January 27, 2004 | View Comments (14) | Category: Web Business
Summary: Making money on the web with a crazy idea for a website.
Remember that site I talked about the other day, Lame Ass Job? Well I have a secret plan to turn into a money making machine. Yes you heard me right. I am going to turn a profit on it before the year is out. And I am going to document it each step of the way from advertising to promotions to cashing the checks. I spoke about the potential of making money on the Independent Web and the answers I got were not to reassuring, but this was an opportunity that could not be missed.
Jarrod (go check out his site for some good reads) and I were talking one day and doing the usual complaining about jobs and how much they suck. I thought it would be cool to start a site where everyone could write about their lame jobs, coworkers, and bosses. I figured jobs was a category that paid some good rates through Google's Adsense so everything was looking good so far. Then I remembered 1&1 was doing a promotion of free webhosting for 3 years and this plan started to look really good.
I hopped on over to GoDaddy and bought the domain name for $7.95 and that is how far I am in the hole. I figure a year's worth of Google Ads should put me over that and then I have a profit. That is a sign of a great business mind. Seriously though, it is a nice little experiment that should teach me some new things about actually making money on the web, which few people I know actually do.
In this series, that will go on through the year, I will talk about the different strategies that I use to make the site successful. Yes you heard me correctly, Make The Site Successful. In reality I have to make $157.96 for a profit (forgot the MT license I paid). Do you think this is possible? Or in reality is this the dumbest idea you have ever heard of?
Next article will be about design issues, so lets not comment on that right now.
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Obviously you're not accounting for your time in your costs, otherwise you'd have an 'in the hole' figure of far more than $7.95 :)
It'll be an interesting series to read though...
Justin French
It would have been a lot easier if you hadn't had to pay the MT commercial license, perhaps by using a Free system. If you can build up a decent amount of traffic to the site you can get at least a few bucks a day from the Google ads, and that's the only revenue stream I can really see for the site. Perhaps you could leverage some sort of email newsletter, which can be effective.
I have to agree with Justin that by not factoring your time as a cost (don't forget oppurtunity cost either) your figures may be skewed.
Matt (http://photomatt.net/)
Adsense hasn't been performing very well for most publishers lately. I suggest selling your own adspace directly, start with a small price, around $2 for 1,000 impressions, then raise it over time depending on how much interest you get from advertisers.
Of course, if all you want to do is make $157, you will easily accomplish that using adsense.
Rich (http://www.project09.com)
Not to echo the obvious here, but factoring in your time (which is the major cost factor for freelancers, consultants, and even large agencies)and this is a money losing effort.
How much would you charge to design that site for someone else? What about the regular maintenance, the administrative costs of collecting the stories, choosing which are appropriate, filtering out the unappropriate and then posting them?
Time is money. Every click of the second hand spent on this, is time and money lost on something that could really be profitable.
If you were to do a true financial analysis on this project, you would most likely conclude that this site itself lives up to its name.
To wrap this up on a positive note - if you're really looking to make some money off this business model, develop your own CMS to run this mini-metafilter type site and then offer to sell, install and maintain it on other sites. Of course, going through some of your past posts, that's probably your goal anyway.
Mark Fusco (http://www.lightpierce.com/ltshdw)
I hope it's more succesful than http://www.wageslave.com, which started life with the same premise you're describing.
Also, you wrote, "Well I have a secret plan to turn into a money making machine." You personally, or your Web site?
(And the posting software here insists on sticking the comma *inside* the anchor element and inside its href value, no matter how often I put it outside the end tag.)
James (http://www.jamesbritt.com)
Another question, how are you covering your ass in regards to these stories?
Shouldn't you have a terms of use or rules page describing what qualifies as an appropriate story - no proper names, companies...
Where does it state you will edit the story?
Do you know the law and how it applies to what is considered libel?
Do you know what your liabilities and responsibilities as a public medium are regarding possibly propogating an untrue statement?
How are you going to protect yourself from that?
How are you going to protect both the user of your site, and the subject of the posting?
I know these are boring, cynical, pessimistic and generally unfun questions - however, if you are going to truly go on the path of becoming a legal business (inc, llp...)these are the types of crappy details you'll have to be accountable for.
Mark Fusco (http://www.lightpierce.com/ltshdw)
1&1, huh? I have a test site set up with them, but their admin interface is so counter-intuitive and soooo slow that I've not really done much with it. And it blows my mind that I go in and set up an email account and they tell me it'll work in 3-4 hours. When I do it on my server, it's instantaneous.
Still, free is free I suppose, and you use FTP much more than the admin interface.
As for the job thing, good luck. IIRC 1&1 also gives you some free google advertising credits so you can become a paid listing for some keywords of your choice. That might help a little.
JC (http://thelionsweb.com/weblog)
Ah, yes, time I take to work on the site. This may be kind of weird, but I have had so much fun reading the stories that I never even thought of it as work. With that in mind I will simply keep track of how long I work on it and at the end of the year we can look at how much I made compared to how much I put in.
Mark: The guidelines will be posted hopefully with the new design. You guys are sort of getting the pre-Alpha look at the site.
Scrivs (http://www.9rules.com/whitespace/)
I hate to be the bringer of bad news, but don't you remember Kvetch? (www.kvetch.com)... it's long since gone, but it did exactly what you were talking about only not limited to bitching about jobs. I would recommend talking to Derek Powazek about his experiences before diving into this.
Nick (http://www.digital-web.com)
After reading the Kvetch eulogy I can see many flaws in a system such as this. For one they had no moderator regulating the flow or quality of content coming in. Second, it seems that you could fake anyone's name and in a community based environment like that, it will always be a problem.
But like I said, worse comes to worse I am out $157.95 for a year. Already made a couple of $ from Google Adsense so I think I will be alright.
Some people learn by reading books, other by listening to people speak. I learn both of those ways too, but the best way for me to learn is to actually try it.
Scrivs (http://www.9rules.com/whitespace/)
hmm. well, and you can always use the mt license elsewhere.
Don't they have an unlimited web developer license for use on client sites?
JC (http://thelionsweb.com/weblog)
From what I've read, Scrivs seems to be investing his free time into this. He also seems to be enjoying it. Thusly, time doesn't necessarily equal money. Not until it gets bigger.
I can see some potential problems there, though. Being the only moderator, what happens when the site gets popular? You'd be spending a lot of time checking each post. You may want to find (hire?) someone to help you out. Of course, you'll want to let users know about any delays they can expect before their story is reviewed.
How are you promoting the site other than on your blog? You may want to buy some advertising. Then, hope that it will bring in enough of your own advertising clicks to be profitable.
If you make $1 per day this year, you'll have made plenty of profit. I have no experience in the effectiveness of AdSense, so I don't know what would be expected.
There's potential return value on the site, so that's pretty well covered.
Again, I wish you luck! Thanks for making this a public experience so we can all learn. In the meantime, try contacting TV networks about the reality blog idea that Zelnox had... :P
Chris Vincent (http://dris.dyndns.org:8080/)
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#1
This should definitely prove to be interesting to follow.
One thing I would have done though was create my own CMS to avoid the cost of MT's commercial license. Of course, that's something I've been doing for some time, and I have some decent experience in the area. Might not be suitable for everyone.
Anyways, good luck!
Chris Vincent (http://dris.dyndns.org:8080/)