Back in the school, we got to create some of our own photo editing projects, at the time I’ve had photo manipulation pretty much mastered, so I wanted to find something new I know nothing about, and I’ve ended up picking “Old photo renovation”.

It was definitely new and challenging, the workflow was quite different that editing the regular photos, removing print imperfections and then manually color the photos was quite fun. Eventually I get quite good at it, restored plenty of family photographs, some of them almost 100 years old. Eventually I decide up posting some offers for freelance services, which ended-up scoring just a couple gigs, not well paid as well, after some time I took down the gigs, and transit my energy to some other stuff. Couple years later the technology was getting so much progress that I’ve got dragged to the photo restoration field once again. The progress were just unreal, we got Microsoft AI photo restoration, then some very advanced face restoration GFPGan and then CodeFormer. The automatic coloring was also getting somehow usable, with eventually ending up, in the Photoshop itself simplifying the pipeline.

The tools were quite new so most of them were only available as command line tools, as since most photo editors dont really know how to set up Conda environment, and use python I’ve got some edge over the rest, as those two highly specialized niches crossed together. I could deliver the high quality images for fraction of time. So I’ve decided to come back to the market, this time I was aware of how those site works and how to gain traffic, with such high completion.

Check the restorated images here: https://gallery.restorimo.art/tags/restoration/

Target client

There are over 1000 pages of gigs on Fiverr offering photo restoration services, and they are dirt cheap as this is global market, majorities dictates the prices, and since doing any type of remote work for global market in infinitely more profitable for 3’rd world country citizens they are swarming those sites like crazy, destroying the market for everyone else, so there was no point to compete with them. Believe or not, but the majority of people having any old photographs are old people, so the main platform was determined, Facebook. Although there is some problem, Meta is aware of their marketing potential and they are monetizing it, Facebook is one of the worst platform to grow organically, but one of the best for Performance Marketing, meaning paid ads, but it’s not the way I like to work, so I’ve decided to not go this way just yet.

Marketing

Driving traffic

Mesh funneling

The best strategy for growing social media is using all of them, and direct the traffic from one platform to another, and since all of them are focusing now on the short content videos, it was my best bet, and the process of restorating old photos is quite interesting and engaging to watch, with some simple directing. So the platforms: Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook.

Top funnel

The days when you could just post high quality content and get and reasonably amount of impression are over, there is so oversaturation of the content that you stand no chance without any strategy, and leaving all to luck is not really the best way to do business as well, so we need some content centered platforms that build no brand, but gratify high quality content.

Reddit

As usual the best and the easiest platform for gaining insanely amount of impressions. You can read more about the full process here [[Reddit Top Funnel]].

Pinterest

This one is more unusual, with in oppose to Reddit doesn’t grant impressions periodically, but requires lot more SEO and setting up, and the type of content wasn’t really the best for this platform, but it was great nonetheless

And then it was just a matter of putting some watermarks and do some backlinks work, and we were good to go.