Well 2024 is over, so as an end of the year exercise I wanted to take a look at my site stats and see how the year went.
Total visits to the site: 285 (and I’m guessing a big portion of those were just me testing different plugins and pages).
Average engagement time per session: 15 seconds – So that’s not good. Guessing my site just gets a lot of bot traffic.
Both of those stats are down from the previous year though.
Good thing though is that organic search sessions is up 50% (which means that some people did find my site through google searches).
Far as social media goes…
Pulled all my content off Instagram, stopped posting to 500px, started and stopped twitter, started and stopped mastodon. I did restart facebook, but just as a means of sharing photo’s of cosplayers and reenactors that I take at events with the people I took the photo’s of. Pinterest is doing ok though. I got 71 saves, and 43 outbound clicks! My top created pin had 1.3k impressions and 3 outbound clicks. Ok, so “doing ok” is subjective, but that one is directionally correct at least.
Youtube – I did zero video work this year. I did post some d&d session streams but those got less then 10 hits.
I think I gave away 4 business cards this year.
Had two people post comments to posts, and one person reach out for work – which didn’t pan out (cause their message got lost in all the spam and bot messages).
Photo sales: $0. Resulting donations: $0.
But… I took second place in the photo contest for the Jackson Civil War Reenactment!!!! I also joined a photo club and got one of my photo’s on their home page!
So what can I learn from this and what can I do differently next year.
Well I learned that I really enjoying photographing reenactments and comic-cons. So that I need to keep up and expand. Doing both of those has also taught me that I kinda like photographing people (something I tried to avoid doing before this year). But it also showed me that I need to work on posing and lighting of the people that I shoot. So that’s some homework for me. My most successful post here was the Tilson Street Photowalk I did with my camera club, so I need to get out and do more local events.
I also want to expand the number and type of events that I shoot – might try some car shows/meetups this year, or see if I can doing a cosplay meetup or something. I’m also joining a sportsmens club that has a lot of open areas that I can utilize to create content – so I want to focus on that a bit more (I’ve got a class scheduled for getting my CPL instructors certification so I should be able to use the content from one of those activities to support the other).
I think I’m going to give bluesky a try, see if it’s less horrible then other social media outlets. Going to try and be more active on reddit as well. I also want to try and post to more contests – the BBC has a bi-weekly content where they post selected pictures to their site, which would be cool to be on there.
Generally speaking though I’m struggling to see how to make this “business” endeavor successful beyond just a hobby. I understand the appeal in trying to monetize a hobby like this though – you have a camera, you take (what you think are) good pictures, why not sell them? Problem is that everybody with a camera has that same idea, and unless you already have a huge social media following, or are selling a service (weddings, senior or family pictures,…), or they have a connection to that picture, then it’s not going to work as a business. Nobody’s going to go to random site to buy a photo. You can either sell as a service or print photos and sell them at art fairs. And if you do the art fair route you need to sell stuff that’s local to the area that people will identify with. Nobody from Detroit is going to buy a picture of a Yellowstone wolf, but they might bite at a pictures of stuff in downtown Detroit. It’s a very saturated market with a lot of people giving stuff away for free (and that free stuff is often better then what’s available for purchase).
You could try the website ad traffic approach, but I think with all of the AI tools out there I don’t think there is much change of meeting their rate of content generation, and quality seems to be secondary these days (not that my writing is of great quality – but at least what’s on here I write myself lol). I did learn a lot about search engine SEO though, which I think has helped, so I’m hoping to keep learning more about that next year.
I keep going back and forth on focusing the site on a specific niche. Reenactments? Cosplay? Shooting Sports? – I could see calling the first two just “portrait” work. But I also just like wandering with the camera and shooting anything and everything. I do think though that if I wanted to turn this into a business that it’s essential to pick a focus.
I was considering a rebrand, which I might still do if my CPL endeavor pays off at all – but for now I think I will keep this site as more of a hobby.
So time to set some new goals for 2025, hope for a better year, and keep shooting.
So GFY 2024, and let’s hope for a better 2025!
This was my most “successful” pinterest photo btw.
