There’s more than a few enthusiastic photographers that seek to set up a website that not only looks great, but is also a showcase of one’s most choice pictures, supported by a good dose of fascinating content. And while you’re at it, remember to make the selling photos online process easy for anyone who wishes to purchase your images… However, when it comes to the finer details there’s an abundance of choices you have to make…

Do you host your own photo gallery or folio on your own site (with a payment facility and download function), or do you ‘outsource’ all the folio, payment and download facilities offsite?

A simple example of an online photo lab (which includes prints, posters and personalized gifts) is SmugMug.

But no matter what, things come down to visitors. We can call this web traffic, or just ‘traffic’ if you like.

Even if you have the most beautiful, interesting and wonderful photographic website in the world, if no one comes along to visit your site, you’ll stay unknown and your photo business will not evolve in the direction I’m sure you want it to.

So you need traffic (visitors), as much as possible, but even more importantly, you need the ideal visitor. The ideal visitor is the person who is looking for information and perhaps images that are in tune or closely related to the type of photography that you take.

But why do you need visitors to your site? This comes down to your own goals and vision picture you have for your photo business. You just might want to sell more photos. You might want to grow a newsletter or e-zine list, develop your brand awareness, or get people to visit your recommendations or affiliate products…

Or you may wish to get feedback on your work and ideas, offer screensavers or downloads, offer digital products of your work, showcase your best pictures for clients, and so on.

Or you might even want to just simply inform and entertain with what you do best. Or maybe set up a portable photo business that just runs quietly in the background… (See how I do this with my Selling Photos Online Toolkit.

A good savvy photo business will have most, if not all, of these above aims for a website. There’s nothing quite like multiple streams of income… Of course once you do have a growing, regular line of traffic happily visiting your website you should be able to start looking at the bigger potential of automating things a little…

Selling more photos and doing less work sounds about right too. Watching as the passive income downloads itself into your account is a nice ideal to hold on to.

However it’s more than likely that you have only developed a small number of these website options above. That’s okay too, the key is to start with what you have and with the budget you allow for it.

One of the most common problems I’ve seen is photographers who create a website that doesn’t really provide ‘information the visitor is looking for.’ Or a website that sits alone in cyberspace with no one to visit it.

With 50 million (plus!) websites out there you do need to get it right if you want good regular traffic, sales and to let the search engines at least find you.

And how do you do it right? Well… you can write articles like this, link to other websites that relate to your theme, send out press releases or create simple information products…

Granted, there’s always some serious time and effort involved in this path… but just remember: you’re fascinating and expressing yourself is a good business to be in.

So, stay enthusiastic… explore the urge to learn a little ‘online stuff,’ have a good idea of what you want to talk about, and get hungry to develop your own fascination factor with a website that reveals your unique perspective about selling photos online. You can do it.

Martin Hurley writes a weekly/occasional article for The Corner Blog. Martin, a photographer, author and photography business teacher, teaches amateur photographers how to turn their hobby and passion into a recurring, passive income. Learn how to earn money from your photos and photo products by checking out his Digital Photo Toolkit.