How Many Views Did You Get In Your First Month Of Faa ?

You must be careful counting views. I tweet every new image and then at least once a day - some other image I like or perhaps my whole website - every tweet brings a boat load of views - mostly from bots. But I get about 2,600 views a month. More telling would be comments or if you can weed out the bot hits from any other hits. I doubt many of the hits have anything to do with sales - I think it is searches and my email and other internet marketing. I can tell you that the comments on my work has gone up this year tremendously because I have been paying more attention to this site, the use of tag lines and key words, entering contests, etc. As I said, I tweet, I joined Houzz (but I have a bit of work to do that with), and every email I send out has a www.rdericksonfineart.com link on it - even the reply's to family and friends. I also hand out business cards that I developed and print myself like they were candy.

I know that your concern is sales I suggest you do a little research - try to find your work by searching and seeing just how effective your tag lines/key words are in locating your images. This is like a full time job and you are on commission - you gotta work it and work it - and even when all looks lost - work it some more. I worked in retail for a few years on commission - in a market that didn't often purchase what I was selling - yet I managed to win a star award from the company as well as boosted my income very well by personally being responsible for over $300,000 in sales - my co-workers were apparently satisfied with their minimum wage paychecks.

i never, ever counted or paid attention. in the first month all i did was upload. i sent something like 1200 or more images here all at once. how many are views - i have no idea. the impact you make here makes little difference. the impact you make - outside this place makes all the difference. further, being here only a month is like becoming president in a big company because you stuck your foot in the door. you won't make a big dent by being here a short time. i sold within 2 weeks of being here. i already had a presence online, it was the matter of google finding me in another place.

views don't tell much of the story. while some are convinced a ratio makes a difference. it doesn't. bot views, random views, etc - it doesn't tell you how long it will take you to get that sale.

what you want is:

1. quality
2. quantity of quality
3. keywords and descriptions so your easy to find.
4. to advertise yourself to make yourself easy to find.


---Mike Savad

right now you have 30 images, and many look the same. once people look at once image, they pretty much saw all of them. don't worry about the views, they aren't that important.


---Mike Savad

Roy,

How many images have you been able to sell ? And do you think business cards are still worth it in this generation ?

Mike,

Thanks for the pointers, I will definitely touch on the local market first !!

Shaun, I love it when people say I never count views and then say, but I got around 1,257 views in the month of...:)

The best thing to count Shaun is sales. But don't let that get you down either because I never made a sale until I was here for 2 years...and look at me now. I made so many sales that I can take my wife out to dinner at a very reputable restaurant like Wendy's. :)

anything that pushes a business is a good idea --- however --- that said, you need more than 30 things. i would start by building a portfolio. choose about 20 topics and make at least 20 images of each of those things. otherwise it's like having a menu with 4 items on it. your main goal right now is to produce nice things that people would like in their home or office - that can compare to the stuff that's on here. and you need that variety - just like any store does.


---Mike Savad

I uploaded this image last week, I hadn't pushed it out yet because my computer is in the shop. It had 11 views, then sold last night.



Sold this one to the same person: uploaded a couple months ago or something, hadn't bothered marketing it specifically, about 15 views.




Views have little to do with making a sale or not. How you get the view that sells is. And to that point I wish I knew if this one came from my AW site vs my page here on FAA, and there were better stats here, but c'est la vie.

this one had like 350 views or so, it's been here since sept 2011, today it sold.

i've had images that had 60 views and it sold. i've had stuff that had close to 3000 views - and never sold.

give a viewer a reason to go into your folder, and show them lots of things. the one above - i totally forgot i had it. it didn't have that many keywords or votes. they must have looked in the store itself.


---Mike Savad

You do NOT need a large portfolio to sell here.

http://fineartamerica.com/profiles/chrisaustin.html

http://fineartamerica.com/profiles/dave-allen.html

Personally, I believe the more subjects you cover and cover well the more likely you are to have someone find just what they want and that ~ 100 images on site is normally where I start to see sales but it is NOT a requirement. The two artists above sell and sell WELL here. Neither has a particularly large portfolio.

I am also a believer in visitor counts. Individual image views do not matte much but I consistently get a sale every 500 views and that number holds steady. (Yes, the bots and other hollow views are included in that number.)

Don't know about anyone else, but views seem to have virtually stopped in my area, unless I do the Twitter thing with a new image and the bots show-up automatically. This is the last view I had after midnight last night, and that was after doing the twitter thing posting a new image: Upper Central, Plains on 03/30/2013 at 12:38 AM.

I have had 47 different images viewed since midnight Gregory. (since it shows the count by image, I do not know if any of those were viewed more than once.)

I will say my daily count has been down this week and correspondingly, I haven't had a sale since Tuesday. I am starting to jones a bit.

thing is - if you already have a body of work that you know sells - you don't need many images. however, depending on your images you may need that variety. it also depends how you sell it and who you guide here. like that gold jesus and mary - they have 2 images and sell them all the time. however if you have few choices, and no one likes the work you present, you won't sell a bunch.


like if i went to a new place, i would choose the top sales pictures and start with those. on here i have 2100 images. on there i might have 200 because i know they sold well here. but of course then there are demographics and such of who buys what. like i have more images on redbubble, but have made more sales here in a year, then i have ever made in that other place.

---Mike Savad

"...I haven't had a sale since Tuesday. I am starting to jones a bit. "


You're not gonna have to join a 12 step program are you? lol. :)

1 st ............:)

I may....

no sale since tuesday - you pore thang. i haven't had a sale (here) since last year some time - fortunately sales on other sites keep me from feeling too dejected.

the people who say they don't pay attention - or actually don't pay attention - to their views in my opinion just have no need for external validation and probably sell enough to not really care about the view count, a lot of which is bots anyway.

I, however, obsess over view count and, like roy, tweet every new image but don't go as far as tweeting something every day. if i think a particular image would like a little boost, i will retweet from time to time. when there are only a few dozen pictures in your portfolio, perhaps an over-all view count would mean something to you, but when you expand your inventory to a couple or several hundred images, a total count does not factor in the wide spread between a few that nobody ever seems to look at and the other end where the most popular images reside - so i generally do the math to come up with views per image.

my per-image view count has been slowly but surely rising, the more i do in the way of promotion, though i admit i could be a lot more dedicated to that part of the business.

whether or not business cards are worth it - it couldn't hurt to carry a few and litter them about town, and it need not be an expensive proposition. there is card stock available that separates cleanly to make a decent looking card you can print yourself - which i have done. the card i am using at the moment is one i designed and had printed on Zazzle and bought only a hundred of for a test run. if you do go for cards i would suggest that, as an artist you design your own and feature an eye-catching example of your work.

these next two days many will do their easter stuff, whatever that is. so i don't expect too much traffic, but still hoping. i haven't had a sale since yesterday.

about the views, i never knew we had a view counter until someone mentioned he was at 50,000. when i went to check mine it was 200,000. i check the main one every now and again, today it's 550,000 but the numbers don't mean a whole lot. because not every view equaled a sale - it would be great if it did though.


---Mike Savad

just went to your portfolio and commented on one of your pictures - a nice shot of some bougainvillea which you refer to, in the description as a group of purple flowers. a lot of people will look at an image and want to know what and where it is and even why you took it - they are looking for some reason why they should think it is special - and if you don't care enough to show a little love for the image with a bit more of a description than "a group of purple flowers" they will quickly pass on to another picture - and if they are sufficiently disappointed by what you have to say about your art, they will find the portfolio of someone else who is not embarrassed to extol the virtues of their own work.

think of it as copy writing (not copyrighting) in a catalogue. people buy, not based on the picture of the item so much as the language used to describe it.

case in point: J. Peterman ... a J. Peterman catalog reads like a romance novel.

I joined FAA in 2008 which seem like from the last century I can't even remember what I had for dinner last night LOL!
In the beginning I hardly paid much attentions to the site, even I sold three canvas prints on the fifth day. I figured it was just beginner's luck and I was not getting rich with the sale. I think it took me a year to realized there was the a view counter.
Good Luck!