Publisher: Richard Schneider
When I first bought the PictureCorrect.com domain name in 2003, I created a Photoshop service website where people could send their photos to be edited for a small fee. Unfortunately, I was unable to find very many interested customers so I tried adding an online gallery of some of the best photos that I have taken. But this still did not bring many visitors to the site. Almost a year later, I decided to scrap my initial idea and rebuild the site to be a free photography information resource. I thought it might be fun to build a site that conformed to some of my hobbies. I initially tried to monetize the new site with only Google Adsense which worked well but only with certain sections. Later on, I started adding information on specific products so I signed up with the Amazon affiliate program and others but had very little success with them.
When I first stumbled upon Chitika, I experimented with eMiniMalls on only a couple pages to see how well they performed and I was shocked to see how much more I could earn with Chitika than with the other solutions I had tried. After being a Chitika member for only a few days, I spent hours replacing other ad units with Chitika units. Soon after, my Chitika earnings surpassed my Adsense earnings to be my number one revenue source. PictureCorrect.com reached a milestone at the end of last year by receiving more than 100,000 unique visitors in one month. This consequently required me to move it from a low budget hosting arrangement to a dedicated server (since my site has high resolution photos, I have burned through over 20 Gigabytes of bandwidth in a single day). My next goal is to keep making the site more and more useful until 200,000 unique visitors come in a single month.
I am very grateful to Chitika for helping me make my hobby into a small business. Also, if Ryan Travis gives you some optimization advice, it is probably in your best interest to give him your attention.
Get the expert optimizations like Richard did with Ryan Travis: Simply post your URL in the optimizations thread on Chitika SPHERE. Yeah, it’s that easy!