Zinchuk 2.0

Intended for publication the week of April 12, 2009

By Brian Zinchuk

I have been brainwashed.

After listening to hours upon hours of the podcast This Week in Photography (www.twiplog.com), hearing them go on and on about web 2.0 promotion, I have jumped in with both feet. Damn them.

Easter weekend meant some very, very late nights adjusting html code to bring me into the 21^st century. However, I got it pretty much all done in one weekend.

A little under year ago, I finally got a personal website with a personalized domain. The quaint personal websites everyone just HAD to have ten-twelve years ago really didn’t do much, and I hadn’t touched mine in years. Last summer, I had a photo shoot I just had to get online, RIGHT NOW, so I got a domain name and created a really pathetic site. Thus was born www.zinchuk.ca, hosted by M.R. Internet in North Battleford. I was lucky enough to have a name unique enough that no one else had grabbed the domain first. Much better to be a Zinchuk than a Smith, in this case.

It sat, neglected, since then, stillborn. It was time to breathe some life into this site.

I wanted to kill several birds with the same stone.  First, the blog:

Since 1992, 17 years this past March, I have been writing a weekly newspaper column. From the Top of the Pile has been around before Twitter, Facebook, blogs, personal webpages, Napster, eBay, MS Internet Explorer, Netscape, or even Mosaic – if you can remember back that far. It was a blog before there even was blogs, with a weekly readership in the thousands. Hopefully it will reach that online, eventually. Now it’s a blog. It can be found off the main www.zinchuk.ca site, or at www.brianzinchuk.wordpress.com.  If you ever wanted to comment on my weekly diatribes, here’s your chance.

WordPress.com makes it incredibly easy to set up a blog. I got it up, running, and adjusted in just a couple hours. If everything else had gone this smoothly, I would have been done in a day.

Then there’s Twitter. I really don’t like Twitter. I think it’s pretty much useless, with the 140 character limit. But now it’s part of the landscape, and if you drink the KoolAid on web 2.0, you need to be on Twitter, apparently. Thus begat www.twitter.com/brianzinchuk. Follow me, if you dare. Most of the tweets will probably be about the blog.

While I’m on Facebook, that’s not part of this. I want to keep something to myself.

Finally, one must get into the meat and potatoes of the website – promoting my little photography business – Brian Zinchuk Publishing.

A photographer without a website these days is like a farmer without a grain truck. How do you get your product to market? You don’t.

That’s where my long forgotten but limited html skills were dragged back, kicking and screaming, into the light. Make that the dark, because it’s impossible to work on code when the kids are awake. It’s not sexy by any stretch, but should do the job for the time being.

There’s not much point of having a website if you can’t make money off it, though, so I took This Week in Photography’s advice and signed up with an American online photo ordering service, www.pictage.com.  You shoot, they do the rest, apparently. It won’t replace my usual sales method, a booth in the lobby, but might provide some additional sales. I hope it works.

So what’s the point? In many ways, this is an experiment. Build it, and they will come, fingers crossed. The fundamental problem with putting something online is no one is going to find it unless they are looking for it. If you’re totally new, you’re going to be very much alone.

If you want to promote one media form, you have to do it in another media. That’s why radio stations buy billboard advertising, because no one is going to tune in to a station they aren’t listening to already, without a little nudge. As such, ironically, this bold experiment is getting its launch this week – in this newspaper.

Welcome to Zinchuk 2.0. I wonder what Zinchuk 3.0 will look like?

Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be found at www.zinchuk.ca