Whilst Im sure that this was a deal set in place by the new owner so that any new readers would not be lost.  I have the feeling that this is going to turn into another cashquests type deal where the new owner is just using the readers as an extension of their already successful bsuiness model.

Just a bit disappointed, and thought I would rant a bit.

I guess I know how John Chow Feels now.

For all you white hat SEO’s out there, please do not start preaching to me.  I didn’t do anything wrong.  I think it had to do with my server being down, and me using a new theme, but that should not have a effect on the url structure or on my serp’s.

C’mon google “Don’t be evil”

I am really regretting giving away this site now as it is ranking really nicely for some great keywords.  A promise is a promise though, and I promised my readers a free blog and by God that is what I will give them.

The winner of the free blog is: Adam Dempsey,  Adam please get in touch with us within 24 hours or we will have to give up the blog to someone else!

TRAFFIC!

Before we get started on this, I want you all to take a look at the screenshots of the traffic you can expect to receive from your image hosts.

Monthly Screenshots:

For those of you that can’t read it shows August stats of 17 Unique visitors. And September stats of 36,025. That’s about 1k unique a day, but I only started promoting after the 10^th of September. Now you are all probably thinking that Im lying right? Well here is another screenshot with the proof that I started after the 10^th and stopped promoting on the 24^th of September. Here is the screenshot for September:

Made it a bit bigger so that you could see the daily unique.

Now come the part where I tell you all my dirtly little secrets on how to get traffic to your image hosts. This is what you have all been waiting for.

The way to get traffic to your site is very simple. People come to an image site looking for PICTURES! You just have to post pictures on forums and people will click through them and I am going to show you how exactly.

Step 1: Getting Pictures: You have to get the pictures before you can actually post them anywhere. The best source for getting celebirity pictures is http://www.forum.phun.org. These are all updated daily and they are mostly brand new. Now make sure that the pictures you source are not already posted on the other forums where I tell you to post them. So now you have your pictures.

Step 2: Upload the Pictures: Now this is kind of obvious but the pictures that you get have to be re uploaded on your site, I was about to skip this step but then remembered that there are actually people out there that would skip this step. The reason you have to reupload them is so that you are actually using your own site in step 3.

Step 3: Posting your Pictures: I only use 3 forums to post pictures on, and the traffic has sustained itself. The forums to post the pictures on are:

http://www.celebs.me.uk

http://www.masalaboard.com

http://www.santabanta.com

That’s it. Take the pictures from Phun.org, download them, reupload them to your site, and post them on the other forums in step 3.

It might also be a good idea to put your site in your signature on these forums. Since people are actually also posting pics on these forums they may be inclined to start using your site. That way you have people doing the work for you.

Another method that could be successful for you is to post funny/interesting pics on digg, it might not always lead to a front page dig but it will lead to a backlink and SOME TRAFFIC. First thing you need to do is get some funny/interesting pictures. Once you have those you have to upload them all to your image host. Than 3 times a day post an article on digg with a link to the image. If you are lucky enough to get dugg to the FrontPage you are looking at over 10k hits to just that image. But that’s not it, diggers have websites and they use forums. So the pictures would go viral and you would see a crazy amount of traffic. This is not something that is guaranteed but is good if you get it done. The forums should be enough to keep you happy with regards to traffic.

There you have it ladies and gentlemen. A tried and tested method that will make you money, and all you have to do is spend less than 15 minutes a day to make sure that you continue to make money. The proof is all there in the screenshots, and if you are still not able to make money with this method than you sir is a nincompoop! Also remember when you get tired of working those laborious 15 minutes a day you should be able to resell the site for 10X monthly revenue very easily.

I am starting to believe that the term was something invented by frustrated SEO’s to convince clients that had sepnt 1000’s that the reason that the site is not ranking for the term “home loans” is because of the ever omnious GooGle Sandbox.  What they fail to mention is that some sites get indexed and ranking for top terms WITHIN hours of DOMAIN REGISTRATION.

Yes, it is harder to get a site about “credit card repayments” ranking on the first page.  The reason?  First there are over 1000 credit card companies that deserve to be there before your spammy site because they actually have the qualitity content that the searcher is looking for.  Obviously visa or mastercard are going to rank on the top because they are an authority/trusted site.  They have people linking to them on an hourly basis for no particular reason.  They have people on their site staying on their site for more than the 30 secs that they would on your site.

So there you have it ladies and gentlemem.  I have officialy claimed that there is no such thing as a GooGle sandbox.

Little did I know that this little site of mine would soon start to rock the serp’s.

If you do a search on GooGle for “firefox promotion” please take a look at the number 6 positions and think about that the next time you decide not to enter into one of my contest!!

The winner will be picked on Friday.  Entries for that particular contest are now over.

Monetization:

Now come the nitty gritty of the actual ebook. The monetization section. It is important to talk about Monetization before the traffic because you should have the ads on your site before you move to promote your site.

There are 5 ways that I have been monetizing my inmage hosts, you do not have to implement all of these you could pick and choose the ones you need. They are:

1. Adsense

2. Adbrite

3. Azoogle

4. Link Sales

Adsense is the obvious choice to go, but you must consider one thing with adsense. While you may get over 10-14 THOUSAND impressions a day it will lead to very FEW CLICKS. Seriously people coming onto image hosts for some reason do not want to click on an adsense ad for some reason. It is beyond me. Don’t believe me? Check out these 2 adsense screenshot for 2 of my last sites. As you can see there are alof of daily impressions but not that much has been made from adsense.

As you can see from the screenshot there are a lot of impression but no earnings. This is not to say that you should not have adsense on your site because every once in a while you will get a click for $1.00+ that makes it all worth it.

Here is a screenshot from my second site that should drive the image home for you:

Adbrite is what you will have to use to pay your server bills. After finding out that I was not making enough with adsense to cover the overheads I started looking into other advertising mediums. I thought that a CPM advertiser would be a good way to go because of the fact that I was getting over 12k Impressions a day. So I decided to give some of my advertising to adbrite. The good thing is that you don’t have to worry about users clicking on ads for you to make money. You just have to have the ad displayed there and you will get paid. Another thing that you must remember to do is turn ON the interstitial ads so that if a user is viewing more than one page you will also get paid for that. I started out with one banner in my footer and then added 2 more. On top of that I also removed all the adsense ads and replaced them adbrite.

Here is a daily screenshot of the earnings I achieved with adbrite.

And here is a daily screenshot:

Azoogle. Now this is a big boy. You only have to consider this if you have found a good campaign that you think will convert well on a image host. Because you wont get paid for impressions, and you wont get paid for clicks. You will only get paid when and if a customer converts for the advertiser! So think of it like this, they come to your site. See an ad that interests them, click on it, and fill out a form as simple as submitting a cell phone number or there zip code. Or as complicated as a 4 page questionnaire. Obviously you will get paid more if it converts but it is also a lot harder to convert. Think twice before giving up your adspace to this one.

Link Sales are a nice and lucrative way to make some money as well. Im not going to go into too much detail about it here but if you click on this link you will see the DigitalPoint thread where I sold the links as you can see it is a nice way to add some monthly revenue to your site.

W00t! 75% of the work is now done. The only thing left is to get traffic to the site now. Usually I would never give out this type of information but because its MY eBook you all should KNOW!

I was one of the people that actually went around preaching the fact that redirecting your links using Alexa would actually help you increase your alexa rank.

First this method no longer works.  Apparently if you try it now you will get a 404 error.   I learned this method because of the post about making money with online image hosts part 2.  There is a link in there that I specifically use that redirects to another part of the blog.  I used to be one of the sheep that thought it would increase (decrease) my blogs rankings.

Geoffrey Mack, The Project Manager at Alexa has said:

The redirect doesn’t do anything to your rank. The rank is based on one thing only: logs from toolbar usage. I should know, I am the product manager at Alexa….

So yea, if you were using it go back and fix your links.  If you were not than please ignore this post.

Scripts:

I am not going to tell you that there are 100’s of scripts out there and I have tried them all. The truth is very simple. I have checked out over 20 image hosting scripts and I have come to use only 1 of them. You have to be very careful with image hosting scripts because for some reason hackers love to hack image hosts. Luckily with the script I have been using I have never been hacked once and there have been attempts. It’s just that some image hosts are easier to hack than others.

The script that I am going to tell you to download is a free image hosting script, it is released by The Mihalism Fourm, now usually you could go there and download it after registering but I know that at the moment there servers are being bombed by downloads so if you use the link at the end of this section you should be able to download it without troubling them too much.

Here is a screenshot of the actual page after you upload it to your server:

In the bottom you have the footer area which once successful you should be able to sell text links for.

In the highlighted red areas you have the adsense ads.

In the blue you have the multi upload feature. Forum posters absolutely LOVE the multi-upload picture parts, because they get a chance to upload a full set of pictures at one time. Thus saving them time. Now you may be saying “But Mubin, if we keep it to one picture at a time wont that make them keep coming back to the homepage to upload more pictures?” The simple answer is yes, but the more detailed answer would make you think about the fact that if I have to upload 15 pictures I do not want to have to keep going back and forth to do it. I may do it once, I may do it twice, but I will not be there the 3^rd time. You have to consider it like a cost-benefit analysis do you want that user on your site once or do you want the traffic that he will bring by posting all those pictures on a popular forum? You make your own mind up, I have given you my opinion on the matter.

On top you have the gallery feature which is great for keeping people on your site.

People click through on all the pictures and stay on your site. The more people on your site opening more and more pages the more revenue you have BECAUSE of more page views! Plus the longer they stay on your site the longer they actually have to remember the site and pass it on to a friend. So try to make sure your gallery is populated properly.

With this script you have the option to edit the number of field used for uploading. Sometimes I have it set to 5, and other times 15. I like to experiment.

Now for all you people that want to download the script you can download it by CLICKING HERE! Yes, I know it leads to page on my blog with a link to rapidshare. I did this on purpose so that in case the rapidshare file goes down, I do not have to edit the ebook just the actual post. SO BACK THE FUCK OFF HATERS! There are no ads on the actual post just a straightforward link to where you need to go.

At this point in time you should have your image host’s domain name ready. And you should have downloaded the script and familiarized yourself with it a bit.

Hosting:

There are 3 main types of hosting out there.

1. Shared

2. Virtual Private Servers (V.P.S.)

3. Dedicated

The best shared hosting that everyone will go to and that is dirt cheap for the first month is HostGator, if you use the promo code “hgc25” or “iceishot” your first month will only cost $0.01. This is okay to get your image hosting site of the ground, but I pretty much guarantee you will have to move on to something else after the first month if you follow all the directions in this ebook till the end. Hostgator is good if your plan is to make an image host promote it and than sell it because you will just be paying $0.01 with HostGator. If you want to go down that route, than please do sign up with HostGator now.

A V.P.S is a good idea if you want to host your site without much trouble of it going down or an email from your host saying that you have exceeded your bandwidth limits. I have yet to find a decent VPS provider that I can stand behind and say that I recommend them. I can say this though be very careful of unscrupulous resellers promising you the world at a price of $5. IT’S NOT FRIGGIN POSSIBLE! So don’t be a fool. If you are luck enough to get to the point where you need a VPS spend the money and reap the rewards.

Dedicated. You will be very lucky if you get to the point where you will need a dedicated server. BUT IT DOES HAPPEN. At this point in time you should be making more than enough to cover the costs of your dedicated server. Again don’t try to get stuck with a seller that is just reselling someone elses service. Now I have actually used a dedicated that I can stay I will stand behind. On customer service and uptime you cannot beat the service provided by “thewird” you will have to go to the proxy.org forums to find him, but he is the guy to go to if you need a dedicated server. He is online all the time as well so he can answer your questions instantly as well. I am not getting paid by “thewird” to write this. I have used his servers for my proxy’s for the last 6 months, and every time there was a problem it was usually something that I did wrong.

Now that we have hosting, the script, and the domain name sorted there is just one thing left to do, and that is get the site monetized, I know I know its getting better and better isn’t it. Don’t worry we are coming to the traffic part in a bit.

Introduction:

First thing I will let all you readers know is that I am not some run of the mill ebook seller that you have never seen or heard about.  I am Mubin from MubinAhmed.com, while I’m not one of the big names on the Internet like John Chow or Shoemoney, I am a bit well known though so I will stand by what I sell.

One of the other things that you should know is that this will not be one of those ebooks that is 99 pages long with a bunch of filler.  You will get the down and dirty from start to finish, and that’s it.  No bullshit in between.

 I will tell you this; this is not one of those things that is automated.  You will have to spend about 25-30 minutes a day promoting this site before it will take off, but once it takes off you should be able to sit back and relax and let your site users take care of all the work for you.

 Now as most of you may know I used to make all my money from proxy sites.  I actually carved my niche in the proxy industry when no one else was touching it besides a few people.  I like to think the mini write up I did on my blog was the reason that proxies are so famous/saturated now.  The picture that made me famous:

Now if you go to shoemoney.com you can see a family friendly version of this picture, it is not actually a pic of me, but of my younger bro.  Anyway back to the reason why I started image hosts.  It was my original intention to just start proxies and relax with the residual income that would come in while I was just doing nothing.  Today though I have decided that I don’t want to be one the players that sits back and relaxes but would rather have something that I can put my brain into and hopefully get some rewards from it. 

One of the things that I noticed while everyone was using my proxy was that my proxies should have complimentary sites with them as well. What do people that use proxies usually use them for? Most of the kids from school that log in to MySpace use proxies so that they get around filters on the network. Now what do most people that go onto MySpace do? They post images and messages on their friend’s accounts. Now, since you can’t actually upload images directly to MySpace you have to use a online image host so that you can hotlink a image directly.  When my proxies started I didn’t have any time to invest in an image host. But since summer has started and the proxy business has slowed down I decided it was time to branch out.

Domains:

First thing you will obviously need is a domain name.  I use moniker.com for all my domain names and keep them in one place for tracking and selling.

We will break down how you should decide on which domain to get it will be broken down as follows: (I know some of these are obvious to you regulars but there might be newbs out there and I don’t want hundred’s of questions coming my way.)

1.      Catchy

2.      SEO

3.      Type-O’s

The first thing you should attempt to do is register a domain name that is catchy.  You need something that easy to remember and easy to pass on.  I remember a wise man (Shoemoney) once blogged that a domain name is good if you can say it to a friend over the phone and he can access the site without having to ask you how to spell it or if there are any abbriveations that you have to worry about.  Try to think of something small that is easy to pronounce and people can spread your site with word of mouth advertising.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a very important factor that should be taken into consideration.  You do not want a site that has nothing to do with images, uploading, hosting or whatever.  It’s great that you got a catchy domain name but if it has nothing to with iamge than you are going to have a HARDER time ranking for necessary keywords.  Sooner or later you will have to start ranking for the proper keywords so that the traffic to your site will remain sustainable.  The 2^nd image host I made was YourPictureOnline.com and it was ranking great in the search engines.  One of the things that I was not aware of was that this was actually a dropped domain and thus it was aged about 2 years as well.  Much like seasoned wine a seasoned domain name always tastes better.

The first image host that I opened was baayimg.com if you know about the piratebay, than you should also know that they opened their own image host called bayimg.com which when it was not even fully announced had crashed THEIR servers because they were not ready for it.  I took advantage of this and registered the domain baayimg.com an extra a is something that could happen to 1 out of 10 people easily.  And if what they are looking for is an image host, than that is what they will get, maybe not the original one but a image host nonetheless.  You have to be very careful though as some people do get PISSED off when they find out it is a type-o or a “copycat” site.  Luckily there are not that many loyal users of image hosts. (Having a typ-o that is good can also increase the value of your site).