Advice on earning with images

[Andrea]

I've seen blogs that combine photos with amusing fiction type text, in other words either the animals themselves are the narrators of the blogs or the owners of the blogs are writing fiction to go alongside the photos of the animals.

I would like advice on doing something that is like this with our cows and other pets as they often do something that prompt me to want to write little stories about them. However, I'm wondering how to combine this with photos to earn adsense/affiliate income or perhaps any other type of income.

Does anyone have any useful ideas?

[netmeg]

Well... it's probably not going to be much of an earner, unless you can somehow focus it to concentrate on people who are in a buy cycle. People love to look at animal pictures, but they tend to look at them and move on; they're not coming to your site to solve a problem or learn something or look at products, so they will be a lot less likely to click on ads.

That said, if you can get lots of traffic, what with interest based advertising, you might be able to derive some AdSense income. It just may not be as much as you could make if you focused on buyers. And you'd have to get a pretty good amount of traffic.

[incrediBILL]

If you have stories about pets you're probably going to earn better if you directly put pet related stuff on the page and intertwine the product placement into the story.

I'd design the whole thing to sell such as a picture of your cat playing with that new laser pointer linking to an affiliate page selling that laser pointer, or cat food, or your favorite cat carrier. You could literally build a pet related ecommerce site that was nothing but carefully placed product placement.

AdSense might pay some, but it's not a business plan, and these days I don't find it reliable to even put related ads on a page like it used to be. If you really want to make some money, try some approach like I outlined, design it to sell and slap AdSense on as an alternative income source.

[Andrea]

Nutmeg and incredibill, thank you for your replies.

When you suggest using product placement, I only have experience of owning cows and pet rabbits. How do I advertise products in animal pictures if I haven't purchased them? Also, how do I write short stories whilst promoting products that I haven't used?

As you can see I am stuck about what to do, because I'm not really that interested in writing long articles about affiliate products. I am interested in pictures and posting short descriptions of them. So, if I wanted to promote a product that I haven't used, how do I get pictures of animals using them?