Last month I made my first sale from my photoblog site.

Or, if you want to get technical about it, I made my first sale back in January.

Let’s go back to the real beginning. April 1st, 2004 was the day I posted the first image to my photoblog. The weeks leading up to that foolish day, I had been struggling mightily with the Greymatter software, trying to wring some sort of decent design out of it. I was happy with the final results, but the weekly process of uploading a new picture was, to put it simply, a pain in the ass. Lots of html code, lots of writing, lots of image preparation.

Still, I enjoyed doing it. I kept it up, posting one image a week, all the through late October. I wish I could blame the end-of-posting on the back-to-back business trips I took in late October and early November, but really, it was just another case of blog burnout.

So, there the site sat, forever displaying on the main page the last uploaded photo. Neglected but not forgotten – you can tell by the way I categorized the site on my main page’s redesigned index: “Optimistically Updated.”

And then, late in March, Oksana decided to start work on our taxes. While sifting through our small business’ records for the previous year, she encountered a suspect PayPal charge for $18. I didn’t know what it was off the top of my head, so while she looked over my shoulder, I logged into my account and checked its history. Problem solved.

Before I logged out, I noticed something – a balance in my account for 280-some dollars. What the heck? I followed some links and discovered that someone had placed an order for the Mendenhall Glacier Panorama print from my website almost two months prior!
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So, I checked the stats today on my photoblog site and noticed that I’m right around the same number of visitors as last month. Not bad considering that we’re only 13 days into May. There are a lot of ways that these stats can be interpreted, but I try to focus solely on to the “unique IPs.” Yeah, sure, three of those visitors are definitely just me checking the site from the three computers I use the most, but I’m pretty sure the other 18 are from real people (as opposed to web crawling robots)!

So, yeah. I’m happy. Granted, I could get no additional IPs hits for the rest of the month – in which case I suppose I could conclude that everyone I’m telling this month had already visited it last month (before I had really started advertising.)

Still no orders flooding in, though. Hmmm. Maybe I should check those PayPal links again…!

I put up a new photo today if you’re interested (and yes, this is my way of copping out of writing a real blog entry.) I’ll check the stats again on June 1 and post the results here. After that, I plan to sign my photoblog up with as many blog registries as I can find. Should be interesting to see if that will generate significantly higher numbers.