I’ve spent years helping start-ups, not only with web design, but with planning and consulting. Over the years, I’ve learned several ways to get in early on start-ups like Facebook and I have ownership in a lot of companies. Below is some of what I’ve put into practice.

Earn Shares Socially

One of the really easy ways to get in on the ground floor is to earn shares in a company by way of social media promotion. My busy schedule and lack of time has kept me from making one of my ideas a reality, but thankfully, someone else has done it instead. The idea was to create a site that brings new start-ups together with social marketers to generate buzz for the start-up in exchange for stake in the company that the social marketers would split. Wahooly is trying to do just that. This week, they opened up in beta to 20,000 users and 4 start-ups, promising to pair them up in the relationship I envisioned. This will be one to watch for sure.

Zurker offers what I wish Facebook or Twitter had in the early years. Basically, they’re doing for themselves what Wahooly offers to do, just without the middle man. Zurker is a start-up social network that aims to compete directly with Facebook for your updates and daily loyalty. In an effort to grow their user base virally, they’re offering vShares for referrals. Unlike actual stock shares or options, vShares are a virtual representation of your right to equity in the company if they ever get big enough. You have to have a little faith here, but the payout may be worth it.

Become An Owner In A Product

When you go offline and walk into a store, have you ever wondered who invented the product you just bought? One of my favorite new companies in recent years is Quirky. It’s a platform for inventors, thinkers, and designers to see their ideas and designs come to life in the form of real-world products. Quirky guides the invention process all the way through to a completed product that they then get on the shelves of big box stores like Target and Bed Bath & Beyond. Right now, those stores and others have products on the shelves that I’m getting checks for about every month. If you are creative, check it out but like other ways to earn, be ready to wait a while for that first notable check.

Other Ways To Earn

If you’re in a position to do it, consider taking shares instead of (or as part of) payment for goods and services. Web developers, printers, artists, and anyone who can help growing (and sometimes broke) start-ups save a few bucks can often walk away with shares that have the potential for millions of dollars down the road.

This is better when you really believe in the company and its future, but can be a good idea even if you don’t. A great example is David Choe, the graffiti artist who could be worth $200 million when Facebooks IPO hits. In 2005, when Facebook was still limited to students and relatively a small player, Choe came in to create art and opted for a small stake in the company rather than payment. Even though he reportedly didn’t think much of the Facebook concept, he’s going to reap substantial rewards from its success.

Many companies will pay (in options, often) for your expertise as well. If you can call yourself an expert in anything, leverage your unique experience and knowledge and offer to consult for a related company in exchange for shares or options. The more you help, the more your shares may be worth in the end and everyone wins.

The Waiting Game

Taking ownership in a product or start-up will not make anyone rich over night. David Choe, mentioned above, was once homeless between his work for Facebook and the great position he’s in today. Employees of Google spent years working hard before becoming IPO millionaires. If you need the money now, do things that will earn you money, but if you opt for shares in a company, be prepared to wait for years before your ship comes in.

Conclusions

Even the busiest of people end up with free time spent chatting or playing games on Facebook. If you had an free hour every day (after work and family, of course), would you give it up for a small chance that it could turn into a large profit one day? If so, try some of the things above and report back in a few years.

Are you doing any of this already or is there anything I missed? I’d love to hear your input in the comments below.

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Sell Old Games Online

Glyde’s selling process is a little different from what I’m used to. To sell your old video games, you just have to start typing in the name of a game, select it when Glyde finds it for you, and click the Sell button. Then you tell Glyde the condition of your game and it will auto-set the market price for you. You can raise or lower the price and then list the item. Although you have to fill out some required information for your first listing, the process is a lot faster and easier than most sites.

To review this site, I figured the best thing to do would be to create an account and start selling. In a test scenario where I might sell the Halo 2 XBOX game in Excellent condition gave me a suggested selling price of $2.25. After the $0.27 transaction fee and $1.25 mailer cost, the total money made from the sale comes out to $0.73. My first thought was that this seems like a pretty low price to let go of my game for. Despite it being an older game, I found it to be a bit low compared to other online shopping sources, as well. I next checked out how much I’d get for Halo Reach, which fell a lot more in line with the average selling price on other sites at $11.51 after fees.

The thing that I found most appealing about the selling process is the shipping procedure. Once someone has purchased your game, Glyde sends you a pre-addressed mailing envelope to ship your game in. All you have to do is pop it back in the mail and you’re done. This is a vast convenience over the way I have to ship things I sell elsewhere, which usually includes a lunch hour wasted at the post office.

Buy and Sell Anything Online

While Glyde may be well-suited for selling old games, you can buy, too, and they don’t stop at just games. I found the iPad, iPhone, Nook, Kindle, and even books. The selling process is pretty similar throughout, but the questions displayed on the selling page are geared towards what you’re selling. When selling an iPhone, for example, you’re asked about if it works and the amount of scratches on it. With a game, you’re asked more generally about the condition of the game.

Buying is pretty straight forward, but the feature that stands out is that Glyde shows you the item that is closest and cheapest for your search. This seems like it would be a no-brainer, but sadly, eBay, Amazon, and Google don’t default to such a listing. In addition, I like that the packaging isn’t suspect to the whim of the seller. You can pretty well expect your item to be delivered in what Glyde deems adequate packaging.

Conclusions

Where Glyde may occasionally fall short in seller earnings on a sale, it doubles up on convenience and ease of use over all. The shipping system stands out in a way that promises to quietly eliminate the usual shipping concerns most buyers and sellers face on other platforms. Personally, I will definitely look to Glyde when it comes time to sell games or some of the books I have sitting around here.

Although the preceding was a sponsored review, as always I strive to provide an honest opinion of the product or site reviewed.

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I’m sure that by now, most people are familiar with the concept of “checking in” to let your friends know where you are. For those who aren’t, it’s pretty simple. You’re out to lunch at Outback Steakhouse and you whip out your phone and check in using a service like FourSquare to let your friends know you’re there. Maybe one of them will drop in and have a drink with you or just notice that you go there a lot and try the place themselves. Checking in is only becoming more popular every day, but now you can get paid for doing it!

Get Paid To Check In

WeReward.com pays you for check ins and tasks you complete in the real world. It integrates with Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, so you can still get your badges and share the way you always have, which is pretty cool because I can now just use this one app for all three. Of course I checked out the video below and then promptly downloaded the app to my iPhone.

It’s one of those things I wish I’d thought of first and had to happen eventually. I’ve been checking in all the time on FourSquare and now I can get points for each check in that convert to cash. You bet I’m in.

Trying It First Hand

I haven’t been out yet, but I wanted to give this thing a shot. After downloading the app, I set up all three network connections to Facebook, Twitter, and FourSquare. I always do this first in new apps so I don’t have to go back and do it later in the middle of some activity or while I’m on the road. Before I could do this, the app took a little longer to load than I had expected, but I suspect that’s because it is grabbing all the nearby businesses and the reward details. It also crashed the first time I opened it. I can’t say if that’s the app’s fault as I’m jailbroken, but it’s in open beta, so who knows. Regardless, once the app is loaded it’s fast and it hasn’t crashed again. So far, so good. I should also point out that I’m using a non-default font on my iPhone, so text in apps sometimes gets cut off as seen in my screen caps.

When you first open the application, you get a listing of businesses in the area where you can check in and earn reward points as seen in the image on the left above. For these, it seems I have to take a picture of the establishment if I want my points, but it’s not like that’s hard to do. When I hit “Check In”, it loads up the camera, I snap the photo and submit it for review. Another option lets me find things nearby with a search. To give it a test run, I typed in “pizza” and off it went searching for me. A second later, I had a listing that included a bunch of places near me that were either pizza joints or at least serve or sell pizza. Oddly, the list also included Long John Silvers. I don’t think they sell pizza, but other than that, it was pretty accurate. Before you check in, you can also click a little arrow at the bottom to expand a CityGrid listing for the business which includes a bit of helpful information as well as a review count and overall rating.

The image on the right above shows the Tasks view. This is the sweet spot where you can cure a little boredom and earn a lot of points quickly. Points convert at one cent each, so the Taco Bell task will earn you a cool $5 while other tasks are generally pretty simple and get you decent point amounts as well. As a test (and to earn an easy breezy 50 points), I tapped on the WeReward task which asked me to write “www.wereward.com” on my body with a marker and submit a photo of it. I wrote on my hand, snapped a photo, added a little note for Twitter (optional) and submitted it. I now have my first 50 points pending.

You can check the status and history of all your rewards in the rewards page of the app. This shows Pending, Approved, Declined, and Referrals. This page is also where you can see your point total and its dollar equivalent and cash out if you’re over 5,000 points.

Earn With Referrals

If I’m already going to use a service and tell my friends about it, I look for the referral program if it exists, and it wasn’t hard to find here. Not only does it exist, but it’s on a percentage scale. When I refer someone, I get 10% of all their verified check in points, which can add up pretty quick. I know some serious FourSquarers who check in all the time.

Conclusions

Now this is where you iPhone owners should Download the App. WeReward is a welcomed addition to my iPhone. Not only will I use it daily, but it works well and is very well thought out. I’m already excited to try it out for the first time checking in somewhere for dinner! Download and let me know what you think.

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UPDATE: This stand now has a web site and will be taking pre-orders in the near future : Perfect iPad Stand

Yeah… The bottom part is a bowl meant to eat food from. I’ve posted a couple times about Quirky, a site that takes product ideas through a community-driven process that refines the idea into a product, logo and all. This is where a site member, Jeff Tromp entered his idea for the perfect iPad stand. Just watch the video to see how it works.

A Better iPad Stand

What will make this iPad stand better than everything currently on the market? The thing that stands out the most to me is the full range of motion it provides. Jeff makes some great points in his video, showing how Apple’s stand sticks you with portrait positioning and walks away. His racing game demonstration in the video above (and additional racing-specific demo) show his iPad stand going beyond portrait or landscape, turning the iPad, itself, into the steering wheel for the game. From what I’ve seen, it really seems to provide the freedom that all the existing stands are lacking.

The amazing part about this new (hopefully) soon-to-be-product is that people are already reviewing it and consumers are lining up to buy one. Across the globe, a site in Korea posted a favorable opinion (translated) and views on his YouTube demo just keep going up. A lot of his video traffic is viral and that says a lot.

Make it happen (and make some money)

The two best things about Quirky are that you can help guide the development of a product and that you can make money doing it. This is no exception. Jeff’s Perfect iPad Stand is in the running to be chosen as Quirky’s Product 46 and I think it will win, too. Just click that link and create a free account at Quirky to vote for Jeff’s idea. If it wins, your vote will earn you a little piece of every single sale. Seriously. Not only can you say you helped it become a product, but when it’s ready for sale, you can wake up in the morning and see earnings from its sales. I know this because I’m currently earning on 21 products at Quirky and the highest earner for me is their Cloak iPad case.

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What is Quirky?

In short, Quirky (which I mentioned last year) is a site that brings together thinkers to take a good idea from just that to a product on the shelf. People like Jim spend $99 to submit an idea for consideration. Phase one starts with people voting on ideas, which helps the company select a winner. Subsequent phases such as naming, industrial design and logo design and selection all earn people “influence” for helping guide the product’s creation. In the end, those who helped all have influence (which translates to a percentage of sales) in the final product, the original idea submitter earning the highest. Involvement can be as little as filling out a survey or voting in the winning logo or it can be more involved like creating the winning logo. The more you contribute, the more you earn on every sale of the final product. When a product is designed and ready to go, it experiences a presale period with a threshold of sales to meet before actually hitting the production line. This final hurdle completed, a product sells on the Quirky site as well as through any vendors that pick it up.

How Jim Made All That Money

My first instinct is to say that he didn’t have to do a lot of work for the money, but truth be told, Jim already had some man hours into this before becoming a part of the Quirky community. He had owned several pocket knives over the years, but he never felt any of them really got it right. He wanted to build the perfect pocket knife. Realizing that “perfect” meant different things to different people, the idea of a modular pocket knife was born.

After a few prototypes, Jim’s idea materialized as a product idea submission for Quirky. With $99 on the line, the idea had little more than a decent description and high hopes. After voting and discussion, the then unnamed product was chosen for production and began to work its way through the development phases, getting a name, logo, design, and even a tag line from other Quirky community members (or “quirks”) along the way. Last week, Quirky announced Switch, the modular pocket knife kit.

In pre-sale, Switch had a decent start and was moving along at an average pace. After seeing some great press from top tech blogs, it caught the eye of major online retailer, Think Geek, who committed to a large purchase and helped the sales total for the day reach 1,170 units. At $8.90 per unit sold, Jim earned over $10,000 in just one day for his cut. That doesn’t count the almost 300 units sold in previous days and the countless sales to come.

What about the other contributors? They’re not doing too bad either. The second highest contributor, Kelly Saglibene, has earned $1,311 in the 5 days Switch has been up for sale for the logo she created and Julie Kowal is taking home over $1,000 so far just for submitting the winning name. Sadly, I was busy during the Switch product development process and did not contribute.

My Q & A With Jim

I had some questions I just had to ask Jim. I’m sure he’s busy, so I kept it brief.

How did you first come across Quirky?
Through a prior investor that knew them.

Why and when did you decide to submit your idea for production on Quirky?
When I first met Ben we talked about various products. I had been tinkering with pocket knives for years trying to modify them. He thought it was a natural idea for Quirky. As a test of their site, I submitted it.

How did you feel when your idea won the selection phase?
I was a bit surprised – it had not won the first time through. I thought perhaps it was too complicated a product for Quirky. Evidently not!

How about when you saw all those sales?
Beats a stick in the eye!

Do you have any plans for all the money Switch is making you?
My guess? Charity. But who knows, maybe a boat J

Will you be submitting more ideas to Quirky after such a success?
Definitely. I have always been a tinkerer and have several ideas. Just hard to find the time; you can’t just submit on a whim. The community expects (and rightly so) a well-thought out concept, complete with pictures, or video, or schematics and whatnot.

Jim ended with a very good point. If you’re going to pitch a product idea or business model to anyone, it needs to be a well thought out idea and it’s the same for Quirky. Don’t let that scare you though. If you have a great idea, figure out the details, draw up some artwork (or get help) and submit it to Quirky. You may just have the next hot product.

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That’s the promise of a pretty cool crowd sourcing site, called Quirky.

What is it and how does it work?
Quirky is a site that lets people submit ideas for new products to be developed. Presenting an idea costs about $100, so make sure you really think it’s a good idea and take some time to think out the details before submitting. This is essentially your business proposal for venture capital. Of the ideas submitted, the rest of us get to vote for our favorites and contribute to the product idea. Days later, a product is selected and the process begins to develop the product idea into a product.

Product development consists of a few more steps and like the product selection process, site members get to influence the process by suggesting a product name, designing a logo, etc. It all happens pretty quickly, but email reminders help you keep on top of new product stages. Once a product has completed all of its development stages, Quirky begins taking pre-orders. Depending on the product, they’ll accept pre-orders for, on average, from 300-500 units. Once they fill the pre-order, the product goes into full production.

How to make money
The best part about this site is the ability to earn some extra money. The idea originator gets a decent perentage of the sales, of course, but then many of the contributors do, too. It may be a good amount or just pennies per sale, but it’s on every sale. I like to think of it in terms of something like the Slinky or the Rubik’s Cube. Had one of those products started on Quirky, several contributors would be laughing all the way to the bank. The example on the right shows actual earnings for some people on a $15 product. Helping out with a product’s development might not make you filthy rich, but it could bring in some nice Christmas money.

A good example
A pretty good example of this was the first product I helped with, Scratch-n-Scroll, which is currently selling nicely.

Scratch-n-Scroll is a standard mousepad with an added writing surface. This mousepad is for all those times you are working at your desk and cant find a pen to jot down that phone number or list item you know you will forget later on.

Simply, write notes to yourself on your mouse pad using just the pressure from your finger or the built in plastic stylus as a “pen.” Cool thing is, just like your childhood toy the magic slate, you can erase the notes at any time simply by flipping up the semi-transparent top sheet.

When I got to it, it was a really good idea among a list of ideas we had to vote on. It was my first pick of those offered, so I was glad to see it chosen for development. Through all the stages, I think the only thing I did was offer some comments about the design and function. My help was noted and I now get a very small amount of money (I think it’s like 1.5 cents) from every sale. If they sell 10,000 of these things, I’ll make about $150, which is pretty good for having just commented on how to improve the design.

Make the most of it
As someone without a ton of free time, I always look at how to get the most benefit from the time I spend on anything new like this. With Quriky, there’s three ways to earn money. The first two we’ve already gone over: submit your idea or help with someone’s idea. The third is to help sell the finished product. When I linked to the above Scratch-n-Scroll, I did so with a unique affiliate link. On this product, I get a 10% commission on any referred sale, and sold one already by just dropping a link on Twitter. If you choose to help with product development, don’t just help with one product. Help with any product that you like enough. If you help with 10 products that are all in production and selling, you can build up a nice residual income. Finally, when I signed up (and I think they’re still doing it), I got $20 in my account just for signing up to help contribute, so at the very least, go sign up.

If you do sign up, leave a comment here and let me know what you think of the site and what products you assisted in.

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A year or two ago, I didn’t like payperpost , but it wasn’t their fault. What I didn’t like was the back-handing that Google was doing to all the bloggers to tried to make a couple bucks for their opinions. Google dropped me from PR5 to PR0 overnight and with the frustration of trying to get my page rank back up came fear that it could vanish just as easily. Because of that, I stayed away from PPP and a couple other sites for a long time. To be fair, I shouldn’t even say I didn’t like PayPerPost, because that’s not really accurate. Regardless, I found myself sans that revenue stream until recently.

I got an Alpha key a few weeks ago so I could check out the new site before it officially launched and it was a nice change from the old PayPerPost I remembered. The first thing I noticed was the new elegant design. It’s simplified and they’ve cut it down to only the necessary goods.

It’s not as great as SocialSpark (another IZEA site), but It looks like it’ll be much better when they come out of alpha and have more opportunities available. It’s hard to tell where it can go from here and how some of the searching and sorting features will work out until there’s more available, but it’s off to a pretty good start. The only thing that really bothers me is the very limited time frame we get to complete an opportunity. Id love to see them open that up to at least a few days. In any case, after a long time away, I’ll likely be logging into PayPerPost every day to check opportunities like I do currently with SocialSpark. Welcome back, old friend.

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@joetech I want that free link in your Bookmark Friday post : http://www.joetech.com/suggests/bmftw

This week, three people asked again and nobody new bothered to, so:

Babasfarmlife (Wiley, Colorado)
Bio: Remodel Victorian Country Stone Farmhouse
Site: http://babasfarmlife.blogspot.com/

Rambleredhead (Indiana)
Bio: Great gay podcast – Interviews with the GLBT community
Site: http://www.rambleredhead.com/

Hilary Dickinson (Suffolk, UK)
Bio: Learning about Internet Marketing with particular interest in helping our young people learn about finance, IM & blogging
Site: http://www.hilarydickinson.com/

Thanks to everyone who retweets my requests for Bookmark Fridays and sends me bookmark suggestions, too. Now on with the bookmarks for the week (and there’s a lot this week):

Fast passports – My project manager is flying into Mexico next week and realized the need for very fast passport processing. Check out these guys!

Twittad – Here’s a “make money on Twitter” idea I like. Would you let someone put a sponsored background on your Twitter profile for a few bucks a week? (affiliate link – If you don’t want me to earn, go right to http://www.twittad.com)

Wall-E case mod – This is one of the better super-customized computer cases out there.

Cyberoptix Tie Lab – A friend of mine makes ties. Scratch that. She makes super hella cool ties that I’m starting to see on TV stars and everywhere else. My favorite is still the medic tie.

Tweenbots – This is a great (and fun) experiment in social interaction and human nature. Just watch.

Glacier W200 wearable computer – How’d you like a computer on your wrist? This is pretty cool, but it’s more for health and military than it is for me and you. Still, pretty cool.

ShirtsMyWay – This is kind of like a CafePress for dress shirts.

Ashton beats CNN – Ashton Kutcher beat CNN to one Million followers. Watch the video as he hit’s 1,000,000. And he’s on with Larry King right now, talking about it.

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AzoogleAds just announced that they’re throwing a party at the Playboy Mansion and they’re having a contest to decide who gets to go. The top 25 challengers get an all-expense paid trip for 2 nights to Los Angeles, including hotel accommodations and attendance at the party.

The party is on August 28th, 2009 and the competition runs from February 1, 2009 through April 30, 2009. I was just talking to my friend Ian Fernando about how I plan to kick start my affiliate marketing this month and although I already have plenty of motivation, this doesn’t hurt and the timing is perfect.

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Share them
There’s over 100 Million blogs, alone, and they’re all looking for pictures for their blogs. If you’re like me, a lot of your photos are just personal, but many are artistic in nature. These are the photos you want others to see. These are the ones looking for publication. Flickr is a great place to get your photo noticed, but if you want someone to publish it in their blog, you’ll want to set your licensing. I use “Attribution Creative Commons” for all of my non-persona because I just want the eyes on my photos at this point. You can just share some if you like, reserving the rights on those images that you want to sell rights to or personal items. This licensing type allows for anyone to use your photos as long as they credit you back in the way you desire. My photos require a link back to the photo’s page. If another blogger happens across one of my shared photos, they will find that they are free to use it with a link back to the photo on Flickr. If the photo is used in print, my name should be mentioned along with the URL to my site. This kind of sharing can lead to a lot of inbound traffic for the rest of your photos.

Send your photos to groups
Flickr has tons and tons of photo groups. A group is just a bunch of people all sharing photos that fit into a specific theme. Michelle and I spent some time in London and Paris for our honeymoon. During our time there, I took nearly 500 photos and about 80% or more of these are non-personal and intended to be artsy. These photos are a perfect candidate for the groups “London” and “Paris”, respectively, of course. All I did was join the two groups. Then I opened my “Honeymoon” set and opened the photos I wanted to add to the London group. In each photo page, I clicked “Send To Group”, selected the group, confirmed, and then closed the photo page. When you have a couple hundred photos to add at once, this can become tedious. Luckily, there’s an easier way to add multiple photos to a single group. Head to the group’s page, and click “Add Photos or Video”. What you get is a page that lets you select a bunch of photos at a time to add. Just navigate to the set to select photos from and start clicking. Most groups impose a daily limit, so choose wisely. When you’re done there, find more groups. Many of my photos were of castles in London, so I found a large group for photos of Castles and added those photos to that group as well. Look at some of your best photos and think about characteristics that might place that photo in certain groups. Find those groups, join them, and add your photos that apply. If done right, you will have thousands of new views on your photos.

Give people what they want
Sure you have your ideal photos that you want to promote, but what if they don’t fit easily into a group, you don’t want to share certain photos for free? The goal here is to get more people looking at your work, for starters. For some of you, your ideal future includes getting paid licensing fees on some of your photos. Either way, you need to give people what they’re looking for on Flickr. There’s a couple easy ways to do this.

First (and easiest), is to just make a list of what’s making news right now. Primarily (in the U.S., anyway) that’s the ongoing presidential election. That means there’s thousands of bloggers out there writing post after post about it. Think about what they’re writing, and shoot photos or create artwork that would fit with their posts. Today, for example, there’s probably 500 articles that remind readers to register to vote. If you thought about that last week and took a good picture of a “Register to vote here” sign, some blogger out there would probably be in your photo stream right now, glad to see that the usage rights fit his situation. You can also shoot photos of stuff that’s always popular, like sports cars, girls in bikinis, cuter-than-cute fuzzy animals, etc.

Another winner is backgrounds. Backgrounds and wallpapers have been popular on the web since long before Flickr and there are sites that would love to have free rights to use them. Create some backgrounds with attribution rights and you’ll soon have sites displaying your work and linking back to your Flickr pages. Last month, I turned my yellow Lamborghini photo into an iPhone background and this site posted it for people to download. This weekend, I created some fairly simple, but nice-looking iPhone wallpapers with just a background and some PhotoShop effects on the Apple Logo. Another site is already displaying and linking to them. I haven’t even jumped into full backgrounds, either. If you’re shooting photos, try for the Eden effect (an image of somewhere I can look at all day while stuck in a cubicle), things people are fanatical about (cats, dogs, sports, cars), or artsy, but not overbearing, patterns.

Either way you decide to go, you’ll have people looking for your photos and passing them on to other people, displaying them on their computers and iPhones, etc. For me, iPhone backgrounds were an obvious choice. They are small, pretty easy to make from most photos, there’s a lot of buzz still for the iPhone, and there’s potentially about ten million people who might want to download them. If you have photos that you want people to pay a small license fee to use, those people are more likely to see your photos when you’re promoting the free stuff.

Tag and Title!
I, myself, sometimes forget, but you should always tag your images and title them properly. An image with a rich title (use keywords) and good tags will have a much better chance of being seen in search results both on and off Flickr. Once you’re in the search results, the thumbnail should earn the click on it’s own, but you have to get the image in front of someone first. Is your image a 1024 by 768 background image of the AZ Cardinals’ new stadium? If so, your tags should include “background” and “Cardinals”, but dig a little deeper, too. Add in “1024×768″, “wallpaper”, “Arizona”, “stadium”, and anything else that someone might search for that would accurately describe your photo.

Use your own images and link back
I really can’t think of a long drawn out way to say this. It’s simple… If you use MySpace, LiveJournal, write a blog, etc., use your images and use the code Flickr gives you under the image. It creates a link right back to the image. This is a gateway to the rest of your images, where someone else might find an image for their blog or a friend on LiveJournal might grab the linking code to share the image, too.

Know your numbers
Suppose you didn’t do anything above (not on purpose, anyway), and just happened to upload a photo that hit the mark. People are commenting on it and adding it as a favorite. If you know where those people are coming from, which photos they like the bes, and why, you have a recipe to recreate success.

Looking back at my own stats, I can see that the most popular thing I’ve uploaded to date was my “Blue Screen of Death” background for the iPhone. It was also the least effort to create, but happened to catch on because you have to view it to read it and it’s funny having the famous Windows mood-killer displayed on a Mac product. In any case, I can also see that it has become the “favorite” of three people, which is more important to me. The fact that someone went the extra step of making it a favorite tells me that they liked it a lot. The fact that three people did so tells me that I should spit out a few more geek humor iPhone backgrounds before I publish this post. Get to know your statistics pages. There’s more than you might think by passively glancing at a page or two. Click every link and take note of which images get the most love.

Don’t be afraid to learn
I’ve said it once and I’ll say it a thousand times. You’re never SO good that you can’t learn from someone else. Look at what other people are doing and get inspired. Find tutorials like this awesome guide on how to get “perfect exposure” out of your images. Soak it all in, try it, ask people for their opinions. After all your marketing, the image really should speak for itself.

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