Jim’s Slide Scanning Business Blog

I was recently asked “How’s the business doing?”  I can say that it seems growth of my slide scanning business has slowed just bit over the last few months.   That being said, sales seem pretty close to even with what they were last year, according to QuickBooks.

After almost 10 years of providing slide scanning services, I’ve gathered a large customer base.  Many of my customers send me slides in batches, so a lot of the orders I receive are from repeat customers.

A large part of the success of my business is due to my pages doing well on the search engines, for many different search strings.  Part of the reason for this, is my publishing of lots of not-for-profit pages to the Web, with most of them linking to my scanning pages.  My main scanning page has LOTS of information (and words people search for.)  One of my high traffic pages is my slide scanning tips page where I share some of the logic of the process.

Since I do the scanning work part-time from my home-office, it is not my only source of income.  I’ve been working as a machinist and assembler in a large manufacturing plant for over 30 years.

I get many calls from people looking to convert their slides to PowerPoint presentations and I’m currently enjoying the number 1 spot on Google for the search term “slides to powerpoint.”  That position varies over time.

Sometimes I get swamped with scanning orders, but as I’ve mentioned in a previous blog entry, the inflow of work is often quite close to my capacity to complete and ship orders out.  It’s rare that I don’t have orders in-house.  About every 3 or4 months there might be 1 0r 2 days where no orders are in progress. Except for July…

Speaking of July, as I’ve done in previous years, I plan to shut down the slide scanning for the entire month including the first week of August this year.

Today I added a link in the blogroll to Steve Bennet’s blog, related to his scanning business, Pixmonix.

Orders for slides to digital conversion continue to flow in. Large orders have dropped off a bit in March but the average size orders continue.

In past years, April has been a busy month with an increase in orders, possibly a result of Spring cleaning!

QuickBooks shows that sales are up over the same period last year, while my prices have not changed. That seems to indicate the film to digital market is continuing to grow.

A consistently good ranking ( for dozens of related terms ) on the big search engines helps my business. I’ve never had to pay search engines to list my scanning page, I understand it can be quite costly.

Casual readers, customers and competitors are encouraged to comment on my blogs. Comments can be added by clicking on the comments link below. Comments can be anonymous, but all comments will be moderated by me before going public.