Making Money and Saving Money Running a Photo Blog

I haven’t seen many people trying their luck with this process so sometime back I thought of experimenting with it. Though I didn’t experiment enough to make some serious money, I came to the conclusion that it is possible to make money sharing pictures, if you have got the right mindset.

So here’s where the magic is. Networks like Shareapic.net pays publishers to upload their own pictures, host them free of charge and get paid whenever these images are viewed. For an instance, if I was running a photo blog which was getting a lot of image views, I’d host my images at Shareapic.net and post the thumbnails on my site. When the user clicks on the thumbnail, he/she is taken to the Shareapic gallery which has the original image, that can be viewed properly.

And when that happens, I get paid for the number of image views. Ah, I almost forgot to mention that Shareapic earns money through the advertisements they display alongside the original image. But, not to worry, it’s not that much big a deal, and many users will not get distracted.

If you’re running a photoblog, then hosting your images at Shareapic will save you some bucks on your bandwidth expenses and will get you some bucks from the traffic you refer to them. Genereally, their rate is 22 cents per 1000 views, which is not that bad., and is higher than any of the other networks that I researched.

But, you don’t have to have a long-running photo blog to earn some decent cash this way. You can simply start a nich photo gallery on a simpole web page or a blog. For an example, summing up the whole process in a few steps;

Do some keyword research on the words ‘pics’, ‘pictures’, and ‘photos’., and select your niche. Let’s say I selected the phrase “house pics”.
Now I need to get some house photos. I don’t necessarily have to have a lot, but more the better. For this, I’d search around the net for some non-copyrighted content or do a Creative Commons search on Flicker.
After this, I would set up a wordpress blog, divide my pictures into 5-6 categories and make a post on each of the categories.
I’d be building a different ShareAPic gallery for each of the categories and pasting the code for the thumbnails, so when the user clicks on the images, he/she will be taken to the ShareAPic site.
Do some link-building and wait for Google to index the pages - and I’m done!
One thing I wanted to note here is that niche picture sites/photo blogs have relatively less competition in search engines so you need not do a lot of SEO to get them ranked.

Suppose you hit a niche where you get 1000 hits everyday, which is easily doable. And let’s assume that each user will check out a minimum of 5 photos. (Some of them will be there to download the whole gallery) So, you will be having 1,000 x 5 = 5,000 minimum image views per day, which will earn you (5,000 / 1,000) x 0.22 = $1.10 everyday, on auto-pilot.

All for this, for a few hours of work… So I guess that’s not a bad invertment, is it?