The Future of PhotoNaturalist

I’m happy to announce that PhotoNaturalist celebrates its first birthday today (February 2, 2010). I launched this site exactly one year ago today, and I must say it’s been an amazingly fun year!

In our first year, we went from zero to 1800 subscribers and had more than 40,000 unique visitors.

To all of you who shared PhotoNaturalist articles with your friends, I owe you a special thank you, because that has been one of our largest sources of new traffic.

This site has grown faster and larger than I ever could have imagined, so I’ve been thinking a lot lately about where to go from here.

One thing I’ve learned from running this website for the last year is that I absolutely love learning new things, and I love sharing what I learn. It’s something I’ve enjoyed my whole life, but never really realized until now.

I’ve started a lot of little projects throughout my life, and for every single one I ended up creating a website to share what I learned. Most of these sites are long gone now, but one of them from ten years ago still remains and I love going back there once in awhile for a glimpse of my past

Anyway, I’ve realized that PhotoNaturalist encompasses all of my biggest passions in life: nature, photography, learning, and sharing. So, I have made the decision to try and run this website full time. There’s so much more I want to do with this site and the community that surrounds it, that I cannot see another way to do it, other than work on it full time.

Of course, running it full time means finding a way to generate income from the site, so here are a few of my thoughts on that:

• I will continue to write 1 or 2 blog posts per week, which will always be free. In fact, I’m hoping to start writing 2 or 3 per week.
• I don’t want to run a bunch of ads on the site for two reasons: I don’t want to advertise things I haven’t personally used and support, and I don’t want ads to interrupt you while you’re reading.
• This leaves one solution I’ve thought of: selling extra resources that go into more depth than the blog posts. This would include things like eBooks, videos, etc

I think it’s really hard sometimes to squeeze a topic into a short blog post, so I see the eBook as a way to cover a topic more completely. So, for the next year, I’m planning to release three eBooks that will each sell for less than $20.

The first one will be on wildflower photography, and I’m planning to release it in the first or second week of March, about one month from now. It’ll be about 50 pages or so, and will contain everything I know about photographing wildflowers, covering the topic in much more depth than the free eBook I released last year.

The other two eBooks I’ll keep a secret for now, but one of them I plan to release in the summer, and the other in the fall.

If these eBooks go well this year, and PhotoNaturalist continues to grow, then next year I’d like to try a few other things, like holding in-person workshops, release training videos, and maybe even create some kind of membership program that will give you online access to a wealth of training material that I create.

So, that’s my plan. As always, if you have thoughts, comments, or suggestions you’d like to share with me, please e-mail me at editor@photonaturalist.net, or leave a comment below, or use our contact page, or if you’re reading this through our email updates, just hit reply

Thanks again for all your support this year. I always look forward to writing a post each week, and although I don’t always have time to reply to your comments or e-mails, I always read and enjoy every single one.

Cheers to another year of capturing natural light

Steve

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About the Author: Steve Berardi is a naturalist, photographer, computer scientist, and founder of PhotoNaturalist. You can usually find him hiking in the beautiful mountains and deserts of Southern California.

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