Day Trip Media: Narrow Escapes - Sites And Ideas I Let Drop

Sunday, 27 April 2008

Narrow Escapes - Sites And Ideas I Let Drop

I have to admit to being a serial website maker. I get ideas and bounce from one thing to the next. I'm not sure why I've worked that way, I think it comes from my background in Fine Art, the idea being you're always working on a number of new 'creations' at a time.

Unfortunately, for the first few years of working on web sites, my ideas around monetising them were pretty crude. I've been running affiliate links (with little success) since around 2000. The first money I made was at the original MP3.com site as a musician, but that didn't last as a business model. Then I tried Amazon links and some complete crap I put on my sites like banner exchanges, simply because I didn't know any better - given the way my sites were, they didn't earn me much.

Then came AdSense, and for a good few years AdSense was for me the key to my financial success. My notion was that I would make sites until I created one that drove so much traffic that the sheer volume of AdSense clicks would pay my way. I didn't really change from this model of working until I was thrown into my self-employment and needed to do something that made me more than a couple of pound a day.

So, I got a lot smarter with the sorts of sites I was making and moved away from AdSense as the primary income for them, concentrating much more on affiliate focused sites. It's all been a big learning curve, I don't naturally consider myself a retail driven sort of person, which explains why until recently, many of my sites were more non-niche and slightly esoteric.

It's a good job I was able to change the way I worked and immerse myself in affiliate marketing rather than AdSense. I had concentrated on more AdSense (and arbitrage) sites the first few months of my working self employed, and as a result my business came close to failing. At one point I'd sold most of my record collection to fund myself, and was within a few days of returning to work for the BBC in a less than ideal role.

Luckily I saw the potential in the way I had been working exploring Adwords and bingo niches that quickly made returns, so I took the chance, turned the job down and carried on with my business with increasing levels of success. Now I'm trying to concentrate on a much more niche focused ideal, as well as continuing to develop existing sites and keep them ticking over.

I thought it would be fun to look at some of the domains I've recently let drop, and the ideas that never quite happened. These sites and ideas had AdSense as their main monetary element, with the potential for additional affiliate links and stuff. A couple are sites that still exist but will never really be developed, and I'll give a quick insight into the ideas behind each one, and the pitfalls, problems encountered.

Media Scum

The plan had been shortly after leaving my last job, I would start a Holy Moly style bitch and gossip site about the media in Wales focusing on its ongoing ineptness, lack of vision, wasting of public money, etcetera. It was going to feature a lot of user generated content alongside my own stories. I never got around to it, and I'm glad I didn't, probably would have cost me money in legal fees in the long run and I doubt there would have been much interest either. Domain's just dropped, so if you fancy doing something with it yourself, feel free.

Chav News

Another in my long line of Chav related sites. It would have aggregated new stories featuring famous Chavs and their escapades. However, like in the real world, Chavs don't make a lot of money, they ain't got much to spend online either. AdSense would have been the most viable money maker for the site, that and pay as you go mobile offers. Domain dropped ages ago should you be bothered.

Moanr And Lazybloggr

More AdSense nonsense, this time the idea was to get people to write blogs for me. Be it moaning web 2.0 style with moanr.com or playing at blogging without actually having a blog with lazybloggr.com. Both sites took only a couple of days to set up, then failed to capture mine or anyone else's imagination and have since been dumped. Kind domain parkers have since taken of moanr.com, and will no doubt soon also take care of Lazybloggr.com to make a few pence more than I ever did with them.

P2P Lawyers

A quiz and arbitrage site hybrid that aimed to get lots of high value AdSense clicks on the back of a fun viral quiz aimed at file sharers. It's still live until I can be arsed to arrange to sell it.

JunkTrove

I had it in my mind that I could do something fun along the lines of turning my waste products into online AdSense gold. Basically I was going to put together a site of all my junk, years of old email, stuff I've thrown out, stuff I've sold on eBay. Logistically it would have been a nightmare, and luckily I never did any more with it, although I do quite fancy one day turning it into a blog about interesting junk. A lot easier to manage, I'd still be cutting and pasting email now if I'd have gone with it, though I do have a local visual junk trove that one day may see the light of webspace.

PAS-78

PAS 78 was a web usability guideline document put out by some government body a couple of years back. I felt quite chuffed at picking up the uk and com domains of the hyphenated version of its title, but to stingy to pay the £30 for document to read it and put a related site online. It would have bored me to tears, just like renewing them both would have done. I think both are available if someone more worthy than me wants to do something with the domains.

I Am Robot

Another AdSense site, the idea had been to see how many Myspace users would befriend someone who was claiming to be a robot joining them for spam purposes. I also stuck in some early landing page / Adwords stuff on a robot theme that fell flat on its arse. I got 300+ friends with my swanky robot adder software in a week, and then they put a load of restrictions on the amount of friend requests you could put out in a day. Just as well, Myspace traffic sucks.

Your Space My Friend

Carrying on with brief and ultimately pointless flirtation with MySpace is this hopefully non-copyright infringing site. Never one to do things the easy way, I eschewed the quick route to a MySpace resources site of just buying a ready made one, I set out to hand build one of my own, with all my own graphics, hand made by me. Time consuming, pointless and still live (just about) it's set to remind me never to waste time on this sort of crap. Yes it's plastered in AdSense, but do the ads pay anything more than a penny or two a click? What do you think?

Tips For Info

This was first an arbitrage site, then it was going to be an all singing and dancing affiliate offer site, then it was a back up bingo landing page thing for bending the rules on Adwords, then it was a chore and now it's waiting for someone else to have a better idea than me. Not a bad little domain name if you want it - I don't think tipsfor.info is registered any more.

Dumped.us

A great domain I picked up with the idea of adding subdomains for humorous effect, as in he.dumped.us, they.dumped.us, ibm.dumped.us etcetera. Not quite sure what I was going to do with it, but I'm sure it would have taken ages to do and made me no money. I think I gave the domain away for next to nothing as some rule change about owning .us domains freaked me out enough to not want to keep it.

The Problem With A Lot Of These Is...

Looking back at the list, a lot of these came from me being diverted from my main goals. I'd often see something a bit shady at a website and try something out or get the idea to try them out. A lot of these sites which didn't make it, as well as many others that I still have online don't really do anything for me other than serve to remind me of a couple of things. Firstly, I'm prone to being easily distracted and making a site as the result of some whim. Secondly they remind me of what not to do in future.

In many cases I've made a rod for my back with the mish mash of sites I have out there not really doing much. At some point I'm going to need to consolidate and weed out all the crap. The crap still makes money though, all be it a few pounds of AdSense revenues every month. I'm trying to concentrate on building quality in existing brands and sites I own. But every so often I still get the urge to do something silly and time consuming. Maybe next time that urge comes on me I can come back here to remind myself not too.

Posted by Dio Bach at 09:01

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