What should be my goal?

For an image hosting site...what should be my goal for the first month?
With little advertising how many members should i be able to get within a month to join my image hosting site.

 

Depends on your budget, but after a moth, you should have:
10,000 uploads (total)
100 members
(Im assuming you'll have a public upload as well)

 

also depends on your luck. if people who come to your site is really want to use your service, he/she will join you straight away. but just for wait and see or not wanted yet, they wont join you.

anyway you have to channel your advertise at the right place where people really want to use your service. for example in adwords, maybe the keyword "image hosting" is so clear for people who is really looking for that service. when they go to your site, they will joint you. use the right keyword.

 

Before you decide your goal, I would suggest to ask yourself what do you offer that other image hosting web sites don't?

Why someone who wants to host an image should come to you, and not to imageshack?

If you can find one answer then you can expect very high figures

 

Goal is to bring Traffic
Traffic brings Money

 

Well if you really look at all the image hosting sites the main goal is to host the image. Some sites give you slideshows and prints. My site will have slideshows shortly, right now its just image hosting with linking codes.

After 4 days i have little over 100 members already. is that good or bad? i spend maybe $100 on advertising.

 

it a good idea but deponds upon your luck that how many member is listed

 

Thats not very high in my opinion. Do you offer a public upload (which you should have)? If so, how many total images have been uploaded? Why not offer an affiliate program ($.2 for every new member). Do you offer adult image hosting, or rather, does your current host allow you to host adult images? If not, time to switch to one that does, because more than likely a user will upload an adult image and thus get your hosting shut down (I speak from experience). Do you have a blog? If not, get one and allow users to subscribe to your RSS feed? Do you have a dedicated bandwidth line? If not, get one, because I had a 10kb (or maybe 30kb) image rack up 30gb in bandwidth in just over an hour or so. Submit your site to some image hosting directories (http://www.imagehostingdirectory.com, free-webhosts.com, etc). I also have a few other ideas to separate your image host from the rest and offer consulting if you are interested.

 

Wow, I guess you really have to go dedicated if you want to get into image hosting business. Thanks for great advices Drig.

 

its all depends on your budget.but, keep on increase your members for first month. from next month you will be rocking.

 

I do not offer public upload? Why would i want to do that? should i do it? please explain...

I do have a dedicated server.
I have an affiliate program paying $0.03 per click - http://www.photolinko.com/affiliate.php
My host does allow adult content but i am not going with full adult content support, it is being moderated and adult content is deleted right away, but i do not have to worry about my host.
I do not have a blog but i will get one shortly

 

Public upload will bring in more traffic. People are lazy and dont like registering, especially when hundreds of other sites dont require it. Make money off the ads on the displayed images.

Id consider a pay per registered user, rather than click.

Do you moderate every picture uploaded? As in approve it before the user can use it? I would highly not recommend this approach, because many times a user will want to use the image right away. If not, then I still recommend going with a host that allows adult content (you dont have to allow it), because an adult image just has to be on your server for 1 minute and you're facing the possibility of having your account closed.

 

Adult content is one of the problems.. what about the child porn? Would you want to take the risk of hosting the child porn off your server?

 

Well, it can be against your TOS, but chances are someone is going to upload us legal adult pornography (I dont think someone would upload illegal pornography if IP addresses and other information is recorded). When I used to run my image hosting site, pornography was against my and my hosts TOS, but someone uploaded it anyways and within a few hours, my account was terminated. To cut the story short, its very hard for an image hosting site to recover after being down for a few days (users are not usually loyal). Scrapped the domain for $125 and that was the end of that. Lesson learned.

 

I do not approve the images after they are uploaded, they are automatically live on the website. My host doesnt care about adult content...i asked. Illegal 18 and under then yea thats against the TOS. I do monitor uploads daily and if i see any images that are against TOS i delete and block the ip.


So does everyone agree that i should include public upload?

 

I wanted to get into this business for quite some time now, but the issues of child porn stopped me. I do not even want to imagine what can happen if someone uploads and another one sends a complaint about an objectionable pic posted on my site...

Public upload is what you have to allow but you will have to monitor the content closely on a daily basis. I can point to several image hosting companies that are full of this illegal content... They are not hosted in US though.

 

Right now i pay $0.03 per click with my affiliate program...do you think i should change it to pay per sign up???

and how much?

 

Hm, I feel there is a lot of click fraud that can happen with pay per click and much less with pay per signup. Maybe $.05-$.1 per signup?

 

Yea i know thats the only thing i worry about..the affiliate program tracks ip and cookie session and only counts the click once but i'm sure there are ways to go around that.

 

How did those number come about?