#BIG

Phone Photo Friday

I got to know Kristen on the facebook fanpage for  Very Big Ideas.  She currently runs a business helping others set up and manage custom blogs.  On her site, she is currently experimenting with a Phone Photo Friday feature.  The idea is to take submissions of photos from users taken with there cells and upload them to here site.  Kristen has a very big idea to make this into a daily feature site.  She gave us the following information. . .

• I’d like to turn my weekly blog feature Phone Photo Friday into a daily website, similar to awkwardfamilyphotos or something like that, with ad space for cell phone carriers.
• I have been doing this on my site for only a couple weeks and already have over 20 pictures waiting to go up.I want it to be a different picture every day – whatever one fits the mood for the day, and whichever order that we want.Basically, they would go onto the site be able to look at and comment on pictures and then, they can upload a photo to the site. it would send me an email and then we would choose one to feature each day. Or we could break it apart – so monday’s are scenery, tuesday’s are people, wednesday are sunsets, thrusday are animals, friday are…. Advertisers could be cell phone carriers, cell phone cases, etc.

Kristen added that the cost of buying and hosting the site is the sticking point.

My suggestions

• Focus – keeping your attention on one vertical makes it easier to attract  ”customers” and advertisers.  It sounds like your focus should be creativity.  This would allow users to submit various photos, and you to change the theme every day.
• Customers - by focusing on creativity you can reach out to others who would be users of your site.  Search twitter daily for people who mention the words “creative” “photo” “photography” reach out to them and ask they to come and check out your site.  Use facebook search as well.  In my opinion this is the most underrated thing on the internet!
• Critical mass – It potentially takes thousands of users to create any kind of ad income.  I would alternatively suggest reaching out to specific partners who can sell a related product.  Can someone take these really creative photos, print them extra large, frame them and sell them from your site?  You could potentially take 20% to 40% of every order!  This is just one idea, but do you get how the focus and specific customers make it possible?
• A Tip - Kristen mentioned that hosting is a barrier to starting.  I use godaddy for all of my hosting.  They have excellent customer service.  If you buy a deluxe hosting plan, you can host multiple webpages for under $7 a month. For example, if you have 10 pages you can host them all for a grand total of $6.64.  A domain costs just 7.49 when you use a coupon code at fatwallet.  No, godaddy does not sponsor me. . . yet. . .

Kristen, those are just my thoughts.  If you need any other advice you, or anyone, can always email me directly.

#BIG

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010 at 2:45 pm and is filed under Company Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.