NEW YORK PHOTO BLOG / DAVE BECKERMAN

my never ending list of revenue generators.

I really am working on about ten things at once.  What happened was that after putting a lot of work into Zazzle over the years (without much of a payout)  I thought, I might as well take a look at RedBubble.com.

Here’s the start of my RedBubble.com/BeckermanPhoto

Before I knew it I was setting up another vendor with my wares.
After all, I already had all the high resolution images from my digital download work – and frankly RedBubble made it much simpler to setup new products.  The look is better (much less cluttered) than Zazzle – and before you knew it I was signed up and adding images.
So once again – this is not what I planned to be doing with the day, but I can’t see any harm in giving another one of these markets a chance.

I didn’t close the Zazzle account.  Let it continue to give me a couple of hundred a year.  In the meantime I’ll continue to explore and add my work to RedBubble (which I’ve heard good things about) mostly.

*CONTEST*
WINNER: Choose any 5 files offered for download in the store: www.BeckermanPhoto.com for downloading. That’s enough to redecorate your living room if you have one.

*TO ENTER:*
Add yourself to my email list (if you’re not on it already) by this Friday.
http://www.beckermanphoto.com/blog/uncle-dave-wants-you/

I will use a random number generator to pick the winner.

The winner will be notified by email on Saturday.

* * *

Obviously I’ve been working like a nut on the mailing list.  Basically pulling names and emails from customers that paid with Paypal and adding them to the MadMimi lists.  I didn’t always use Paypal so I can’t go back too far.  I began using it 2005.  So, the list which is 99% customers will be about 1000 emails once I put in the 2005 customers.

So that it sort of interesting.  Since 2005 I have roughly 1000 customers.  Don’t know if that’s good or bad.  I know some transactions were by check or cash and those aren’t included so it could be 10% more than that. And so I have put up the contest to get a few more… hmmm… and that’s right, I forgot.  I also had another 30 entries yesterday from the Uncle Dave Wants You Post which Lester says that nobody even remembers anymore… or at least no one in the demographic that I want.

I told him that it’s lucky I didn’t go with my original slogan: Remember the Maine.

* * *

It’s true though.  I remember reading a short book about artists and business in ’99 before I began this venture.  And the upshot of the book was that you should expect to spend at least 75% of your time with business and marketing and if you were lucky 25% creating things.

That has proved to be very true.  Over the last three months, and this I remember because it was part of my new years resolution, that I’ve spent 95% of my time marketing and 5% if that taking pictures.  Basically what changed over the years was that a) there was a huge recession which effected the housing industry as well as new buildings going up.  A good part of my income had come from selling to new hotels, corporate buildings, condos etc.  So I don’t know when that dip began, I felt that for sure.

And I think that the other shoe to drop was that people actually didn’t / don’t think about purchasing physical prints as much as they used to.  What?  Yeah.  Like with books and music, the idea of “owning” a physical print is simply not the first thing that comes to people’s minds.  The first thing they think of is: that would look good on my iPhone, or my i-whatever.

I’ve written about this phenomena before – how I had lunch with some 20-somethings and had spent the time talking about my business with both of them looking at me sort of wide-eyed and then after talking about putting prints into packages and shipping them etc. I was asked, Do you mean that you actually print them out and ship them to people.

So, there was culture shock for all of us.  It’s part of what started me along the lines of improving and working on the digital delivery side of the business.

And of course it is like a guy in a rowboat with a bunch of holes in it – sort of a cartoon where you put your finger in one hole and your big toe in another and soon you are stretched pretty thin.  You work on the digital download side, and fall behind getting prints out (those orders continue to come in).  And you get into marketing and you don’t finish up the digital download stuff.

And then there are so many other ideas in the hopper that you may never get to:

- Sending a small amount of sample work and resume to art buyers

- Doing that eBook you’ve wanted to get to for the last few years

- Doing the day trip thing again.  A lot of milage from that the last go-round.

And I could go on and on…

Well can’t you get an intern?  I could but where would I start?  Today, I’m spending my time adding new digital downloads.  How complex is that?  Well, you’ve got to know a little bit of WordPress, PHP, Lightroom, Photoshop, Dreamweaver… I probably left out something.  In other words you need to have programming and photography experience.

Well what about packaging?

Besides the fact that there’s barely room, and that an intern isn’t going to stay around very long just packaging, there’s the issue with updating stuff on the computer, and giving them access to my Paypal account, and to just about every other secure thing on the computer and… Nah… I can’t see that working.

And that’s what happens for just about each chore that comes to mind.  And don’t think that I’m afraid to delegate.  When I was in business – that was my specialty.  Really.  Nothing I’d love more than to be able to delegate this work.  But it isn’t going to work out.

Then there was the Fotomoto experience where I did spend five months outsourcing printing.  That turned out badly because a) I didn’t have control over the final product before it went to the customer and b) I was paying someone who had to make their own profit and my customer wasn’t going to pay that added cost, esp. since I wasn’t even printing the stuff anymore.

The only solution that I haven’t tried is the idea of “going big.”  What I mean by that is that several photographers / programmers pool their strengths.  You begin a cooperative where the three amigos can show their work.  And all three use a similar setup for their sites so that any one of them can maintain the others site.

Photographers / programmers working together for a common goal.  I wonder when that was last tried.

You wake up one day, after selling your wares for years and it strikes you that you are in the retail business.  It’s not exactly how you thought of yourself when you began.  Back then you thought you were a photographer.  Or a painter.  Perhaps an artist.

And as I say, you may be all those things, but after spending the past three months doing marketing, I have to admit that my main business right now is selling things.  It’s something that even after all this time I don’t know much about.  But there are puzzles that crop up once in a while that I can at least categorize.  Here’s one of them: the dead end call.

It begins like this. A message is left on your phone.

Hi, I’m calling from [name the company or person] and I love your photography.  I would like to get some for [my store, my house, my hotel] but I just had a few questions for you.  If you could give me a call back, I’d really appreciate it.

This is always by phone, and never by email.  You have to call back because you see a potential customer.  What question could they have?  You’ve put a FAQ page up which has just about every question you’ve been asked for the last 13 years.

How much do you want to bet that the person isn’t tech savvy?

But you call back and the question is:

I’ve been looking at your site and you have such beautiful work.  I’m just not sure if you do framing?

No – no framing.

I’m wondering if you can do this print at a different size.  Would it change the way the print looks?

Sorry – that would mean stretching the print.  It’s not going to work.

I’d like to do a print that’s 8 foot by 12 foot long.  Could you do that?  If not could you tell me who could. There are a few calls along those lines.

Could you tell me whether this print that I’m looking at on the screen is in landscape or portrait format?  I only want to buy prints in the landscape mode?

Do you sign your prints?  We only want signed prints!

Can I download this and print it for [a small commercial establishment] ? Tie store? Pizza place. Ice cream parlor?

I usually say yes.

But I didn’t start out to do another “dumb questions” post but to say that none of these pan out.  Ever.  In other words, it’s a fiction, a falsehood, a ploy to waste my time and get me to think I’ve made a sale.  When they say they’re going to their computer to order, or that they’ll be placing an order within the next day.  Or anything like that it’s an outright lie.

But if they didn’t want the prints to begin with, then why did they go through the trouble of calling, leaving a message, and even having a long drawn out conversation with me?  I wonder whether my chit-cat (which is usually pretty good) wasn’t up to snuff.  What did I say to throw them off or were they just lonely?  Maybe they wanted a chance to talk to a photographer?

It’s a complete mystery.  But it happens about 3 times in a row.  Then a real order comes in from a real person (not the person I talked with) through the usual website in the usual way, and almost always without a single question.

I’ve had thousand dollar orders come in without one single bit of communication between the consumer and me.

Now. Maybe that’s the key.  Maybe it was something I said.  Or the sound of my voice (it can be nasal in the morning).  As a matter of fact, when I was a struggling something or other – I took a job as a phone poll taker (that doesn’t sound right) and my job was to keep people on the phone long enough to finish taking a poll.  Your bosses listened to you as you did your first few calls (all of which I botched) and fired me that first night.  They said I had no phone presence.  Me – no phone presence?

I tell you that there are people that talk to me for hours on the phone.  I have no trouble talking.  I’m not hesitant.  I have great stories.  So my only conclusion is that there is something about my voice which makes people turn and run the other way when it comes to selling on the phone.

Dormouse with Phone

I’ve finished adding the digital downloads to the the New York Photography section, the Central Park section and the Color Section of the store.  One more section to go: Street Photography.

You know how I’m always experimenting with this social network stuff (as opposed to actually taking pictures) and yesterday I realized that one of the things that I didn’t like about G+ were all the “awesome” or “nice” comments (as opposed to this blog where I don’t get any comments lately) and I turned the G+ profile so that it would only let people comment that I had circled.

There are nice big juicy articles about how it’s good to allow all the “awesomes” and “nices” and that you should see them as simply appreciation.  Which is all fine if that’s your preference but my own preference is to have comments that add something to the post.

But, here’s the point.  There was a very surprising side-effect of narrowing down the number of people who could comment.  Surprising means that I didn’t anticipate it.  And what was it?

PEOPLE BEGAN TO SHARE THE POST AT AN AWESOME RATE. Below is a screenshot showing a post that got 152 shares!

How important is that?  Way important because the big problem as far as having your image or post seen is how quickly it disappears unless it is shared.  Sharing spreads the post out over time.  But how many shares would I normally get if comments were on?  Oh, maybe five.  Maybe ten.

So you might ask yourself – but why should having comments turned off (except for people in my circles) cause super extra sharing?  Only a theory, but people want to say something, take some action.  It isn’t enough to just hit the +1 button.  Even if all the want to do is say, “awesome” they can do it if they share the post.  Once you’ve shared it, then you and your friends can comment on it.  But just being able to share it so that it shows in your own stream is enough for most people.

And of course, the other thing is that many more people +1 it.  Now with all that being said, if you visit my G+ post page you see that I’m basically using it to show images that can be downloaded for $10.  Now this seems to me to be a fair exchange.  You get to enjoy my photography for a bit, and I get to make an offer.  And that offer was taken up last night when about 20 people came from G+ and bought prints I showed to download.

And two people bought small prints as well, and they were coming from G+ because they chose to buy the prints that I was showing there.  So there’s some progress there for all this tedium.  Once I finish up the last section of Street Photography – I’ll be able to experiment with the pricing and add some new collections and then that should be that and we can see whether all this effort was worth it or not.  Or as my father says, so, what can you tell me?  By which he means, what’s the money situation like.