Zazzle is my Affiliate heaven

I read a very inspiring book recently, one that's hopefully firmly set me on the path to doing something constructive with my free time to build additional revenue streams. The book in question is Geoge Marshalls "Get out While you can" a book about affiliate marketing but more importnatly its message to readers is the basic guide to getting out of the rat race and wage slavery of a 9-5 job by getting into affiliate marketing.
Try as I might most of my initial schemesbefore I read the book haven't quite taken off, I signed up to both Cafe Press and Red Bubble to very little success over the last 18 months and even when I did make $27 from Cafe Press I found out my bank wouldn't process the payment because it was under the $50 minimum which hurts even more when you're unemployed. Granted my uploads to both sites have been rather low and I didn't much go for the limits Cafe Press put on sellers so I left it. Red Bubble is very competitive, there are so many talented people on there its hard to cut through the competition to make something work, artists and professional photographers probably do okay with strong content. My novel on Kindle is in double figures, albeit low double figures and with the royalties I could probably buy a pint but not much else. I got into Clickbank but have stalled despite a good Google page ranking but puzzled as to how I move forward or resolve the zero sales situation. Its frustrating to say the least, My strongest and most successful Affiliate revenue stream has been from Zazzle of all places, a place where I'm competing against 42 Billion other products, that's right, 42 Billion!!, I've devoted lots of time to this and now thats paying off as I'm starting to see a good trickle of results and have become a basic Pro Seller, I'm getting low royalty sales admittedly but a steady flow is slowly adding up. What makes this even more surprising is the sheer range of competing products and product quality, no doubt there are people raking in cash from Zazzle from unique designs but to be making sales against these sellers is a good feeling to be had, especially considering how I'm stumbling to make any real headway with revenue from other affiliate revenue streams. I'll still work on improving my Clickbank and Kindle projects for 2012 but for now Zazzle is where the money is.

Has Digital killed Photography?

Nan Goldin has said the arrival of digital technology has compromised photography as a medium: 'The whole issue is so depressing to me.'
Despite the fact I've never heard of Nan Goldin or familiar with her work although as ignorant as that comes across-considering she's won more awards than I've had hot dinners ( won 2008 Hassleblad photography award and Kodak Fotobuchpreis, Stuttgart to name but two) I will say that for me, if anything, digital has allowed me to embrace photography in ways I would never have imagined.

Digital for me is about accessibility and while I would agree that the entire concept of taking a photo in this modern age is probably taken for granted a little too much due to the myriad of mobile devices that can take a photo I still think its empowering to be able to capture a moment in time wherever and whoever you are.

Purists will argue that the processes of taking photos and developing them in a dark room is the only way to take 'real' photos. I agree to an extent that traditionally the darkroom processes of creating photos has to be experienced for you to be able to truly appreciate photography, I was fortunate enough to learn the basic skills at art college but for me the process was a long drawn out chemical soaked affair that potentially put me off, I'm not patient, and I don't have the time and space for darkroom processing.

25 years later I embraced photography again but this time with a digital camera, eighteen months in and I'm still getting to grips with exposure but the important thing is the accessible way that I can shoot and delete within the same time frame. To perfect my photo and get the image I want there and then means everything to me. The frustrations of getting a roll of film back from the chemists that came out black or covered in quality assurance stickers are long gone. For me digital has meant being able to use the photos I take for other purposes, Zazzle.co.uk for example provides a marginal income that has allowed me to pay for the editing costs of my first novel. The only problem I see with digital is that photography exists in a digital format more than a physical one. Do you print out your photos or share them on Facebook?

Are we killing photography by forwarding links to our Flickr and Facebook pages rather than driving to a friends house and sitting down over a coffee to show them off in a book or as a batch we printed earlier that day?

I'd be the first to agree that more people should print more photos of the images they take, memories shouldn't exist just on a memory card and we should all be encouraged to print more images than we do now in order to share and socially interact. Maybe thats what Goldin is getting at I don't know ( I'm ignorant remember) but digital photography opens the doors to a larger audience than traditional photography does whichever side of the fence you're on. Surely thats the important thing isn't it?

What do you think?