The vast majority of my income comes from Fine Art America. There are other Print on Demand (POD) sites but most do not let you control pricing by size. Most you set a percentage across the board. So, if I set say 400% to make 8x10s 30 bucks then my 40 inch prints are in the thousands and if I set the percentage at a lower rate then my 8x10s are 8 bucks. No thanks.... FAA allows the artist to price by size which works well...
The best way to move up in the internal search results on FAA is to get a proven sales record. There are basically two ways to do that on FAA. Market the snot out of yourself or what I call the Abilene theory. Marketing help you can find on the site and I am not the best at it anyway. What I do well and has worked for me is the latter.
So, if you do a search on FAA for Abilene Texas you will find 14 images. Four of those are zoo animals that could be anywhere so there are ten shots specific to Abilene. Now, do a search for the Brooklyn Bridge. Last I looked there were ~1200 images in the search result and there are probably more now. Even if you have the very best image of the BB ever shot or painted you are likely going to be lost in a sea of anonymity and never be seen. I have an image on the front page and it is seen but I still have ~1199 other images to compete with so I have yet to sell that image. Instead of the Brooklyn Bridge insert the Golden Gate Bridge, any flower, any food, Monument Valley, the Eiffel Tower or any other of a thousand saturated categories and you get the point.
Now, back to Abilene. Abilene is a city of 100 thousand plus. They want art. They NEED art. They want and need LOCAL art but there are a mere ten images to choose from so they buy one of those or move on..... I am not saying jump in your car and drive down to I 10 and head east then shoot Abilene for a week. But if you can find your own Abilenes then you can be seen and you can sell. The VAST majority of my sales, especially early on, were my Abilenes. I have a bunch of them...... Oh, and once you sell enough Abilenes your images get to the front of the search results and suddenly you can also sell stuff like the Washington Monument or farm tractors which are saturated markets but now you can be seen in those markets as well......
That is my best tip for selling on FAA. That and a large quantity of quality. (You need both) 25 images will get lost in the 2.5 million images on there. 100 will help. Thousands will help more......
