My efforts to sell our photographs online will only be successful to the extent I can drive traffic to site(s) where I have them for sale. There is no way I can build a site that will compete successfully against the big boys for a term like "Stock Photo".
I might be able to develop an adwords Pay Per Click (PPC) program. I have never actually tried that but from what I read it is not as easy as it sounds. It is apparently quite easy to loose more than you expected if you make a mistake in how you set up a campaign. In any case, it's to much work. Any system that includes daily budgets and sales tracking requires more continuous effort than I am interested in.
Search engines like keyword phrase domains with unique content appropriate to the keywords. These sites will rank well for the keyword with a few pages of content and a couple of links. I have done some keyword research (the Google keyword tool is your friend) and find that a significant number of people are searching for particular types of photos. For example, "Forest Pictures". New Mexico, where I live has nice variety of forests so I can get those kind of pictures.
Today I built out the royalty free forest pictures site using our custom site building code and loaded it with some of our forest pictures. I always learn things doing this. In this case I found I have a really nice collection of Ponderosa Pine forest related pictures but very little about the Pinon & Juniper. I will gradually add more pictures as time allows. What I have published now is enough to get the site indexed and reward visitors with some pretty pictures to look at.
I use Google's paid site search feature to connect my many related sites. With site search I can make a list of all the sites I want included in search results and limited the results to only those sites. So, on the site I tell visitors that if they like my pictures they should try entering some terms in the search box to see if I have others they might be interested in.
I was surprised and pleased to discover the PayPal shopping cart code apparently sets a cookie that stays with the visitor. They can click an Add To Cart button on one of my sites, visit one or more of my other sites and Add Items. All there selections will show in the cart when they are ready to check out. It really makes a very nice system.
My thought is that I get the benefits of the long tail key phrase searches by spreading my products across many domains but buyers can find my products using the familiar Google search tool with no more effort than would be required to move around on a large site.
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