 Alright in this video I'm going to show you how to set up your smug mug to sell more licenses in print. I want to use my own smug mug account in this example so I can basically go through and show you exactly how I have my website set up. Now there's a lot of ways you can configure smug mug but I've optimized mine over the years to make more sales and I'm going to show you how to do the same. Alright so here's what my website can only look like. This is the home page and it's the feed of all the photos that I've uploaded online recently. So when I upload a photo to social media or stock sites I also upload them to my own website. So I use our photo website to do this which allows me to upload the photo once and then just automatically gets distributed to eight different sites. I'm not going to get into that in this video but if you want to see what that looks like I'll put a link up here somewhere to a video that shows you exactly how that works. Alright so I have my homepage set up this way because I get a lot of traffic to my website from my social media accounts. So if you think about it let's say someone sees a photo on Instagram or Facebook that they like and they want to purchase a printer or license. Alright well they're going to go click and go to my smug mug site. Now most likely there's probably a photo that I've posted regularly so in this case my home page they're going to see it right away there's the photo they wanted they can click on it click the buy button and they can go through and purchase the license or a print right. You know good website design is about making it really easy for people to do what they want to do especially if what they want to do is buy something so that's what I've tried to do with my home page. Alright next I have my portfolio which has my best photos. Now this is just a gallery that someone can go to if they're interested in seeing my best work and it turns out this is the second most popular page on my site after my home page. Alright next is all my photos organized by location. Now on an older version of my website I had all my photos organized by location and by subject but over the years looking at my stats I found that people were really only using the search by location and not the search by subject. The reason is I think most people when they see my photos online they may see a photo of let's say Quebec and they think you know I don't like this photo but I like the style. Let me see if this photographer has other photos of Quebec that I might be interested in buying so that's when they navigate to when they get to my site whereas if someone's looking for a photo of let's say a forest they'd probably just go to a microstock site because there'd be much more selection there. So that's why I think it happens that way but again what you'll need to do is try this out for the type of photography that you do right. I think it's good to be able to think about how people might want to see your portfolio and see your portfolio organized especially if you have a lot of photos so they can quickly get to what they want to buy. Now the last two pages here are just the about me and the contact page which are just static pages without many photos on them. Alright next I have my email sign up so anybody can go on my site enter in their email address and every time I upload a photo they'll receive an email with that photo in it. Now you might think that most people won't want an email to follow you that way they prefer to follow you on social media and that is true my social media following is way higher than my email list. I've only got about 200 people on the email list but it's about quality not quantity. A lot of the people on my email list have purchased photos from you before so they know my photography and they might want to purchase from me in the future so it's good that they're seeing my new work as it comes out. I've got editors of travel magazines on this list and I know they're looking at my email so they've purchased from the list I can see that from my stats. I also see like a lot of local designers signing up for the list so people who need to purchase a lot of stock photos about the area they're signing up so although it's not a large list I actually get a higher number of sales through this list than a lot of the other social media channels. Lastly I have another page that isn't linked for my home page that helps me get more sales when people find my site from Instagram and I'll show you how to set that up as well. Alright now let's jump into this mug mug design page and I'll show you how I set all these things up. Now there's three main sections that I'm going to go through and show you in this video. The organize tab, the customize, and then the sell tab. I'm going to start with organize and I'll work my way to the right. So the way that I have my photos organized is really simple. I've really set this up so it's really easy for me to manage. What I have is I've got one collection called Daily Photo Blog and in here I put all my photos okay so every photo that I upload to social media is in here. Every photo that I sell the stock is in here. I've got about 672 items right now. So this is where I store all those photos and I always upload them to this directory. This makes it really easy for me to manage my home page because basically it's a long feat of all my images. What I do with those images I then go in and have them organized by location. So over here you can see on the left I've got a folder with my photos by location and then in there I have some folders for the places I've been a lot like British Columbia. I live in British Columbia so I've got tons of photos from around here. So I have galleries for all the different locations. Whereas somewhere like Ontario, Quebec, or Mexico I've visited there and I have some photos from there but not as many so I've just got a gallery here. Now the way that I've got this set up is when I post my photo to the Daily Photo Blog gallery it automatically sorts them and puts them in here based on the keywords that I put in. So I actually need to set up another one here because I recently took a chip to Hawaii and I've got a number of Hawaii pictures uploaded so I want to create a gallery for Hawaii so if someone's searching for Hawaii stock photos they may find my photos and want to purchase them. So I'm just going to set that up right here in the demo. So what I'm going to do is go here and do photos by location and I'm going to create. So this time I'm going to create a gallery and I call it Hawaii. I'm going to add some keywords in the description. The way that Google works these days I'm not sure how much that actually matters but I still add them in. So here's the United States and then for the URL what I like to do is I'm going to do Hawaii travel. So you can customize that for SEO reasons. Now what I have here what I've done is I've set up some quick settings. So what you can do is you can get a folder or gallery set up the way you like it and then you can set up a quick setting to automatically apply those settings. So I have one here called standard location gallery and I'm going to set that and check it and then it sets it to what I have all my other galleries. So I'll go through and show you what those are. The main change though is that I show very large images. I'll show the original. So someone has a massive 4k screen. I'll show them a 4k image. I am not too concerned with people stealing my photos. I think if they're going to steal my photos they're not going to buy them. So it doesn't bother me and I don't try to stop that because I just don't think it's worth a while. I think it's much better to show people the great big photos and if they're going to buy them then they'll be able to see what they're getting. So I'm going to go through here. If you want to see how I've set this up it's available to everybody in the public. I have everything searchable but I've got that set up as a site setting. Again I don't have any of the photo protections on. I do allow people to share to the different social saddles or put comments. I don't really get a lot of those and every photo that I want to go into this particular gallery it's always going to be sellable. So every photo you see on my site is purchasable and I've got it set up that way. So now what I'll do is go through and create this. So now that I've set it up this has no photos in it but now if I go to the settings you're going to see a new option that you didn't before and it's called smart rules. Now I love these rules. This is by far my favorite feature in smug mug. What this allows me to do is go up and set the rules for when a photo should be entered into the collection. Now I keyword all my photos. I think keywords are so important when you want to sell your photos to stock. So I always put the location in every one of my keywords. I think most of my stock photos will probably come from people searching for a location and having a keyword in there. So I know that all those photos are going to have the keyword of Hawaii in it. So all I need to do is say include my photos with the keyword of Hawaii. Now I'll refresh this and there they are. There's all the photos. Now I'm not going to include my password collected galleries. I don't have a lot of them in there but on occasion I might upload a gallery for someone else to make it password protected and if I do have that set up then I don't want it to show up here. So I'll turn that off and I'm done. It's going to create this gallery with all the Hawaii photos and even better than that what it's going to do is if I now go today and upload a new photo from Hawaii and I still have some that I haven't uploaded yet, it's automatically going to get added to this collection. So if you set up anything in Smugmont, the thing that I would just so recommend setting up is organizing your photos automatically with the smart rules. It'll just save you so much time and so much effort in the organization portion of it. Now going back to the organize tab, the rest of my set up is pretty simple. I do have my portfolio here. This is just my best photos. Now I typically will update this manually as I take more photos and want to reorganize it but I only really do it once a year so this is pretty static. I do have some other galleries here for specific URLs. They got a lot of search traffic on my old website and I wanted them to keep getting indexed by Google so that's why I just put these here. So I've got one for British Columbia Travel Photos. That was a very powerful directory on my old site before I moved over to Smugmont. That's my old Squarespace site. Now I have another one here where it's called SouvenirPixels Instagram. Now this is an interesting one. What I've done in this one is I've got a smart rule set up where every single time I upload a photo to my photo blog it automatically puts it into this particular gallery. Now the thing with this gallery though is what I've done is I've given it a custom URL of IG. So if they go to SouvenirPixels.com.ig it'll send to this gallery and I've set up the gallery settings so that they're in the thumbnail. So you go into appearance, the gallery style with thumbnails. So when you go in when someone goes and clicks on this link now I only use this link on Instagram. So when someone clicks on my profile on Instagram they go to this specific page that has square crop photos that looks very similar to the Instagram page with all my photos in a very similar order but in on my page they can go through and click on them and purchase the photo. So this is how I basically kind of make sales from my Instagram feed coming over and I think it's really nice just to have it the same sort of mobile friendly UI because most of the people that are coming from Instagram are going to be on a mobile device. That's why I set up a page specifically for this. And then I just have some other miscellaneous pages in an app about page. So that's how I've got my photos organized very simple but again very easy to manage which is why I love Smug Mug so much. Now going back to the main page let's go take a look at the Customize. So what I'm going to do here is I'll first let's go take a look at the new site template. So the template that I'm using is called Dina or Dina. It's this one over here. I personally like it because I like white templates or just bright templates so I prefer the white background to the black background but Smug Mug does have a lot of other options for the black background as well too if you prefer that. I wanted to get one that had the bar on the left hand side so it's always showing that have just a large section for my feed so that's why I chose this one but a lot of the other ones are the same and I have customized a little bit so I basically saved my own I've called it on June 2018 which is basically when I went through and set this up. So you want any which template I'm using that's the one. Now the next thing I'm going to do is to go to content and design. So a couple cool things that I've done here as well. So a lot of these are standard items like I've got my you know name up here again this is my photo blog thing so I've got the very large images right on my front page and that's that main collection that I have. I've got my different sections down here on the side and then over here we've got the received daily photo email so what this is and all this edit here is this is just site this is just code that I took from MailChimp so what I do is I use MailChimp to send out emails every time I upload a photo and I've got MailChimp set up so that it happens automatically so what happens is when you upload a photo to smug mug there's an RSS feed which is just like an automatic feed that gets generated for the photo and that can be easily imported into MailChimp to then send out an email so when I upload a photo automatically an email gets sent out to my list which is just over 200 people and they can receive those via email and so this code here I didn't have to write this I just got this from MailChimp it was a cut and paste and put it in here so it allows me to have an email address associated to my site so that's not something that is available out of the blocks with smug mug but I just use MailChimp for it and MailChimp as long as your list is under 2000 people it's actually free so I just have a free MailChimp version to send out my emails that's a cool little thing that's set up there another thing that I've done if I look at my folders here I didn't like the way the folders looked when I first logged in and I found this here where you basically have this kind of overlay I didn't like the way the titles looked so what I did was I went and found some code CSS code that somebody else created so I'm not going to take credit for this this was created by Scott Hunter and I'll put a link down below to where he posted this code on one of the smug mug forms and I basically just took this modified it a bit and used it so I found this to look a lot nicer a little bit prettier so I used that so it's another cool thing about smug mug is that you can go in if you do know coding you can go in the background and actually do some customization I didn't do a lot because I didn't want to spend a lot of time setting this up and I really like the way most things look except for the galleries but it's something you can do another great thing is is that on the smug mug forums a lot of other people have made customizations to smug mug and they've uploaded the code for other people to use you can just go there and literally cut and paste it in so there's a lot of resources like that a lot of great photographers use smug mug and a lot of good photographers are also designers so they have the skills to write this type of code and they're happy sharing that on the web so that's something that I've done to update them at my galleries look a bit prettier now the rest of what I've done here is really just out of the box smug mug I took the template and used it for the most part as is and I like the way it looks I think it looks pretty good so I've left it that way now the next thing that I have here is the cell section so I'm going to do here is go and take a look at my price list now most of the sales that I get from the site are for for commercial licenses so let's look at those in a bit more detail so the way that I've got this set up is that for low res photos less than one megapixel hr is twelve dollars so someone wanted to purchase a photo just to upload to facebook it would cost from twelve dollars for a larger photo a four megapixel one it's a hundred dollars so someone wanted to do an online ad campaign and use the photo in a lot more places they'd probably choose that one and the original which would typically only be purchased for print is two hundred dollars now I did a little test a while ago before I was on smug mug when I was on square space and what I did was I randomly chose half my photos and I set the price to twelve dollars and I the other half of the photos I set the price to a hundred dollars and I wanted to see which would be more effective in getting sales and what I found after doing that for two years is that fifty percent of my sales came from the twelve dollar photos and fifty percent came from the hundred dollar photos so it didn't seem to really matter what the price was and I think that's because people find my photos on social media they want to purchase that photo they come to the site and it doesn't matter to them the price as much they just need that photo for a particular ad campaign or for a particular purchase and they just purchase it now if they wanted to purchase to get a lower price they would just be on shutter stock and they'd be looking for the photos there so I don't feel that I'm competing with shutter stock these are people that are looking for photos elsewhere which is why that I can justify these prices and although these are high compared to the stock sites I don't think that I would make more money on my website if I lower the prices now you can let me know what you think about that in the comments and let me know if you found differently and that's it that's how I have my set set up now obviously I didn't go through the nitty gritty details of how to set up a smug mug site in this but there's tons of different videos and much better videos by smug mug they can go through and tell you what all these different options are but what I wanted you to get out of this video was just a good understanding of how I set up my site and why I've set it up this way for the particular types of sales sales that I'm looking for all right so that's how I have everything set up on my website if you use smug mug and have any tips for how you can do things better I would love to hear them in the comments also as always if you have any other questions about how this set up or how I did these different things feel free to post the questions down in the comments below and I'll do my best to answer them as I can if you found this useful at all I'd really appreciate it if you would go down and hit the like button just let me know that making these videos is worthwhile also this entire channel is about making money selling your photos online so if that interests you go down and hit the subscribe button and turn on the notifications best of luck selling your photos online