Blog Purchase & Breakdown – We Shoot Roses
In mid-March this year, I got my hands on the preset website “We Shoot Roses” for only $300. Here is what it came with:
- Around 80 Lightroom Presets, split into packs of 5-8.
- 12 long-form unique articles relating to the photography niche.
- A Pinterest account
I instantly knew where I wanted to divide all of these assets and how I wanted to split up the website.
Lightroom Presets – Across to “SOCIÉTÉ.me” for the new preset store that was launching over there (remember we took the presets from “The Content Edit” as well).
Blog Posts – these had to move across to “Gillian Sarah”, with 2 of them ending up on “SOCIÉTÉ.me”, one about the best camera bags, and one about finding the best Lightroom Presets – because this is where the store was. Although the content in Gillian Sarah is aimed at bloggers and designing websites, I do have a lot of photography clients, so I figured some highly ranking articles in the photography niche certainly wouldn't hurt.
Socials – The Pinterest account gets just over 200 views a month, so I'm currently doing nothing with it. But I will likely begin to share the Societe preset store from there soon.
The Mistake
As soon as I got my hands on the Lightroom files, I was disappointed. They initially looked good, all in their folders with their example images. But when I loaded them into Lightroom they all switched names and started pulling into weird folders. Upon Googling these folder names I could see that the presets were from a variety of influencer accounts, where they were selling the same presets (with the same names even), and the example images matched the ones from this site.
Panicking, I messaged the seller to find out exactly where she got these from. As you REALLY can't resell someone else's digital products. She messaged the creator of them and did get confirmation that he in fact did make them in the first place, but he resells them, so they are not unique, but you do have the right to sell them to your audience.
This is fine, but it's not exactly what I am looking for. I would also have to re-export and repackage every single one of these presets in order to get them in a state that I am happy with, which is going to take a lot of time.
I've yet to add any of these presets to the Societe preset store. In the meantime I had another creator build me 6 fresh packs to my standard so I could get it all up and running.
The Lesson
Dig into EVERYTHING before you buy it. Would it have been cheeky to message the lady and tell her I want free access to all 80 of her presets before purchasing? Of course, it would have been. But it would have saved me a potential disaster.
All Was Not Lost
If I had bought this site purely for the presets I would have just declined it in Escrow. Sure I'd have had to pay the transaction fees, but in the state they are currently, the presets are completely useless to me.
However, the blog content is fantastic! Each blog post is 1,000-3,000 words and written almost flawlessly. I would have paid double this price for the blog content alone!
Where is it Now?
After moving the posts to their final destinations (for now), I added a redirect to each post link so it links to where it's moved to – just to keep any existing Google traffic. I then issued a re-crawl on Google so the new URLs can be indexed. Once all of the content was moved, a redirect was placed on the main URL to redirect all homepage traffic to the Societe.me preset store. “We Shoot Roses” has officially been pulled apart and is no longer an individual asset.
