It’s the first of the month again, and I thought I’d give you an update on my Photoblog. Here’s the scoop over the last two months:

July: 76 Unique visitors, for 174 visits
August: 111 Unique visitors, for 1387 visits

Holy schmoely that’s a lot of visits! What’s going on here? Well, let’s not get too excited – I’m pretty sure most of those visits are attributed to the new RSS feed that I put up. If anyone else is tapping into it like I am, they’re probably loading that particular XML file multiple times every day (I have my aggregator checking for updates every hour; that would be 24 hits every day.)

I am pretty excited about the 111 unique visitors, though. That’s almost a 50% increase over the previous month. As I implement more and more marketing strategies for the site, it’s getting much harder to evaluate what works best, but I’m cautiously optimistic that the RSS feeds are doing their job. Not to mention the RSS indices that I submitted my site to – each one seemed to at least send a few hits my way this month.

Another couple of notable events worth mentioning: Two people showed at least some interest in purchasing a print from the site. One was a friend-of-a-friend kind of thing that was specifically looking for pictures of Cuba. The other was someone that happened upon the site while looking for B&W photographs of Southeast Alaska. I didn’t have much to offer the latter, and so forwarded them on to my friend, Jeff, at Alaska Visuals. Last I heard, he hadn’t made a sale but was planning to upload a few samples that could be perused. And because the Cuba thing was for someone I knew, I uploaded some other Cuba photos for her to look at. She inquired more about one that was taken at the same time as Havana Nights, but I haven’t heard from her since.

I think it’d be neat to sell one of my photos off the web site, but that’s not really my motivation. I’m having a good time writing up the little essays that go with each picture and more, going through all the thousands of pictures that I’ve taken. It’s getting more difficult to choose the obvious standout photographs, too. I’ve previously digitized many of them, but of those, I’ve already posted the best. Guess it’s time to dig down into my negatives and slides and see what’s in there. I haven’t done that in a long time… I’m looking forward to it!

What to do for the next month? Well, I can tell you that I’m not looking forward to doing a lot of “extra” work to market this stuff. I think I’m going to cave in and do one of those free multiple search engine submission things. Yes, it’ll probably add a lot of ‘bot junk hits to my stats page, but they’re already mussing things up, anyway. Just about every webcrawler out there is listed in my statistics, but only Yahoo and Google actually sent surfers my way this month (for the following search strings: Isabela de Sagua, open shutter photography, photos of the church at Pisco, taquile, purchase Pisco online, photoblog, and playtime.) As long as people are searching for this stuff, I might as well let them do it from Ask Jeeves, too, right?

Oh, here’s another interesting stat: 83 of 111 visitors bookmarked my site. Again, nothing to get excited about. The same stat page for a different site I run said that 55 people out of 26 visitors had bookmarked my site. So, either it doesn’t accurately track that particular statistic or those visitors REALLY liked what they saw!