Displaying prints in cafes

[mokka]

I have a website where I'm trying to sell prints and solicit commissioned photo-shoots, however despite a stead stream of 10-15 people per week since opening 16 months ago, I've only been able to sell one print, and am yet to get a commission from the site. I did get one commission from advertising on Gumtree but now they've started charging quite a steep fee for commercial adverts with no guarantees that avenue seems closed.

I've decided the best way to get people who might be interested in buying prints to my site is asking cafes to display framed prints in my home town, which gets quite a lot of tourists. I've seen this done before, where the photographer gets free advertising and the cafe gets free wall decor and it seems like quite a good deal all round, but I wanted to know whether anyone else had done a simiar thing.

In particular I wanted to know whether people found it was an effective way of increasing sales, and what legal issues people had in terms of writing a contract and licence to use with the cafe and what sort of guarantees they might expect from you.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

[bcummings88]

I know that in Portland, OR many cafes will put your artwork/photography up for free with a nice little price tag underneath it. Of course, the cafe will take a cut of profit and will know how low you are willing to go price wise to negotiate, if needed. Why not see if they will put up your photography with a price tag and a few business cards on the counter? Let them know that they will get a cut of any profit. Seems to be a good way to promote and make a buck.

And if it is a tourist town, are there no artsy shops? Artsy consignment shops are a good way to get exposed to the tourists and network with other artists in your area.

I have a few photographs hanging in a cafe in Portland. I've sold one so far. It's also nice to go in for coffee and see your photographs on the wall.

[ShantDotMe]

10-15 ppl / week is way too few!! are you sure you have your site done properly? I do have a photo blog that I did launch less than a year ago & I do get between 2500-3500 visits in one month!

[mokka]

Originally Posted by bcummings88

I know that in Portland, OR many cafes will put your artwork/photography up for free with a nice little price tag underneath it. Of course, the cafe will take a cut of profit and will know how low you are willing to go price wise to negotiate, if needed. Why not see if they will put up your photography with a price tag and a few business cards on the counter? Let them know that they will get a cut of any profit. Seems to be a good way to promote and make a buck.

And if it is a tourist town, are there no artsy shops? Artsy consignment shops are a good way to get exposed to the tourists and network with other artists in your area.

I have a few photographs hanging in a cafe in Portland. I've sold one so far. It's also nice to go in for coffee and see your photographs on the wall.

Not really any artsy shops... it's only been attracting tourists for a few years, think industrial town in an area of natural beauty that's tidied itself up a bit.

I was thinking that I might have the upper hand in negotiations seeing as, just looking around town, the idea of displaying work in cafes hasn't really caught on, so I don't think the cafe owners might have any idea of how low I might go. I was actually thinking they might just be happy that they didn't have to pay to get framed prints on their walls. Then I was going to ask that in return for the loan of the print, they put a poster near it advertising the print and also my website if the person would like to see other prints in other sizes.

I thought it was unlikely that someone who had gone in for a cup of coffee would come out with a print as it's not a particularly wealthy town and the tourists aren't particularly wealthy either, so they probably wouldn't impulse-buy as much, but they might decide to have look at the website and buy a print some time afterwards.

[mokka]

Originally Posted by ShantDotMe

10-15 ppl / week is way too few!! are you sure you have your site done properly? I do have a photo blog that I did launch less than a year ago & I do get between 2500-3500 visits in one month!

Unfortunately none of my attempts to increase visitors have been working. I have no money to spend on 'real' marketing. I only just scraped enough to renew my subscription with clikpic (where the site is hosted) this year.

I try to advertise on facebook where I have a profile for my site, unfortunately this is not allowed by facebook, and I took the advice of another photographer who has a profile for his business, that I should only send friend requests to people who know me, and be wary how much I publicise it as eventually someone will consider it as spam and report it to facebook.

I also try and advertise on forums discussing things relevant to the subjects of photographs I'm selling, usually local interest forums, while these get a few more visitors in the short-term the visitors aren't coming back, and often I find myself banned from the forums for spamming. I get a few more visitors from photography forums such as this one but then curious fellow photographers aren't really potential customers.

[11A Fotografie]

Originally Posted by ShantDotMe

10-15 ppl / week is way too few!! are you sure you have your site done properly? I do have a photo blog that I did launch less than a year ago & I do get between 2500-3500 visits in one month!

Are those visits or visitors? Since someone can come back for many times in a month, so that will rise your visits, but it's only one visitor.
I always had around 150 single visitors on my website, but that this month I got 370, because 2 websites promoted my website HUGH because I made photos on their swimming tournament.
I think a big part from your website visitors have to come from other websites, so maybe you can go work together with all kind of shops in your town.
Offer them something in return for some publicity, or get together a big competition or something.
Great way to get your name on the market on the place where your market is!

P.s. No offense, but tourist probably aren't your costumers, since they only visit for a while and than leave and most of the times live pretty far away...

[ShantDotMe]

Originally Posted by mokka

Unfortunately none of my attempts to increase visitors have been working. I have no money to spend on 'real' marketing. I only just scraped enough to renew my subscription with clikpic (where the site is hosted) this year.

I try to advertise on facebook where I have a profile for my site, unfortunately this is not allowed by facebook, and I took the advice of another photographer who has a profile for his business, that I should only send friend requests to people who know me, and be wary how much I publicise it as eventually someone will consider it as spam and report it to facebook.

I also try and advertise on forums discussing things relevant to the subjects of photographs I'm selling, usually local interest forums, while these get a few more visitors in the short-term the visitors aren't coming back, and often I find myself banned from the forums for spamming. I get a few more visitors from photography forums such as this one but then curious fellow photographers aren't really potential customers.

You should be very careful, there is a very tiny margin between the advertise & spamming. and spamming will surely hurt you more than any good it might do.

You won't need a big budget to get good number of visitors & facebook is a good place to start doing so. Can you share your sites address?

[ShantDotMe]

Originally Posted by 11A Fotografie

Are those visits or visitors? Since someone can come back for many times in a month, so that will rise your visits, but it's only one visitor.
I always had around 150 single visitors on my website, but that this month I got 370, because 2 websites promoted my website HUGH because I made photos on their swimming tournament.
I think a big part from your website visitors have to come from other websites, so maybe you can go work together with all kind of shops in your town.
Offer them something in return for some publicity, or get together a big competition or something.
Great way to get your name on the market on the place where your market is!

P.s. No offense, but tourist probably aren't your costumers, since they only visit for a while and than leave and most of the times live pretty far away...

As said those are visits, the Unique visitors is anywhere between 1250 to 2000 for the last 3-4 months.

As for the "big part" of the visitors, they won't come from other sites or forums, they will come from search engines!! This is where search engine optimization for the site is very very important!

I do agree on the competition/giveaway thing, it helps... a lot!

[mokka]

Originally Posted by ShantDotMe

You should be very careful, there is a very tiny margin between the advertise & spamming. and spamming will surely hurt you more than any good it might do.

You won't need a big budget to get good number of visitors & facebook is a good place to start doing so. Can you share your sites address?

Yeah I try to stay relevant to the topic being discussed. For example posting a link to my website along with some photographs on photography threads for forums. The fact that once you get to my site there are prints for sale being incidental. However some webmasters take a zero-tolerance approach to anyone posting links that they might somehow make money from.

Yeah I do share my site address on facebook, but as mentioned the same problems exist there, you can't really pursue an 'aggressive' marketing strategy, you just have to hope that word of mouth spreads and you get a few more visitors on the back of it.

About half of my visits are from search engines, and I use google analytics so I can see what keywords people are using to find my site. If you type in my site's name you get it at #1 and there are a few other keywords that are working but generally my site doesn't rank highly.

Short of adding relevant keywords (and I add stacks for every page on my site) I don't know how to get higher up the search rankings, and for some reason Google doesn't pick up the images on my site, even though they are just jpegs in plain html.

Sorry this has turned from a discussion on the merits of advertising in cafes to a discussion on how to get more visitors to my site :|

[slattfri]

Thanks so much for posting this question.... I was thinking of displaying my work at some local places and the info on this particular forum has helped. I would love to figure out how to market myeslf on the cheap..... that's the hardest part of the business.