The results of paper.li publications

As many people may know, I have several Twitter accounts. Most are broadcasting on automatic using the DynamicTweets service. They also use TwitterFeed to promote new blog posts. I'm also using Paper.Li in an experiment to see what results it gets me.

From results so far, it appears that with the @valkyrie_2 account, Zephod's Governor Watch, Zephod's Photo Gazette and Zephod's Sunday gazette are scoring well for readers. The other paper that's doing well is Zephod's Sunday Gazette.

Interestingly, Zephod's Book Gazette, Zephod's Business Gazette, Zephod's Medical Gazette, Zephod's South Carolina Gazette and Zephod's Travel Gazette all seem to be falling by the wayside in comparison.

The view from all but one of the other Twitter accounts is equally dismal. Interestingly the other accounts bar one are publishing solely photography newsletters and all but Zephod's Photo Gazette are getting very poor viewer figures. That can probably be attributed to the fact the other accounts are 100% automated and probably don't have anybody actually reading what's said. Having said that the newsletter on the other account which won't be named is getting runaway viewers yet is totally automated too. This seems paradoxical. I almost forgot I have a further account that's not named either supplying specialist Medical news. That seems to be getting readers. That account is pretty much automated though I do monitor it.

I'm not sure I can really explain it much other than the Photo Gazette just comes out as "Zephod's Gazette" rather than as it should, simply because I didn't update the Twitter text. The photography papers seem pretty much to be totally unwanted by readers. Heaven knows why. They're all automatically generated from what's available online.

Today I had an interesting conversation with somebody that asked "what do you call a business that hasn't made money in 3 years" and he answered "a hobby". That's about right. I suspect that's all photography is. It's a hobby and nobody really wants to see picture or read about it online. The die-hards all have the stuff they need and rapidly bore newcomers. I'm just astounded by the complete lack of interest in anything to do with photography - which is a very fine hobby.

Having said that - if you've noticed, this blog tends more toward the business end of photography than anything else and is more applicable to general business than anything else. Anyway, the decision with the newspapers is that the Zephod newspapers will remain as they are for the moment. If the poor readership trend continues then the poorly performing papers will be axed on Monday or Tuesday and more effort will be put into the better performing papers. Those on other accounts that are performing poorly will get total redesign to be specific to some genre or another. Both my blogs and newspapers are a hobby for me but I do like to see success with them. Failure is not an option - it just means I need to tweak the content to suit more what people are willing to read.

In actual figures, the readership is:

• 47 for one account
• 38 for one account
• For the poorly performing Zephod accounts 11, 16, 16, 19 and 14
• For the better Zephod accounts 34, 59, 20 (plus a subscriber)
• For the other accounts 11, 7, 11, 10

Although the figures are low, there is some hope for 5 newsletters even though the other 9 are probably just going to get deleted. As I have said, I'm not sure whether there's a lack of humans reading Twitter or just a complete lack of interest in photography newsletters. As an experiment, I'll change one newsletter. That was the Truth In Photography newsletter and it was aiming squarely at astrophotography, schlieren photography, shadowgraphs etc - all the really interesting and tricky stuff that should be fascinating but there were just 10 viewers. It's now aiming at model photography, boudoir photography etc. It will be interesting to see what effect if any that has on viewer numbers. I can't say I particularly like the resulting paper but I'm not the end reader. It seems a little hit and miss what works. If I have 5 hits out of 14 I reckon that's pretty good.

At the end of all this I could either pay Paper.Li a monthly fee of $9 and hope that adsense sales will make up the $9 each month or hope that it gets me more Twitter followers and hence blog viewers. At the end of the day, the crux of it all is adsense. Nothing is guaranteed to work and nothing online has ever made me any money so far so its very welcome everything thus far is free.

10 Tips to Supercharge your Photography Website - eBook Review

This is a book by photocrati.com and has been written by a collaborative of authors. The first author comments about Search Engine Optimisation which is basically balderdash. The chance of somebody looking online for a photographer is lower than the chance of the Titanic docking in New York.

The second author recommends putting a blog on a photography website because he states that people might see an amazing set of photos but questions what on earth will bring them back. That author has it about right - it doesn't matter how amazing the photos are because people simply don't care about photos. They like to see them but don't care because they see so many every day. Then the author goes on about having to create engaging content which is a totally different kettle of fish entirely. What might engage one audience might repel another. Where this author loses the plot is where he says "Every time you post something new it'll put you on people's minds and it will give them a reason to come back to your site". How is this going to happen? How are they to know you've put new content? Are people now miraculously mind readers? Why should they care what new content you put on your website? Most website viewers will look once and never again. This is more so for photography websites.

The third author recommends not trying to be all things to all people and to understand who won't ever buy anything from you. Well, that last part is easy - nobody buys photography. The last of this author's recommendations is to list the three biggest challenges relating to your photography and looking at the website to see if it identifies those things and whether it explains to the visitor how you solve them.

The fourth author has very little to say other than bleating about social media.

The fifth relies heavily on contact forms and then following up on the contacts. This doesn't really work just like social media doesn't really work. As an example, I had a webform and it generated nothing but resume spam.

The sixth author makes some sense, stating that it's important to list a location on a website in the site title for SEO purposes and on the contact page. This author is also dead keen on blogs and putting places down in blog entries. 

The seventh author believes that all the photos have to be consistent - either warm tones, cool tones or an overall style with color images. It almost makes sense. Better to have different styles on different pages so that people can choose a style. Alternatively, if you prefer to have a specific style to use as a "trademark" it's possible though I'm sure it'll cut down on potential customers.

The eighth author makes sense when he says that writing tutorials on how to do popular things well will get visitors. The problem is that is all the visitors will be looking for. This is why I ceased bothering to promote my site - I'd rather people found the articles via Google searches than through promotion. The author has it right about why people use the internet - to socialise, look at things, get their news and to track packages. Nothing there about looking for photographers.

The ninth author goes in for a long preamble and defense as to why spam is worthwhile and how somebody should go about collecting email addresses to send his spam to. Most people I know are closing their email accounts because there's never anything in them that isn't pure spam. I closed one a week or two back that was choked with spam as a result of CareerBuilder submissions.

The last author suggests being careful to keep the blog and portfolio separate. Quite what he means there is unclear as most blogs are separate pages on most websites. In fact I have never ever seen a webpage that contained a blog as well as other things. Another point well made is that the photos should all be consistent and single genres. They should also be the strongest work. Fortunately as I'm not even attempting to be a professional photographer, I can do as I please.

The book concludes with a series of tips including writing free ebooks in exchange for email addresses. That's largely how the ebooks being reviewed were obtained. Another tip was to add "now read here" in order to index further blog pages and get people to read them. Sure - I *could* do that but it's a *lot* of extra work for something that I'm doing out of personal interest.

Now the million dollar question... Can I recommend this book? Parts of it are excellent - particularly the last 3 pages. The rest of it is all stuff that I already knew and which comes over as pretty bland and unexciting. The writing style is passable. It's not a book that I can condemn nor recommend. Overall, it leave me feeling pretty meh.

Whine, moan, complain and bitch

Where would you normally expect to find people that constantly whine, moan, complain and bitch? Well, there are several places - school playgrounds, university bars, drug dens, brothels, prisons etc but what I'm talking about here is internet forums. It seems to infect camera clubs as much as internet forums. The number of times I head one of my friends complaining about the cliques and general meanness of several of the camera clubs he was a member of had me questioning him as to why he bothered going to which he said he only went to the occasional meeting when there was something interesting going on.

My own experience of camera clubs is about the same - people that like to play politics and "organise" the club. Then there are the people that like to gossip and back-stab. Sure - we get all this kind of garbage in the average workplace and the average children's playground. Who needs this in their relaxation interests?

Similarly internet forums are like this. I don't know how many I have tried over the years. They are all the same. A hardcore clique that eventually causes so much hassle to new members that new members just do not remain. My sole use for forums was to try to spread news of my blogs, even if that meant joining some rather odious forums and making a few dozen posts.

One of the popular discussions was "what would be your ideal camera" to which the answer should be "the one I have in my hand that I have paid for". It very rarely is the answer given which is bizarre. The usual thing is for somebody to post a question then for just about everybody to debate tangents off the original question. Then tangents off the tangents. Very rarely are discussions that go over about 5 posts worth reading.

If people did anything other than discuss garbage endlessly and indulge in bitching, whining, moaning and complaining then forums might be worthwhile. An old work colleague summed them up as "maximum time soak, minimum technical accuracy, maximum noise". Perhaps the whole problem is that forums are not based around photography but rather around discussion. On discussion groups, people like to talk and will talk about anything. Bring back the photography! All these forums do is drive people to drink!