Big Changes are on the Horizon

The New Year is coming…

…And that means it’s time to reflect on the year and recognize ways to improve! This new year, I’m going to make big changes to the website and how I share my work. This past year, I’ve been using a four-prong approach to share my photography and try and get more exposure:

1. Corkscrew’d: My blog was created as a way to showcase my best work as a portfolio, with an added bonus for being able to write a blog. Lately though, I’ve been using it more as a blog since things are pretty slow during the winter season.
2. Flickr: My Flickr account serves as an online repository for most of my photos, and it makes it easy to share my photos on Instagram.
3. Instagram: Instagram makes it very easy to share my photos, and currently, it’s the most effective way to bring more people to my blog.
4. Visual Society: Visual Society is a great way for beginning photographers to post some of their work and then make a profit. One of their trademarks is giving independent photographers 90% of the profit from their own sales.

So far a few things have stuck, and others haven’t. So in the spirit of improving for the next year, I’m coming up with a new plan to share my work and get more exposure (and more sales)!

The New Deal

So a few things are guiding my new plan:

First off, Flickr is changing its business model from one terabyte of free storage, to only 1,000 photos for free accounts. This is because Smugmug acquired Flickr and is doing away with a lot of free services in order to bring more quality photographers to the platform. Frankly, it seems like another money-making scheme to me, but it’s hard to argue their logic. Secondly, Flickr isn’t as effective as Instagram for sharing my photography and bringing viewers to my portfolio. In fact, I only ever use Flickr to share my photos to Instagram anyway. Flickr also requires me to manage and carefully curate my photo selections into albums; something I already do with this website. It seems to me that Flickr is essentially redundant.

Next is my Visual Society Portfolio. As of today, I’ve only ever made a handful of sales for my Visual Society account, despite it making a profit of 90% of all my sales. However, the Plus plan only gives me three gigabytes of storage for my photos, so I have to constantly curate my collections and remove older ones. Since I’ve barely broken even on the website, it doesn’t make sense to me to continue using it.

Considering the above, my new plan is this:

1. Remove my photos from Flickr and close the account: Sadly, I’m going to have to close my Flickr account. Adobe Lightroom’s integration with Flickr made it very easy to publish photos for sharing on other social media platforms, but with the new plan eliminating a lot of free features, it doesn’t make sense for me to continue using it, especially since my Instagram is doing the same thing and attracting more people to the blog.
2. Cancel my Visual Society subscription: Visual Society unfortunately never fulfilled my needs, though it was simple to make a few sales with it. I just don’t see myself continuing with the service into the next year.
3. Upgrade Corkscrew’d to a Business plan, then add a dedicated shop: With my Flickr and Visual Society accounts closed, I can upgrade Corkscrew’d to a full Business plan, which allows me to add an online store for downloading photos and ordering prints. In addition, I would have unlimited storage for photos, videos, and other media. Lastly, I’d be able to use specialized plugins for the blog, expanding its capabilities further.

All of the external circumstances are pointing toward me making Corkscrew’d a one-stop-shop for my own blogging, photography portfolio, and print shop, with my Instagram acting as my main social media account. Personally, I like this solution since I wouldn’t have to worry about managing multiple websites and making different versions of the same photo.

Going forward, I think this is the best way to start the new year and get serious about what I want to accomplish with this blog!

I better get to work then!