Guest Author - Jill Browne

Some websites let you post travel pictures and stories and suggest that you can make money doing it. I tried a few.

The reality is that the pay is not at a professional level, it's more like pennies per day. This is not the same as publishing in a paid newspaper or magazine. These social networking websites rely on user-generated content and earn money through advertising, which some of them share with the users. Participating can be fun and a good source of contacts, but the money to be made is modest compared to the time required to make it.

Here are my thoughts on some sites I've tried. This article was written in August 2007 and might be out of date soon, so please bear that in mind. My opinions reflect my tastes. Yours may differ. For each of these sites, there are people who will disagree with me, and will claim to have made lots of money. Good for them! However, the average person shouldn't quit their day job.

In alphabetical order, the paying sites I've tried are:

Gather www.gather.com
MyLot www.mylot.com
Squidoo www.squidoo.com.

For each site, you set up a free account and begin contributing content.

Gather and MyLot have some things in common, but their look and feel and user communities are quite different. You post your own articles and photos and comment on others' content. The payment structures reward users for posting frequently.

Gather awards points, redeemable for rewards at certain thresholds. MyLot pays in cash, with a $10.00 US minimum payout.

MyLot and Gather both have subject classifications and search capabilities but I found Gather's more consistent. On MyLot, my search for "Travel" pieces turned up some non-travel "Grey's Anatomy" articles as the top search results.

MyLot's user rating system, as they describe it, should encourage high quality, relevant content. I was surprised that it didn't do this better. Frankly, I became impatient with the amount of unfocused discussion on MyLot. This sort of thing can change quickly though, so my experience may not be typical.

Gather and MyLot may generate a little bit of cash for you if you use them consistently, at cents per day rather than dollars per day.

The reason I started exploring these sites was to have a website to post some of my pictures for my friends and family to see. Flickr.com allows this, but since Gather.com had the potential for payment, I went there instead. That started a quest to find and compare paying sites. I am happy with using Gather.com for my photos, and I've seen some stunning pictures from others there. I may never hit the payment threshold.

Squidoo allows you to create one or more mini-websites, called "lenses", on virtually any topic, including travel. It's as easy to use as all of the above. You can link your lenses to related ones using Squidoo groups. Earnings are in the same range as the previous sites, and again the calculations are invisible. Revenue (in cents) accumulates and is reported monthly. Both Gather and Squidoo have an easy option to direct your earnings toward selected charities if you choose.

I'd like to explore some of the free non-paying sites for photo sharing. If they suit me better than Gather, I will switch. None of the paying sites pay enough to keep me.

There is more to social networking than this article discusses. Each of the sites listed could be a good travel research resource, especially if you can link up with someone who knows the places you'll be going. You won't get rich participating in social networking sites, whether it's about travel or some other topic, so just do it if you love it.