When you read that headline, you probably pictured me dipping my toes in baby oil and snapping saucy shots for strangers online.
But nope — I’ve never actually sold a single foot pic in my life.
Instead, I did something a little smarter.
How It Started
It was 2022, and suddenly every corner of the internet was buzzing with one weird side hustle: selling feet pics online.
TikTok was overflowing with stories of women making thousands from photos of their toes. Forums, Facebook groups, Reddit threads — you name it, someone was talking about it.
Naturally, people were Googling like crazy.
And that’s where I saw an opportunity.
The $300 Investment That Changed Everything
At the time, I’d been studying SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) for years.
I knew how to spot a rising search trend — and more importantly, how to rank for it.
So instead of diving into the world of foot-focused photography, I decided to publish a comprehensive guide on how to sell feet pics.
I paid a brilliant writer $300 USD to put together an in-depth, honest article for my site — a place where I help mums find smart ways to make and save money.
It was a solid article. Informative, helpful, not scammy.
And thanks to some careful SEO magic, it quickly shot up the search rankings.
Here’s a copy of that article reproduced on this site – so you can see what I mean.
Then It Hit #1 On Google
For a while, if you searched “how to sell feet pics,” you’d see my blog post right at the top of Google.
Ahead of all the major finance and side hustle sites.
And let me tell you — that traffic was wild.
We were getting thousands of hits a day, mostly from the US. People stayed on the page, read the whole thing, clicked around the site.
It was one of the best-performing posts I’ve ever published.
The Revenue? Over $30,000 NZD
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A screenshot of the ad revenue this article earnt. This is the USD amount.
In total, that single article generated over $19,000 USD in display advertising revenue alone — that’s more than $30,000 NZD.
All from a $300 investment and some well-timed SEO strategy.
I wasn’t selling feet pics — but I was making money because other people wanted to.
And in the world of online income, being the middleman is often where the real money is.
“In a gold rush, the people who made the most money weren’t the ones mining for gold — they were the ones selling the shovels.”
But Then Came the Downside
My site is monetised with Mediavine, a premier US-based ad network that specialises in high-quality display advertising.
Getting accepted into Mediavine is no small feat (ha!) — they have strict entry requirements, and your site must be in excellent standing with Google AdSense.
That’s why it was such a shock when, a few months into my article’s success, my ad revenue suddenly plummeted.
As it turned out, Google had flagged my feet pics article as “adult content.”
That meant it was no longer eligible for high-paying ads — and worse, it put my entire site at risk of being removed from Mediavine.
That would have been catastrophic for my business.
Mediavine is a major part of my site’s income, and losing access would’ve meant starting over with a less lucrative ad platform (or none at all).
Fighting the Flag
With the support of Mediavine staff, I spent weeks arguing my case with Google.
Eventually, they agreed.
The content wasn’t adult in nature — it was purely educational, and written in a way that aligned with Google’s policies.
The flag was removed, and my ad revenue returned to normal.
But let me tell you — that experience definitely put an end to any ideas I had of publishing more adult-adjacent content.
The short-term traffic wasn’t worth the long-term risk to my entire site.
What Happened Next
As you can imagine, once the internet caught on to the keyword, the big dogs came running (Forbes, Business Insider, all of them).
Every site remotely related to making money started publishing their own version of my article.
My page still hung on near the top for a while — but the traffic eventually dropped off as the space got flooded.
That’s the nature of SEO: you win big, and then you have to fight to hold your ground.
But I wasn’t mad.
I’d already made more than $30,000 from one single blog post.
Lessons From the Foot Pic Fad
If you’re trying to build an online income, here’s what this experience taught me:
- Trends = traffic. If you can spot a trending topic early and get quality content out fast, you can ride that wave to massive traffic.
- You don’t have to sell the thing — you can sell the information about the thing. There’s often more money in teaching people how to do something than doing it yourself.
- SEO is powerful. It’s not quick, and it’s not guaranteed — but when it works, it’s like compound interest on content.
- Know the rules of your platform. Pushing the boundaries for clicks can have consequences, especially if you’re playing in someone else’s sandbox (like Google’s).
Feet pics didn’t make me rich. Google traffic did
So yeah, technically, I made over $30k from feet pics.
But not by selling them.
By understanding what people wanted to know — and getting the answer in front of them before anyone else.
