Painting Reproduction Site Sees SEO as Key to Growth
Brandon Fuhrmann always knew he wanted to make his living through the Web.
As a high school student in the mid-1990s, he and a friend founded Cncentral.com, a site to help people find their way around the then-novel concept of the Internet.
He eventually had to abandon that venture because it took up too much time. Then, after graduating from George Washington University in 2003 he traveled to Europe and became intrigued with art masterworks at places like the Louvre and Musee d’Orsay in Paris and the Prado in Madrid.
“From there I went home and the idea kind of hit me,” he says.
In the meantime, he worked at several jobs including stints at Disney World, the U.S. Congress, and Sony Music. But last August, Fuhrmann returned to Europe and the next month co-founded Ownapainting.com, a Web site that offers hand painted reproductions of famous paintings for as little as $120 apiece.
Fuhrmann is promoting the East Hanover, NJ-based company through a combination of search engine marketing and pay-per-click advertising. He has dabbled with postcards, but found that paper media adds an extra step to the process, since users will eventually have to come to the site anyway.
“I’m focusing all my efforts online right now,” he says.
Though Fuhrmann was loath to disclose which words work best for his company in search, a spot check this week with the keywords “oil painting reproductions” showed Ownapainting.com ranking at number six on Google and number nine on Yahoo in unpaid listings.
At the same time, he says, “pay per click has been more of a trial and error in terms of what’s working and what’s not working.”
Fuhrmann, who’s financing the venture pretty much on his own, isn’t making any revenue projections for this site just yet but in some respects wishes things might have turned out differently at cncentral.com which lasted until about 1999.
“We had some great positions back on Yahoo — the fourth one down between the BBC and CNN,” he recalls. “We were getting hundreds of hits a day but there was nobody on the Internet then.”
