Why You Need An Online Gallery, Even If You’re Not Selling Online
It has become increasingly popular for photographers, specialising in certain genres, to conduct in-person sales. Generally, those that conduct in-person sales specialise in work that is more one-to-one. This tends to work very well, as you are tapping into the emotion of the subject. However, there’s still a definite benefit for uploading those images to an online gallery and displaying them on your website, even if you have already generated the majority of your sales in-person.
MORE SALES POTENTIAL
If you offer an online gallery, alongside any other sales effort, you are increasing your sales potential. Generally, the only people who will or can attend the in-person viewing will be the client. These are obviously your main buyers, but there are others who could and do want those photos too. Friends, family relatives, colleagues, even the clients head office that is always looking for fillers for the newsletters. They are all also potential clients who, without an online gallery, have no introduction to your services.
ADDITIONAL PURCHASES
How many times have you decided not to buy something, to then regret the decision the next day? An online gallery will give your client the chance to make additional product purchases or add extra prints and downloads to their shopping cart by having the images available online after their face-to-face viewing.
SAVE TIME
Many photographers will sit for hours with the client going through all their images. This is great for the bigger ticket sales. However, if there isn’t a high priced item that is going to cover the costs of time, then it is often not cost-effective, and the client’s eventual purchases do not cover the time that you have spent with them. Save yourself and your client time, by letting them know that they can always have another, more in-depth look at the images once the in-person viewing is completed.
FUTURE CLIENTS
This point applies to every photographic genre but we will use a wedding as an example. Normally, when a couple announces their intention to get married, a portion of their guests are friends and family of a similar age and often at the same stage of life or “on the brink”. These guests have the potential to become your future clients. They may well have loved the way you handled the wedding day, they may even have your business card so that they can view your portfolio online, but nothing seals the deal quite like seeing stunning images of someone that they know and can relate to. Publishing your images online is a great way to push a business card in the hand of every guest.
A HUGE BOOST FOR YOUR SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION
Among other things, search engines use external actions as an indication of your website’s popularity, adjusting your page rank and search engine results positioning accordingly. You should be generating as much traffic as possible to your website. All traffic is good news. Traffic that visits lots of pages and stays around browsing for some time says really great things to the search engines. You must be giving the visitor a great experience, otherwise, the visitor would have moved on right? Showing photos from events, studio sittings, award ceremonies, weddings and all other types of work is offering content for the visitor to browse through and will keep the visitor on your website for a long time, telling great things to the search engines.