A Question most Web Site Owners must ask

A Question most Web Site Owners must ask
Are other sites with similar products selling?
I can't speak for other sites but I will speak about ours. Our web site was developed to sell high resolution photographs of Florida subjects, as well as from other areas. If you read my other article about using free web hosting you will understand some of the problems we started with. We do sell photographs locally, but we didn't know how well they would sell on the internet. So our goal was to develop a web site as inexpensively as possible and promote it as inexpensively as possible.
Of course with the current economy as it is, I guess it wouldn't be the right time to expect sales to be booming, besides not knowing how well our product would sell via a web site. So I promoted our web site every way that I know of that was free. As I said in other articles I've written, the big question is how I get more hits on my web site. Well I'm still asking that same question. I even wrote to everyone on my e-mail list to promote our site with those on their e-mail list and ask them to do the same, but that didn't get us any more hits either. I didn't have a way for potential customers that did view our site to purchase a photo directly while on the site, instead they had to e-mail me to order and pay and close a sale. Now I put Pay Pal carts on my site, but it's too early to tell how that's going to pay off. Again as I have written in other articles I have found ways to improve the acceptability of our site, but it's too early to tell if that will improve on the hits or sales. I continuously change to photos of a different subject, even artistically rendered some of the photos without any significant results, yet.
The one thing we have going in our favor is that we're not in a hurry to make money on our site. We're doing it to build a small business for retirement. As I learn more as to how best to promote the site, and if the economy improves and if we sell some of our product through the web site then I will consider using an affiliate to generate sales and or some other means of paid advertising. Our site has only been up for about five months with considerable changes and learning happening during these five months so I'm not really disappointed to a point where I'll give up. As I said were doing this for the long term and are not expecting immediate results.
My final words, we have had about 700 hits over the past five months and no sales. So you are not alone, just stick to it. If there are any gurus out there with suggestions, I'm sure that there are a lot of us out there that would appreciate them.

Determined
Paul L. Viverito http://www.lindasfloridaphotos.com