Devil Works

One of my old business ideas that never got past the idea phase was to set up a digital stock photography site. I had grand plans of setting off around the world taking amazing photos and selling them via subscription to fund my travels to interesting places.

As has happened many times in the past I said kept saying “one day” and missed my window of opportunity and now the internet is full of cheap stock photography.

But I haven’t completely given up on the idea. I do take good photo’s if I do say so myself, actually others have said it too, and the evidence is hanging on their walls, and no it’s not just at my mothers house !

I’m thinking that the only way to decently profit from the venture in this age of everyone owning a digital camera is to brand myself as a photographer and sell limited edition prints.

I’m still firming up my ideas around this concept, but one thing I know I need to do is upgrade my camera. Currently I’m using a Fujifilm FinePix A500, it doesn’t take a bad photo but as a compact camera with only 5 mega pixels it’s limited in what I can do with it.

I’ve still got my film based SLR camera but I’m thinking of upgrading it to something like the Nikon D3. I’d have to go out and buy a heap of new lenses but if I’m after premium prices then I need to take premium pictures.

This plan is definately long term, I know I can take good photos, just need to prove to myself I can sell them.

I bought an expired 5 letter dot com about a year ago. Unfortunately it’s not a dictionary word, otherwise I’d probably be retired in the tropics by now. However it is something that’s easy to remember and therefore brandable.

Since I bought it I’ve been pondering what to do with it. I initially set up Wordpress Mu on it, thinking that I could set up a lot of blogs with subdomains on it. I only installed Wordpress Mu to see what it could do, I set up a couple of blogs with it and then forgot about it for a couple of months.

When I went back to see what was happening with it, I found that 50 odd blogs had been set up on it. I took a look at them and found out they were all spamish type sites with lots of links pointing to other sites. I wasn’t really keen on this but the search engines were picking up the spam blogs and sending traffic.

As it wasn’t costing me any extra I let this ride for a couple of months. Then I started getting adult sites setting up spam blogs with content that I wasn’t comfortable living with.

So I needed to take the blogs down, but as I knew it was getting traffic to the site, I didn’t want to let leave it empty.

It was a short domain so I came up with the idea of setting up a URL redirection service.

I downloaded a free script from hotscripts.com and set it up and the site and promptly forgot about it.

Today I took a look at my site stats for July. I’ve had over 40,000 hits through the redirection service. I took a look at the database for the site and found that only 36 people have set up URL redirections, but yet the traffic they are pushing through my site is about 5 times what all my sites combined receive.

I think this one may have a future, will need to do some programming (or pay someone to do it) but I think once it’s properly set up it’s something that will be a stress free money maker.

Would you believe a few crappy websites making $1000 a month are worth $200,000 ?

When I tell my friends how much time I spend working on my websites and how much income my efforts generate they generally tell me I’m wasting my time. I’m happy to let them think that but I look at it a different way.

I’ve got a full time job, I don’t need the money from my sites but it’s a nice bonus. If I looked at my hourly rate for the time I spend online then it wouldn’t be 20% of what I get for my day job.

But let’s look at it another way. I’ll use fictitious figures just to make the maths easier.

Monthly Internet Income : $1000

Annual Internet Income : $12,000

Bank balance required to earn annual internet income in interest : $200,000

(based on high interest account @ 6%)

Now I’ll admit that spending a chunk of my time on the net each weak isn’t as easy as having $200k in the bank but there is no way I could save that amount of money on my current wage. Even if I took on a second job I’d be looking at working 20 hours a week at $20 an hour for almost 10 years to have that much extra cash to invest.

And I have chosen to go down the path where my sites don’t need constant attention. I could cut back my online time to a couple of hours a week and I wouldn’t see my income shrink.

I just completed an online quiz on a free dating site that rated my knowledge of the internet. At the end of it they gave me a little graphic to put on my site with my score.

Now other people will see my quiz results and visit the site and try and improve on my score and the dating site will get free traffic for the cost of creating the quiz.

That’s viral marketing.

PS The code they gave me to cut and past included a nicely targeted link to their front page. I took it out, does it make me a bad person ?

I’d originally titled this post “What annoys me about Pay Per Post” but I thought that was a little unfair. Overall it’s a good site and a pleasure to do business with them so far.

But here’s a couple of things I’d like to see changed.

When I signed up I chose this blog as the first one to add to the list. No real reason for it, I had planned to add 3 or 4 in total and spread paid posts across all of them. However once I’d nominated this one I spent ages searching for the link to add another one. I literally wasted an hour trying to work out how to add another blog.

Eventually I found somewhere that said I couldn’t add another blog until I had ten paid posts approved. It’s not a bad rule, I can understand it’s there to stop a lot of the spammy type of sites running in and stealing all the opportunities. The problem I have with it is that I had no way of knowing this when I signed up. As I said I have several other blogs and If I had to choose one of them to submit to PPP then I would have chosen my site with the best PR and highest traffic as my first one, which in theory would have given me access to higher opportunities. So at the end of the day it’s both me and PPP that are missing out.

The second issue I have is that PPP seems to have placed a reliance on TinyUrl.com. This service turns long links into much shorter ones. It’s a great free service that’s very popular and boasts 37 millions links and over 850 million hits a month. The catch is that it’s a free service and PPP have no control over. So if it goes down PPP loses it’s ability to do a lot of there stats tracking.

Now this probably won’t effect me much as a blogger, but as an advertiser if I start to see holes in my stats then I’m going to be concerned. (update: I just notice PPP uses TinyUrl for it’s referral links - it makes me nervous)
I can’t understand why they haven’t set up their own redirect service. It’s as easy as going out and buying a short domain (ppplink.net is available at the moment and no bigger than tinyurl.com) and getting a free script from Hotscripts.com and they then have control of the service. It would take less than an hour to setup and they would be in control of that aspect of their business. If it went down then they could have there own techs fix it and not wait for TinyURL to bring their site back up.

Having said all that I want to reiterate what I said at the start, Pay Per Post is a good service. It just needs a little tweaking.

(For the record I haven’t been paid for this post)