Adding Value After Scanning - Slideshows

Everytime I look at our photo scanner I say thanks to Kodak for the service we can deliver to 1Scan's clients and for the substantial revenue it has brought our way. Scanning photos has been a great money-spinner, taking our service to another level having broken into scanning via a flatbed device. As a small (or should that be micro) business I'm acutely aware that if you aren't moving forward, you're rapidly falling behind. Talking to clients it soon became obvious that other companies were gaining revenue post scanning. How could we get a slice of that? My first step was adding an online album facility. People want to show and share their photos, our offering is free and enables them to do just that. We can also offer additional features such as ordering prints. Let me give you an example to show how it operates. This last week I scanned a batch of photos for a chap who, judging by the images, has just got married and been to Spain on honeymoon. We posted his scans to his own, shareable, online library and sent him the link, inviting him to share this with friends. Very soon I could see the hits on that album and my guess is that his bride originally hails from eastern Europe. Those hits peaked dramatically yesterday, they're obviously a popular couple. Very quickly I could see people were downloading free digital copies of the photos. That saves the happy couple hours burning CD copies of the scans, the time and trouble of mailing them across the world - and saves very significant cost. It gains me revenue too, many viewers wanted prints which they can also buy from the album, for direct delivery. I don't have to do anything to make all this happen but I do receive a small royalty from the sale. Second step was photo albums. This seemed to be the most popular next step for scanners. So I was able to do a deal with an album printing company. I'll spare you the gory details but it was a technical nightmare to get running, their client support was poor (including shutting up shop at lunchtime on Friday). Worst, for all the revenue our clients generated for them they never paid us a bean. very, very poor. So we didn't scratch our heads much before ditching them on the first anniversary of the sorry saga. Now we have a link with another photobook supplier and that's working much better. Our third step has just gone live. We're offering to create photo slideshows (or should that be photo slide show) for clients. It's a simple format, you pick one of three styles previewed on our site, tell us what title you'd like, we do the rest. Up to 200 photos for a fixed fee of £9-99. This has been on offer for a week and the response has been very positive. It has surprised me in that we've got a couple of orders where the slideshow hasn't been the simple add-on but the main purpose of the order. If you're in the scanning business, think about slideshows as an optional extra, then you can thank me and Kodak.