My first phpBay Pro site (www.roadbikescheap.com) has been a success. I built it to test the eBay affiliate waters and I’ve been very impress with how well these sites convert. I’ll post a full review of the phpBay Pro API shortly.
Since the first site did so well, I decided to try a second. Here it is: www.usedmacresource.com. It focuses on Apple desktops, laptops and accessories. It didn’t take long for the first site to get indexed, well see how this one takes.
My first job as a designer was for a small advertising agency creating a lot of newspaper ads. It was a good way to cut my teeth in the business, but tedious and repetitive at times. One of the biggest challenges was coming up with fresh concepts and new visuals for a client who ran several full or half page ads a week. We had small stock photography library that got tired pretty quick and on occasion we would utilize a staff photographer to create custom images. When those two options were not in the cards we headed to one of the major stock photography houses for royalty free images priced between $150 - $200. This was fine when budget permitted, but most of the time it didn’t.
Things have changed a lot in the past 10 years. Designers have more cheap photography resources available than ever before. I started using iStockPhoto about three years ago and was blown away at the quality and quantity of user-generated stock photography, all available for $1-$2 per image. All of a sudden, low budget clients with no photo budget weren’t such a drag. Some of these clients became my favorites.
iStockphoto now has over 2.8 million images contributed by over 50,000 photographers. It includes vector art, illustrations, photos and Flash animations.
Last week iStockphoto came up short for the type of image I was looking for so I decided to try a new service called Fotolia. They’re built on the same microstock model of iStock. Fotolia has 500,000 members who have uploaded more than 2.7 million photographs and graphic illustrations. I’ve not spent much time on the site, but they seem to offer better selection than iStockphoto with regards to certain search criteria. The lightbox function leaves something to be desired, but the Web 2.0ish interface is clean and easy to navigate.
If you looking for an even cheaper option, I’ve heard of people using Flickr to find images and then requesting permission from the owner to use it. It seems like most of the time people are content to permit usage as long as credit is given. I don’t advocate using images from Flickr without permission from the photographer.
It’s maybe not the best time to be a professional photographer, but a good time to be a designer. Long live cheap photography.
Just launched Roadbikescheap.com last night. This site is my first experiment with affiliate marketing and the new Ebay Partner Network. The site uses a PHP script called phpBay Pro to pull in live listings from Ebay. So far it seem to be working pretty slick. I will have a review on phpBay Pro once a get the feel for it. The next thing I have to do is start promoting the site to generate some traffic. I’m not expecting much from this first attempt so I’ll give it a few months before it’s deemed a success or failure.