It seemed like a perfect hobby for retirement. Little did I ever dream that www.FunnyPhotosContest.com would take over my life. In fact, it started out simply enough as a photo contest on the Internet for funny or cute photographs. For a small fee contestants could enter cute or funny photos. With a new contest every two weeks and viewers voting for their favorite picture, a photographer could win $50. In addition, twice a year, the 12 winning photos from the previous six months would be judged and the winner would receive an additional $500 grand prize bonus. With my two grown children as consultants, we were ready to launch our website.
No problem…except only a few days before the contest “went live” we realized that as an unknown site, web surfers may not want to pay our entry fee. Why would they, when the web abounds with numerous free photo contests? Thus, we removed the fee and prepared to pay the prize money ourselves. So much for my hobby, www.FunnyPhotosContest.com had just become a business. To make matters worse, my children and I had no experience operating a website business. Nevertheless, we decided to proceed and simply plunged in.
As novices in the website business world, we had a lot to learn, how to advertise the site to attract viewers, how to obtain sponsors to cover the cost of the prizes, and how to increase our position on the search engines like Google and Yahoo, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Although, we started six months ago, www.FunnyPhotosContest.com is still “a work in progress” and is evolving as we go along. Fortunately, we have received hundreds and hundreds of fascinating photos and have attracted many wonderful and loyal followers. Although my hobby has changed to a business, it’s a lot of fun and I have no complaints.
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