As well as my photoblog I have three other photo websites which I sell images from which do a good job of promoting my work work, luckily my day job is as a search engine optimiser, so some might say that gives me an advantage over other photoblogger’s wanting to sell images as my websites do fairly well in the search engine results.

I would say that with out a decent website that works hard for you then your not getting the most out of being a photoblogger (that is if you want to sell prints)!

What a great comment and thanks for sharing your opinions with us.

I agree with your for the most part, that selling images via your photoblog is a very tough thing to do, but is it impossible? I am hoping that the community can help us with that answer. I am eternally optimistic, and really believe that the Internet has truly changed the game. The issue is making your photoblog stand out from all the others, and combining it with a conventional marketing plan (great idea about Seth’s blog).

There aren’t many professional photographers who earn a living selling prints, and I’d wager there are ZERO photobloggers in that category!

The ability to sell prints through a website has little or nothing to do with talent, quality, pricing, promotion, site demographics or site traffic – it’s really about supply & demand. There’s an extremely small market for photographic prints, and tractor-trailer-truckloads of photographic prints available to buy, from the finest museum quality to the stacks of work you see at street fairs.

A photoblogger who wants to earn real money might try thinking of his or her photoblog as a portfolio rather than a print warehouse, because the big money in photography – if that’s your goal as a photographer! – is in commercial work and licensing. There are plenty of photographers with Flickr accounts who’ve gone Pro just because an Art Director or Photo Editor found their work there and liked what they saw – and either licensed images outright or hired the photog for a commercial shoot.

So if an Art Director found your photoblog, would he or she see a body of work that shows your capabilities, your style, your tenacity, your independence, your ability to work hard and take chances? Would they want to work with you? Put yourself in the hiring person’s shoes and build your site — your on-line portfolio — accordingly.

For photobloggers who just want to sell prints, are there ways of making your printed work stand out from the billions of other digital photo prints available? I don’t know the answer to that question, but I can recommend subscribing to Seth Godin’s blog at http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/. It’s not about photography – but it is about marketing.

Keep up the great job, Brett!

I wish that we could get a few more voters in order to average it out better…we’ll have to see. I think that for the most part the traffic that photoblogs receive is from other photographers but does this mean selling images to them is impossible? I am not sure at this point.

Brett