NEW ENDEAVOR

Unfortunately, we did not plan very well and so instead of making money on our www.FunnyPhotosContest.com website, we are losing money! Initially we were going to charge contestants a fee to enter our contest. But a few days before we launched our site we realized, that viewers could enter other photo contests on the Internet for free. So how could we charge? Oh well, we thought all we needed to do was find a few sponsors to advertise on our site and that would solve the problem.

However, attracting sponsors is more difficult than we ever anticipated. As a new website we do not have enough visitors to make it worthwhile for any advertisers to spend money on our site. Thus, we are currently no longer even trying to solicit a sponsor. Instead, we have placed some Google ads on our web pages, but we only get paid when a visitor clicks on an ad. Furthermore, Google often pays only a few cents. And so we are sending bi-weekly cash prizes to all the winners of our contest without receiving much income.

Luckily, an interesting story on the Kim Komando radio program about the www.cafepress.com website has given us some hope. The site allows anyone to sell a variety of products – t-shirts, mugs, mouse pads, etc. – with zero upfront costs and zero inventory. Sounds too good to be true, but in fact they have existed for almost ten years and many people have successfully sold products through the website. They charge a base price for their products. We can then sell their products at any price we choose and they will pay us the difference....not bad!

With this exciting possibility in mind, we will soon begin selling www.cafepress.com products. Our viewers will have an opportunity to purchase t-shirts, mugs, etc. displaying their own photos and our logo on it. We hope that lots of viewers will buy lots of products. But, who knows. All we can do is wait to see what happens.

SO MANY CHANGES

It probably sounds strange, but the changes to my website, www.FunnyPhotosContest.com since I launched it in June, 2006, really do amaze me. In the beginning, the site consisted of just six pages – the home page, of course, a page for photos, another to display (and update every few days) the current number of votes cast for the photos, one for the winners and another two pages for the contest rules and for submitting photos. At the time it seemed like those six pages were sufficient. What more was needed?

Well, I was wrong. Websites like many other things grow. To begin with, as the number of viewers expanded and the number of photos increased, we decided to add a second photo contest. Instead of only one contest, we felt we should separate the photos into two categories – one for “funny” photos and another for “cute” photos”. So a seventh page appeared on the website.

As the second month of our contest began, we removed the previous months photos and replaced them with the new entries. But it seemed a shame to eliminate all those great photos we had received. And so our “Photo Archive” was born and now each month another page is added to the site. We also started receiving emails from our visitors making suggestions, comments, etc. Why not share these interesting messages with all the viewers, we thought? You guessed it, another option appeared on our navigation bar for “Your Comments.” By now I began wondering how much more could it grow?

Of course, it continued to expand and soon we had a third contest. We offered viewers a chance to create captions for a monthly featured photo. We now had three contests for “funny photos”, “cute photos”, and the “caption contest”. With so many options, we wanted to avoid confusion and produced yet another page, the “Details” page.

As if all these pages are not enough, we have also included a page for links and a page for potential advertisers. It seems to me we now have quite enough. But I thought the same thing a year ago. So I can only say, “Who knows what new pages the future will bring?”