Who Is Looking At Our Work

Sharon, if you put - Bots - into the Search Discussions box (above) you will get lots and lots of information on bots including these. But you could also get some private visitors from these places, too!

Thank you... I'll take it as a good thang !

The stats mean nothing at all here. They are maybe as high as 85% bots, aka as spiders or web crawlers.

Search bots or web crawlers or spiders using google. You can search it here on FAA too, but you will get way to much noise vs a google search.

Every page on the entire Internet has these same kinds of bots or crawlers on them. FAA is the only place I have ever seen that reports them as views.

There is NO human element to the bot so they is never going to be sales to a bot.

Here is one definition of a Web Crawler (bot)

A Web crawler is an Internet bot which systematically browses the World Wide Web, typically for the purpose of Web indexing. A Web crawler may also be called a Web spider,[1] an ant, an automatic indexer,[2] or (in the FOAF software context) a Web scutter.[3]

Web search engines and some other sites use Web crawling or spidering software to update their web content or indexes of others sites' web content. Web crawlers can copy all the pages they visit for later processing by a search engine which indexes the downloaded pages so the users can search much more efficiently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_crawler

So Floyd are you saying bots are a good thing? I have wondered on this as I see mostly bots myself.

My most common visitor is this one,...Moscow - Russian Federation,....

Sound familiar to anyone,....or is the KBG watching me ?????

Bots are the librarians of the internet. They sift and sort and update information and links and report what they find to places like search engines.

There are also less good bots, that crawl around and do things like collect email addresses that are easy to find or look for other information to exploit. There's nothing to be done about them, however - both good and bad they're a part of the internet.

I would guess most of the crawlers that we see here are the good guys. This site is incredibly well indexed. That's good for us. :)

KBG is watching you....

:)

Think of visitors as hits...it's not WHO but WHAT

bots are the bees of the internet world. without them, you would not show up in searches.

if you just started to advertise - it may be a while longer before you get sales. however you have very few keywords and the descriptions are very light. you want to be verbose and tell us and the bots what the image is about. use lots of keywords. each image needs to be advertised well.

graphic wise, without critiquing or sounding like i am - the women section, many of those images look enlarged, they aren't sharp up close. your landscapes don't tell us where you shot it, in the keywords. i'd drop the copyright death threat in the bios, and the link out to pinterest. the whole idea of pinterest is to get people in here - not the other way around. once out of your site, they won't be coming back.


it takes a long time to advertise and get known. get more keywords and descriptions, they work so you don't have to work as hard.

quality wise, i saw an egret with a halftone pattern on it.. not sure why it looks like it was scanned from a magazine. some of them your signature is too large, buyers may be turned off because of that.

---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

Bot are merely taking inventory of the Internet. I don't see them as good or bad in that sense. In the sense that they distort the views here, I see them as a bad thing. We don't need to know how many bots are indexing FAA any more then we need to know how many bots are indexing any of the other dozens or hundreds of pages we us every day.

Nothing on the internet is going to show up in any search anywhere unless one or more bots find it first. So they are good in that sense. Are they good specifically germane to our artwork on on FFA? No more so then every single image on the net or every single line of text on the Internet.

Bot index everything, the good, the bad and the ugly. There is no priority to the bots. In reality they are neither good or bad. They are just part of the infrastructure of the the Internet. It like saying the wires the data flow through are a good thing.

They have been around since the first search engines. The are not going to give you anymore of an advantage then they do the other trillions of images on the internet.

We should not be concerned about bots. Like I said, every single page on the net has bots crawling all lover them. Why they are reported here in our views is beyond me. They skew the data and make it worthless, imho.

Thanks Mike.. I'll take the egret comment as a good critique... it is how I edited it and I'm glad it looks like it came out of a magazine ! :) I will work on descriptions. I was thinking that basics is better.. I don't tend to read long descriptions.. but I guess others do. Mike... every single landscape tells exactly where the picture was taken. Not sure what more I can say about where it is.

but i don't think it will print that way, and i don't know how many buyers want an image that looks like it was scanned from a magazine - when they can do that themselves.

the descriptions don't have to be long, they should be a few sentences long. tell us about the location, what we are looking at. it should be more than - this is a photograph of this location. tell us a little bit of history, or why you like it etc. these are all free keywords, but it tells the buyer something about it. the landscapes have a brief outline of the location. the keywords a few images didn't mention the state. and most only had like 5 words.


for example: mountain, mt. adams, landscape

those are the only words your using to find you with. no location, town, state, etc. no sayings about this mountain, there isn't enough telling us what we are looking at. and only one of those words are helpful and that's the mt adams thing... however anyone looking for mount adams won't find you. and so on.


---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

You have to make your market.

You should not be worried about the views. Views do not drive sales.

We had this discussion in another thread. The top 25% of my sales are in the bottom 25% of my views. A few of my images that have sold that are towards the top of my views are there because I have advertised them more often. I am driving the views via the way I advertise. The views are not driving my sales.

Depending on how you advertise may mean that it will take a while for an image to sell. If you advertise properly, an image is just as likely to sell in the first week. The idea that an image has to sit on the net for a while is not one I agree with. I have sold new images quite often simply because I promoted those images in effective ad campaigns.

If you are less aggressive with your advertising then, yes it will take longer for it to sell simply because it will be seen by less people.


This is a numbers game, nothing more or less. The more people that see you image the more apt it is to sell.

If you put up an image and it takes six months for 1000 people to sell it, it is less likely to sell then if you put up the same image and 10,000 people see in in the first six days. A lot of this is just common sense.

How long an image sits on the net has nothing to do with when it will sell. It is how many people that see it and if and when the right person sees it, likes it and buys it.

Once again I suggest to anyone that wants to sell their art, they should get at least a basic, education on marketing and selling.


Here is another tip. People are always looking for new stuff, the latest and the greatest.

On eBay they allow you as the shopper to sort on "newly listed". The latest stuff all sellers, in any category, have added. When I am adding art work to eBay it is not unusual to sell and item with in the first day and I have on occasion sold an item with in the first few minutes of having listed it to eBay.

They also allow that here on FAA, but it is not as easy to find that sort feature as it is on eBay.

Thanks Mike.. I've changed all the landscapes.. and will work on being a bit more verbose. I've ordered two giclee of my egrets and I will see how they print.

"You have to make your market.'

This absolutely 100% true.

You can just stick in the greatest keyword, the greatest descriptions and do what ever you can to maximize search ranking and then sit back and watch the sales roll in. That is just flat not going to work. Not unless you already have a big name with a big following.


You create you own market by offering with people want they want to buy and then getting seen by as many people as possible as fast as possible. Not sitting around and waiting for someone to stumble on it on a Google search or an FAA search. And even less likely, found in one of the FAA groups or contests.

I probably have more people stealing avocados off my tree any given day then there are buyers shopping in the groups or contests.

Sharon,

Echoing Floyd's advice on learning some marketing and sales stuff.

YouTube Hugh MacFarlane. His videos are between 3 and 5 minutes. Take in one to two dozen of them.

They will begin the process of you understanding or framing how you see any communications with anyone
else towards selling. Everyone is a potential customer, but only after time and some what is called touch
will people buy.

Marketing is its own paradigm. It did not come naturally to me. I need to train in it.

If you can get 10k people to see an image within the first six days that of course works better. But in the meantime
comprehending how to communicate, market, and receive potential buyers would help. It would give you more confidence.
I know it has given me more confidence and a better understanding of what is going on.

Dave

Good points Dave.

This goes back to your Twitter and the 19K followers vs 200 quality prospects.

I would trade the 200 for 19K in a heart beat because I know there is going to be more then 200 quality followers in that 19K and it does not cost me anything more to tweet to them then the 200. All I have to do is weed out those quality prospects.

I get what Floyd means when he says not to be worried about views. However, you only have 13,300+ views in five years here. I have 75,000+/- in three ad there are folks with many more than me in less time. A lot of views regenerated by interaction on social media, mores Twitter for me. (Clarification: bots from Twitter, real people on Facebook. And on FB, I've learned that while folks may not click on each image, if they like your work, they will remember it and look it up later.) You say you just started June 1 getting more serious on social media. That's not a long time in the grand scheme of things. Keep working at it and as mentioned, good descriptions and keywords are very important. Remember to put locations in as people would refer to it. I know my location keywords are working when someone hits a few images of the places they are at.

Oh, and there are real people in the "bot cities" too. So, to close, views ca tell you some rings, but maybe not the thole story. Don't dwell on them, but sometimes they can help you know you are on the right path.

Edit to Add -- Your Musican Gallery might as well as set to private. At least the ones i looked at had no tags at all and nothing in the description to identify the folks by and large. I have shot some local to me musicians and always put their name, band name and where they're playing. One band changed the name just before I shot them and I put both in. I've always felt my best bet with these shots would be that the band or the management would want the shots, so unless they get more famous, there may not be a huge demand for them, but my feeling is they add to my portfolio.