Greg's small business success story.

Although this article is not about photographing, let me introduce myself. My name is Greg Madisson and I am a well-known photographer from Southern Spain.

Luckily we live in the 21st century when a person who produces something is able to sell that easily. I am talking about photobanks and photo-auctions; there are tons of them and a photographer, especially a talented one, is able to earn some money.

As for me, I always hated being dependable on somebody's will and I always dreamt to open my own business. Even working with a famous photobank I felt I do not have my own business!

So I started thinking. What can I really do? The decision was -- to open my own website. I had a blog at Myspace.com already where I posted my photos (their smallest versions mostly) and I knew something about running a website. That would be a piece of cake I imagined.

I am good at design so I made the presentation of the simple website myself and my younger brother helped me with moving that to html. The next thing was registering a domain name and purchasing hosting for my knew marketplace. That was really less than $15, I was inspired!

What to do next? I found a problem. How to sell full versions of my photos? Which payment way to choose? How to program or at least setup all huge solutions on my small website? I was frustrated. Will my poor business die before being born?..

It will not I said and started searching! I found a couple of companies who could help but their rates were terrible. One imagined I would be happy to give them 60% of my earnings! Ha! No way! Another one wanted a serious setup fee, which was no good for me.

The third found company was Ubscribe.com (http://www.ubscribe.com/). They had their system in beta-mode (and still have now as I know) and first I was worried. They promised to help me for free and their rate was really good. But I have nothing to lose!

Their manager Andre was helping me by phone when I had any questions and I am really grateful to him for his help, I really had tons of stupid questions! Their technicians even cleared up html on my page and helped me setup everything on their side and even on mine! I felt lucky. That was totally free.

The last thing I had to worry about was promoting my website (a professional photographer homepage). I have just put address of my page to all photobanks I worked with -- to my signature, to my personal details, etc. That worked, I had 20-30 visitors a day and even got first 2 sales! Andre from Ubscribe.com contacted me personally with a congratulation. Oh how happy I was! Whoa, it goes!

Next part was ordering links to my page at different companies. Adbrite.com helped me much with that -- they allow to do this easily.

What do I have now? I popular website which I plan to make a photobank to help young talented people follow my steps. When I have a new photo, I create a new service and a billing routine at Ubscribe.com (which is less than a minute), upload my photo and I am almost over. After that I press a button and here I have a new page generated -- I add that to my site and my photo is ready for new customers!

I believe everyone who owns any media materials (music, video, text, any services) or wishes to sell in the Internet, can follow my steps and use my experience to succeed.

I will have one more article soon, about promoting in the Internet for newbies. Of course, if I got responses from you, my readers, about this one. And if you like it!

That's it I think. If you guys have any questions to me about this article or whatever else, please contact me by email: [email protected]

Thank you for your time.

Greg.

P.S.: Special Thanks to
- Ubscribe.com (http://www.ubscribe.com/)
- Especially to Andre, you helped me really and I appreciate this, man!
- Adbrite.com (http://www.adbrite.com/)
- Shutterstock.com (http://www.shutterstock.com/)