Some programs pay you for promoting their sites or products, but competition is often stiff for these methods. There are actually easier ways to make some extra cash on the side, and surprisingly, some of these methods are not really that well known (and therefore with less competition).

Did you know that the pictures you take on holiday can actually make you money on the Web? Photo sharing is not something new, but making some money out of this is also possible. One of such programs is Shareapic.net.

How it works is this – You just upload your photos to their site, and promote them. Which is a lot easier than promoting actual products, as people in general like to look at photos and it doesn’t cost them a cent. When your photos get visited, you get paid. Seems really easy to me, but it actually works.

The problem is in the promotion of your photos, although it isn’t too complicated by itself. You can promote your photos in many places, photography forums being among the best for this purpose. Post your photos in thumbnail view in the forums, with a link to the original photo.

Shareapic provides you with codes to copy and paste into your messages. Then, you can post to different social networking sites like Myspace, Orkut, Facebook, etc. Also, Shareapic makes it easier for you by automatically publishing your galleries to those sites. However, nothing beats having your own site. You can more easily post your galleries on your site, and have full control over what gets published, plus all the visitors who arrive will be visiting your photos too.

Different photo sharing programs pay you differently. Shareapic pays you around $1 for every 4500 views of your photos. They have the added advantage in that they also pay you a cut of the revenue from their ad company Bidvertiser. However, bear in mind that traffic originating from Asia generally pays very little.

A referral program is also a plus, and Shareapic also runs a referral program where you get paid for referring people to their program. All in all, their system is simple and it pays. For amateur hobby photographers, programs like Shareapic provide a simple method of earning some side money from their uploaded photos, without too much hassle or effort.

In July this year, Carlos Slim emerged seemingly out of nowhere, to overtake Bill Gates as the world’s richest man – after more than a decade of dominance by Gates. Some sources reported that Slim’s wealth was estimated at $67 billion, ahead of Gates by nearly 9 billion. Now that’s 9 BILLION, mind you.

A couple of days ago, the Forbes top 5 list was reshuffled, when an Indian billionaire with interests in construction, textile, and petroleum industries, Mukesh Ambani, appeared to have overtaken both Slim and Gates. This was widely reported in many Indian newspapers, but subsequently watered down by Ambani’s company, Reliance Industries. Mukesh is not the only Indian up there.

These are interesting times with such a fluid situation, that no one at this point in time, really knows who is exactly the world’s richest man right now. It might not be anything remotely connected with you and me, but it’s still an entertaining, trivial, frolic in financial fantasy. A slight change in stock prices could send any of these guys straight to the top. But one thing’s for certain, the world is going to have to do away with the long held notion of “Worlds Richest Man” revolving around Bill Gates, alone.

How the times have changed.