To Domain or not to Domain, that is the question

My domain name "BritishPhotography.us" is expiring soon. I started that domain just about a year ago to use as a commercial website. Well, the usual thing happened - nobody visited the site so I let the paid webhosting go. The domain name is a convenient way to find my blog-hosted website. The problem is that it still costs money. I have little objection to spending $3.99 or even $4.99 on a domain name as it just makes it so much easier to tell people what the website is. When it gets to $10.99 then that ease becomes harder to sell when all it is saving is a few keystrokes for the maybe 5 people a year that would visit my site. Sure - I get lots and lots of website hits but 90% of those hits are from web bots but not from real people. Heck, I don't even get any spammers trying to post spam on my blog as comments! This is my biggest problem - whatever website I put up - nobody seems to want to visit it. It can't be boring because people would have to visit in order to discover it. Having said that, the general comments I have read is that most blogs get no visitors other than the author and are just vanity things. The same can logically be said for most websites for what is a website other than a blog with a domain name. Just for fun I will try to think of a more interesting domain name. I want something that encompasses high-speed and technical photography as a domain name that's short and snappy and doesn't cost any more than $3.99 or at a pinch, $4.99. There are simply far too many domain names that cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars and unless that recouped itself in hits on the adverts my blog carries then it would be money down the drain. So, I'm thinking hard.

Connected

I now have Twitter and Foursquare connected to my site. I might add more photos sometime. This is my special interest website more than anything and is pretty much just hanging around until I feel like doing some more high-speed or technical photography. My main photo site is here. That started as a commercial website. Well, the commercial stuff didn't work out. I have a feeling that to sell photos commercially, you have to market like hell and I just don't do marketing all that well. Sure - I can sell. My day job is as a full time Head Cashier in a store but selling photography takes a load more than sales. At the end of the day you have to persuade people they need a product they have no earthly use for, sell the heck out of prints and recognize that you will most likely only ever see clients once. It's constant promotion. Judging from the numbers of photographers I see going bust, it's hard enough for them too. I'm taking a much more pleasant route and keeping photography as an interest.

Today I read an interesting webpage about some photographer's "multiple income streams". He mentioned writing books and making videos but not anything much else. He claimed to have 3 income streams from photography but fudged what the other two were. To be quite frank, my books sell - I need to do a rewrite and come out with a 3rd edition but what I have sells and it's a great achievement.

I've become a bit lazy about taking photos because I don't happen to have a handy garage to do the high-speed work in, these days. I'm also pretty busy with my job and the courses I'm taking. It's rare that I get 2 days off together so my days off are usually a mad rush for laundry or a mad rush for cleaning the house or something similar. After work I normally just collapse into an armchair and relax to the sound of absolute silence. Thus, don't expect anything to appear quickly on my webpages.

Working on a new book

I am currently working on the first edition of High-Speed Photography - it's not Rocket Science, translating it into another language for a foreign market. There will be some minor text corrections and some minor layout changes. Otherwise it will remain fairly close to the original. This is part of an experiment to see if it works in foreign markets.