How To Start A Successful Image Hosting Website

Posted in Websites on 10. Mar, 2009

Image hosting websites are great! Sharing hilarious photos with the whole world, or keeping an old family portrait alive for the family to view anytime and anywhere, it’s great! One can make quite a bit of money with a picture hosting website, and I would love to show you how.

Step 1: Domain, Website Hosting, Script.

First off, get a domain from your favorite registrar (Your Domain Registrar Here); find a domain with one of these keywords in your domain name: image, picture, pic, or hosting. Next, get reliable website hosting, I suggest using HostMonster.com, they have fantastic customer support, they use cPanel, which is a very easy-to-use control panel, and they are very reliable. What more do you want? Fast servers? Well they have those too! Finally, get a great image hosting script, the best, free, one I have found is from my good buddies at Scripteen, here is their Image Hosting Script.

Step 2: Install and Promote

Installing is quite easy, especially on a cPanel control panel; they will have provided very detailed instructions along with the script! However, if you want me to, I will install the script for a small fee ($5), just send me an email (use contact link up top) and I will get it done usually within 24 hours. Then you will need to promote your website. This can be very easy, and very difficult, for a few reasons, if you try to Search Engine Optimize (SEO) the website, the best way is to write a short article on your website about website hosting and about how your service is very fast and reliable, and then you will need to submit your new website to as many directories as possible. That’s how the other image hosting websites have SEO’ed their website, tons and tons of links with a bit of unique content. Next, you will need to get some pictures (try to find some non-copyrighted hilarious ones) and submit them to forums, lots of forums, as well as some websites that feature funny pictures and other unique content. I just provided you with two links to Google with some keywords and listings that will guarantee your success. Go down those two lists and choose 10 from each. On the link to Google with the keywords “hilarious pictures” find a link on each of those with a “add content” or “submit pictures” or something to that effect, when you find that link, then sign up and submit your content. You will get some perfect back links and a lot of great traffic to your image hosting website as well!

Step 3: CPC Ads For Cash

Cost Per Click (CPC) ads for cash, that’s right, I am actually suggesting that you use CPC ads instead of using CPM (Cost Per 1,000 Impressions) ads. This is because with my experience with image hosting websites, the visitors visit your website for the picture that is there; after they have seen it they typically do two things:

1. Search for more pictures

2. Leave.

Now, with both options the visitor will typically look around the page they are on to see if anything interests them before they leave or search for more pictures. This is where your ads come in, if they see your ads, they will read them, this greatly increases your chances of them clicking on the ads, therefore you will get a much better CTR (Click Through Rate), more so than say, a proxy website where the visitors are not focused on your ads, but on the website they are surfing. So that is why I am suggesting that you place Google Adsense advertisements on your website, Or Yahoo Publisher Network ads, or even Bidvertiser ads. This will earn you much more income per visitor than other CPM advertisements would. Another trick you could try, which I just thought of, is you could place CPALead.com advertisements on your website! Now, what CPALead.com does is their advertisement is very unique; it’s a popup ad that blocks the content on your website until the visitor completes a survey. I know this does sound kind of cruel… However I believe that theoretically this could increase your revenue drastically! Think about this, the visitor has one reason to come to your website, the picture that you are hosting, if you block this until they do a survey, I believe that most of them would do it! And that would give you an average of $0.50 per visitor! Now, I can see that the easy downside could be that you would have less of a returning subscriber base, but the increase in revenue might be completely worth it! I would suggest trying this out after your image hosting website has a good subscriber base of around 100 to 500 members, see if this really effects the number of active users, or not. And please let me know your findings! I am interested in this!

Well ladies and gentlemen, that is all I have for today. The three simple steps to a successful image hosting website, so a bit of hard work and due diligence and you will be on your way to extra cash using a tried and true method to start your very own image hosting website! Thank you so much for reading, and I hope you stick around to read some more fantastic articles! Please subscribe to my RSS feed at the top right! It will notify you of any new articles to the website so you can keep up-to-date with all the new fantastic websites to make a fortune off of!

Thank you very much!

Sincerely Your

Internet Income Teacher

-Galen Schneider

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