Web Design & SEO For Small Businesses

Today I am going just little bit away from my theme. Because after couple of months I just logged on to my Istockphoto website to download some images for one of my project. What I found was amazing I had submitted 50images to istockphoto in the last year with the Digital Canon SLR which my wife presented to me at my last years birthday, it has generated revenue of $600 till today. Wow a good residual income online. I also check other website which I had submitted my photographs like fotolia, dreamtime, bigstockphoto and shutterstock all these sites has generated some good amount of revenue ranging from 200-300 dollars. The total income from all the sites generated was around $2014.50. 

It has been a while I have taken stock photos to sell but still I take photos while I am traveling. Saying said that making money online is not just through blogging or affiliate marketing there are several ways to make money online. All you need is to come up with a strategy to create income online and be an expert in that field. Even if you are not an expert in certain field but if you have interested sure you will succeed because today there are several was you can educate yourself in certain subject either online or offline and be an expert to some extent.  

My interested to take photos started while I was very young and gradually It developed into a hobby. Here are some tips and techniques you can use if you think you want to make some money online by taking and selling stock photos.

1) A decent digital camera with a minimum of 5 Mega Pixel. Don’t Start with expensive cameras first. You can get a good digital camera for between 200-300 dollars. You can upgrade to more expensive ones later with the money you start making money from selling photos which you have taken from this camera.

2) Create a list of Stock photo sites they are several of them just pick the top ten. If you submit to other sites which has less traffic it take long time to sell one.

3) Browse through these top stock photo websites and see which ones are downloaded more. Try to get an idea from those images and takes pictures which sells more. Usually pictures of nature won’t get sell more. Istockphoto and some other stock image sites have list of themes which are in demand.

4) To start selling you need to apply as a photographer with these stock sites first for that you need to send them some of your best pictures taken so far. Some sites are very strict in picking the photographers so you should be careful and send one of the best images with good lighting and composition.

5) Don’t give up in the beginning stages you photos might be reject due to poor quality. So don’t worries try to improve your creativity and style of photography.

6) You need to add some SEO into stock photos as well. You need to give better keywords related to the images to show up when people browsing the photos. A stock photo with a large volume of related keywords would sell more than with fewer keywords. Also don’t try to use non-related keywords it might get you in trouble and may be even remove you images because of malpractices. 

The bottom line is take nice pictures with a creative eye which will sell and make you money online with stock photos.

Always finding a good affiliate program is a daunting task for any affiliate marketer.There are thousands of affiliate programs out there not all of them are suitable for your website or business. We need to test and make sure is they are perfect fit for your online business. This blog posts is all about how to find the best merchant for your affiliate marketing for your niche. The best way is to make a list of all the merchants who has an affiliate program for your niche and differentiate between wheat and chaff, and pick the one which you think is potential for your niche.

Your main goal is to send quality targeted traffic to your merchant’s websites which will convert and get you the sales commission. But if your merchant’s website can’t convert that into a sale then all your efforts are gone in vain. So before considering any merchants and products from the list you have created you need to study, test and monitor these affiliate programs. 

1) Do some research and post most threads about the merchant and the programs in forums to find if they are honest and pay you once you make the sale. You can find several answers about this from forum from people who have already used this program. Also search online for websites who is promoting this program and write an email ask them about how this program is doing for them. 90% of the time I get positive answers from people promoting the program. Identifying a merchant how is honest and protects your sales commission is most important while identifying the right affiliate program for you.

2) Commission range usually it is hard to make a profit with all affiliate programs, especially if you are using PPC to market these programs. If you have a very good commission then it will help while promoting, Higher the commission more successful would be your affiliate marketing. Also consider weather the merchant is offering 2nd tier and 3rd tier commission this will help you in the long run.

3) Cookie expiration date is important for long term sales commission. An online visitor takes time to make a decision on making a purchase online, so if the merchant offers more cookie tracking days the better. 30 day cookie is really hard because if the targeted visitor decides to make the purchase later after a month then you effort in promoting and sending quality valuable traffic to the merchant is in vain.

4) Links and banners verify the merchant’s banners and links can make a conversion as well as the links works properly. If a poorly designed it won’t convert very well.

5) Do a test on the merchant website and as well as buy that particular products, during that process think yourself as a potential buyer and view things from the buyers point of view like the navigation, checkout page and things like that and evaluate it if it was an easy process without any compilation then the merchant is a good candidate for your affiliate marketing.

The bottom line is if you join a affiliate program without doing the above strategies you may end up in hard to earn money online.