Survey: Product Development

CN 2845 in Winnipeg, January 15 2015

Could you please help me out by taking a survey? I'm considering some future projects and I'd like your input on what you would like to see. I'm considering videos and eBooks and maybe some online photography training. Your input will help me decide what to focus on first.

I haven't had a lot of products for sale. I had/have my train and grain elevator calendars for sale for a couple of years, and of course I have prints for sale. My store lists both.

Beyond that, I used to sell a VIA in the Maritimes DVD for the New Brunswick Railway Museum but I haven't offered that for years. They may still sell it in their gift shop - I don't know. I tend to shy away from mailing products myself, because I must confess that I am really bad at mailing things. I put them off for some reason and I am frequently late. It's better that someone else handles the mailing!

I'm working on a VIA Rail Chaleur video. I have footage from the 2007 and 2009 chases I did with David Morris and I'll be including maps and some still photos to round it out. I'm just waiting to digitize the rest of the 2009 chase before I can finish it.

In case you're curious, for the 2015 calendars I offered, I sold 8 train calendars and 2 grain elevator calendars for a total profit of US $42.52. The last pair sold on January 19.

Clearly I'm not making enough money to quit my day job!

One might wonder whether it is worth the effort but I like doing it to review my photos and also because people do ask for the calendars. I have the grain elevator calendar on my office wall.

If you have a few minutes, please take the survey. I appreciate it!

Train Photo Survey Results and Analysis

I asked "Where do you view train photos" back in late December. Thank you to the 37 people who responded! 27 came from this blog and 10 from my TraingeekImages Facebook page.

Here are the results.

Keep in mind that people were allowed to select more than one option.

I have a few observations:

• I didn't realize that many people were using Flickr
• I'm surprised only one person is using Instagram
• The Google+ numbers are pretty strong
• I was really surprised to see so many using railpictures.ca
• The "other site(s)" surprised me too - see below

For "other site(s)" the responses indicated they look at this blog, Trackside Treasure, the Beachburg Sub, and Google Images. One person mentioned 500px and one mentioned Fallen Flags.

I wanted to do this survey to decide where to concentrate my photo sharing in 2015. Here's where I am already active in sharing my photos:

• This blog
• Manitoba Grain Elevators
• Google+
• Facebook
• Railpictures.Net (just started again recently)

I'm occasionally active on:

• Flickr
• Instagram
• 500px

I intend to become a lot more active on Instagram as I believe that is where a lot of traffic is going. I'm going to try Railpictures.ca. I will try to remember Flickr but my personal feeling is that it is not likely to grow.

What are your thoughts?

Quick Survey

Would you mind taking this quick one-question survey? I'd like to know where people go to see train photos. Thank you so much!

Thank you - the survey is now closed. The results are here.