Market to a Niche: Consider designing your image hosting site so that it targets a specific niche, such as photographers, moms, grandparents or young adults. You can also target individuals in your city or region. It is much easier and cheaper to go after a small segment of the population then it is to try to target to everyone, especially with so much competition.

Have a High Quality, Good Looking Site: Make sure that your site looks professional. It doesn’t have to cost you a fortune, but check out some of the webmaster forums. You will likely find other members that offer website creation at decent prices. If you have some basic web building skills, consider purchasing a template and adding your copy and scripts to it.

Make Sure Your Site is Easy to Use: Don’t make your so site so difficult to navigate that it takes a 4 year college degree to figure it out. The simpler that it is to use, the more often people will come back and tell other people about it.

Monetize It: In order for an image hosting site to be worth your time, you have to monetize it. Consider using Adsense or Adbrite ads. If you can get a good amount of traffic, you may also want to consider selling advertising space to other web masters who may be targeting a similar niche.

Provide Some Extra Value: Give away something extra. Consider your target audience. What are they interested in? Find out and then find a way to give to them free. A simple digital product that they can download would be more then enough. Perhaps tie the gift to a certain number of referrals that they are required to send your way before they get access. This is a way to satisfy the customers that you already have and to also gain new ones absolutely free.