photos
I don't believe it is a good idea to spread your efforts over a number of sites and/or blogs, but in this case I want to keep the new effort separated from my existing web site and photo blog so that I can clearly see if the new blog, that simply showcases funny photos, will produce the desired results. Creating a blog is so ridiculously easy these days, what the heck!

Time, Top Traffic Sites and Web Success
Time is such an important ingredient in web (SEO) success that I am reasonably sure I won't have much to report back soon (all of the top traffic sites that I have investigated have been around for quite a lengthy period of time). But when I do I will share that information here. Stay tuned.

Penetrating The Consumer Market For Photography

Turbulence, Change And Pictures As Products
In this crazy time of turbulence and change in the photography world, I think it is extremely important to keep an eye on, and perhaps a toe in, a variety of markets. One market that the Internet seems to have opened up to individual photographers, at least on the surface anyway, is the market made up of consumers, people who want to buy pictures as products. I define that as everything from fine art prints to anything with a picture printed on it such as coffee mugs, greeting cards, mouse pads, calendars and so forth.

Cats, Dogs and CafePress.com
What I have found so far is that it is not necessarily an easy market to penetrate. With my collection of “Animal Antics” images, photos of cats, dogs and other animals in anthropomorphic poses and situations, I thought the process would be simple. Just put my images up on CaféPress.com and rake in the sales. Why is it that things so seldom work out as planned?

Cats, Dogs And Coffee Mugs
The first thing I misjudged was how much work it is to put pictures up on sites such as CafePress. A funny picture of a cat that works really well on a mouse pad invariably doesn’t fit well on a coffee mug. A photo that fits on a coffee mug probably isn’t going to fit too well on a journal. You get the picture. Not only that, but you have all kinds of products that you have to decide if you want to include. Things like “Flip Minos” and dog bowls. Then you have items like T-shirts and sweatshirts that aren’t going to print detail well. Is it better to include every product you can, or to limit your selection to products that the images actually work well on? I decided that the latter is better, except that what I have actually done is the former. I have all kinds of products, mugs, T-shirts, funny golf shirts, and the like, that don’t work particularly well with my images. I keep meaning to fix that…but, well, you know…. Decisions, decisions!

Key Words, Tagging And Traffic
Then, if you go to all that trouble, you may find, like I did, that after three or four months you have had six visitors and no sales. Does that sound like fun or what! To drive any kind of measurable traffic to your CaféPress Store front requires a ton of key words, tagging and promotion efforts. That isn’t to say it can’t be done. I am experiencing a slow but steady growth in sales. Heck, just yesterday we sold four T-shirts and made $18.00. But it does take a huge investment in time and energy. Will it pay off for me? I think it will and so I continue….

Time, Effort And Photographic Success
But back to the point of this blog. To succeed in this market will require having photography that is suited to the market, whether it is a collection of beautiful landscapes, cute kittens, or breath-taking flower arrangements…the images have to appeal to a broad group of buyers. You will need to put the time and effort into all the work from SEO to uploading images…it is up to you to bring the customers in. That doesn’t happen automatically. And, as I pointed out in a previous blog (Bill, link here to the blog http://www.johnlund.com/2009/11/passion-perseverance-and-visualization.html), you need patience and perseverance. Photographic success takes time…and an effort like this can take a LOT of time.