Advertising and posting pics

J

jvo

Well-Known Member
Supporting Member
First of all, I'd like to say I sent an email to the admin to ask about advertising on this site. I corresponded with Frank last summer about the same topic, but told him I decided not to go through with it as I was staying busy at the time. I have since worked my way through most of my jobs and am now needing some work. I am patiently waiting for a reply on the advertising info again, no panic on that though.
The other thing is, I will need to have a way to showcase what I can do. I got burned with photo bucket years ago, and lost all my pics and don't want to do that again. My son in law says he can build me a website and that is what I think I'll do.
Is that the best way to showcase your work? Anybody know anything about how Facebook or instagram would work? Mostly curious on what the best way to interact with photos would be. I can do basic stuff with the computer, but my hands are better suited to doing manual stuff.
I will need to post the metal shaping that I have done in the past, I guess, to generate some interest and stick my big toe in the water to test the temperature.
I appreciate comments on this topic. I don't need to decide on whether to do this or not, as I have already been making a living for the past year now doing metal shaping and rebuilding body parts.
I wish to continue this from semi retirement now into the foreseeable future. Just a one man operation to make enough money to live on, not looking to compete with any big shops or to ever hire any employees.
I'll be sixty in a couple months and I have grown tired of working for a living. This is a very tough way to make a living, but so far I am enjoying it immensely.
Thanks for any positive input you might be able to give me on the photo posting and how to interact with interested parties.
 
If the work that you are doing is of a good caliber, then the work alone should be enough to advertise yourself. If I don't like your work than I will not get you to do it. People will ask who did that great job & ask the owner who did it. That's how I have always had things done.

The Old Trucker
 
You are absolutely right. The work I have done in the past is how I got into doing this. It was totally a hobby while I was working as a dispatcher in a high stress job. My friends were bugging me to do work for them, and I haven't gotten much of my own stuff done as a result. Word of mouth is what got me where I am, but I am in a small market here. I need a little work to be able to make my commitments without taking a bunch out of my small nest egg.

I have a good friend that decided to go out on his own several years ago. The first year, he had nothing come in the door for 5 months straight. After that dry spell, he has been extremely busy to this day. It just took a little bit to get off the ground. I'm hoping to avoid a long dry spell. Thanks for the comments.
 
I've found that photobucket has moved to a rather clunky interface, so I really only use it for sharing random stuff on forums (build thread photos, for instance). I don't blame you for wanting to avoid it. There are alternatives though, such as flickr, which may or may not interest you.

Facebook does have its advantages for sharing photos, but there are downfalls to it as well. One being that if you set up a business page to showcase your stuff, then not everyone who "likes" your page will see your updates on their timelines. That is, it's becoming more difficult to reach your intended audience via a FB page. Originally they made a change where you needed a certain number of likes in order for all of those people to see your updates by default, but now it seems to be affecting the bigger pages that have more reach. It's like if you had a mailing list and only a certain portion of the people you sent an item to actually received it. Plus with the talk of adding video ads it's becoming less and less appealing. Lately I've contemplated leaving it outright. In many ways it's like shouting to be heard above a noisy crowd since there's just so much content to get people's attention.

I'm not on Instagram so I can't comment either way on that.

Setting up a page on something like Blogger might be a good option. It's pretty easy to upload photos, and you can also set it up like a traditional website with sections for contact info, projects, pricing, etc. Might be easier to keep things cleaner and more organized, whereas FB is more of an instantaneous flow, if that makes sense. With a blog site you make posts similar to making threads on here, and you can tag the posts with titles so that it makes things easy to navigate.

Of course, you can always set up a traditional site and use FB, Twitter, or Instagram to drive traffic to it, or link them all together. With Blogger, for instance, you can make a post and easily share it on FB.

Hope that helps!
 
Even though I use FB and PB I still store all my photos on an external hard drive that way if my computer crashes or PB gets a glitch, then I won't loss everything.

You can do a lot with a website, more so than FB, and most are easily managed with the new plug & play type software,
Some will offer a free limited website G'Byte site to start with, but those usually have stipulations, like advertising pop-ups, etc.

Also with the free sites, you don't get your own Domain Name, but rather your company name is attached to the end of the Servers Name, not ideal when people are trying to find you using a search engine.
With those sites you need to add a whole slew of Meta Tags to your HTML for people to find you.

If you want your own Domain Name, you'll pay for it.
 
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If you sent an email to me Frank, I can't find it. Jay Vee Oh Oh at telus dot net the first four words, are all small case and only the first letter of each. Thanks. I will look again. Just got home from the weekend, or I would have responded a couple days ago.
Actually, I did get it May 30, it just took awhile to get to me after I turned my computer on again after the weekend. Thanks.
 
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