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.
