Article about starting a new online business. Feedback preferred.

Small online business story.
Media selling for newbies.

Although this article is not about photographing, let me introduce
myself.
My name is Greg Madisson and I am a professional 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: gregmadisson@yahoo.com

Thank you for your time.

Greg.

P.S.: Special Thanks to<br>
- Ubscribe.com (http://www.ubscribe.com/)<br>
- Adbrite.com (http://www.adbrite.com/)<br>
- Shutterstock.com (http://www.shutterstock.com/)<br>

Greg Madisson is a professional photographer who started working in
photo-business 15 years ago and moved to media and content-selling
business a year ago. In this article Greg describes the steps he had
to pass to do this.
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