Like so many of my posts, this one is going to be long, so please be patient.
In February of 2004, I began work on my gunshopfinder.com website. I seriously underestimated the time it would take to make the phone calls to the shops and get them on the site.
At the end of last year, I realized that while the site would be bringing in money, it would not be enough to completely sustain our bills.
About the same time, I heard that the owners of a local photo studio had been talking about trying to get a well-known photographer on board. My name was mentioned.
I approached their lead photographer and had lunch with him, to see if this was true. That led to meeting with the owners, all of whom were excited about the idea.
I proposed that I freelance for them, with them guaranteeing me five days of work a month at $500 a day. They agreed, and I started with them in March. And then business ground to a halt. By June they wanted to renegotiate. They would pay me the $500 for a full day, $350 for a half day, $250 for a day of shooting promotional shots for the studio, and hourly for things like prop shopping, etc. I thought that was fair.
Well, business still hasn't picked up, and I'm hurting. They're really nice people, and they have invested money in me through mailings, ads in industry sourcebooks, etc. But the fact is that I've only had one half-day shoot this entire month.
Meanwhile, the phone-calling for the website has slowed, as the store owners are so busy with hunting seasons that they don't have time to talk.
Fast-forward to today. I was talking with the owner of the company I do website hosting with. We've known each other for about four years, and I have several sites on his servers, including the gunshopfinder.com site.
He knows that I'm very, very good at getting websites ranked high on the search engines. (I almost always get first-page results for the sites I do). When he took a look at the traffic to gunshopfinder.com (which is now at over 250,000 visitors a month, according to one stats program), he was impressed. When he saw that 99% of that traffic was from search engines, he suggested that we talk.
He recently had his search engine optimization (SEO) guy leave, and then found out that the guy hadn't been doing a good job. His company sells SEO services. They charge $800 a year. He said, if I was interested, he would pay me half of that for each customer. He also said his company had many, many SEO customers, and that I could make a very good income. If he has at least 125 to 250 SEO customers, he's right.
OK, if you're still with me, here are my concerns:
1. The studio I'm with has been actively promoting me, but they apparently haven't had much success in promoting me or their other shooter this year. I'm starting to hear that their reputation isn't as good as I thought it was.
2. I still believe that, with time, gunshopfinder.com will be a financial success. If I can find some banner advertisers whose ads don't conflict with the interests of the shops on the site, it could be very successful financially. As the owner of the hosting company put it, with that kind of traffic I should be able to make a lot of money from the site if I hook up with the right advertisers.
3. Judging from what the hosting company's previous SEO guy was doing, I'm certain I could do a much better job.
4. Can I do all three at once? I know I can continue to make phone calls for gunshopfinder.com while doing SEO work at the same time. If, suddenly, work at the studio took off, that would be a problem.
5. Is it ethical for me to take on other work, such as the SEO work, while the studio continues to try to sell my photography work? Should I tell them that I'm doing other work to make ends meet while they try to sell my photo work?
6. Am I nuts?
Lots of questions, I know. Money problems are only getting worse, though, and someone waving dollars in my face certainly makes me pay attention.
If the SEO job were to come through, and there's a very real possibility it could, down the road I might have to just say goodbye to the photo studio. And there would be no looking back. In fact, I would probably not be able to get a photography job in this city again.
Thoughts, anyone?