This morning I had an idea for a new website. It will be a website/blog about building a website/blog.
I recently read an article explaining how bloggers earn money online. I knew a little bit about Google ads, and wasn’t impressed. But this article described how, once you have enough traffic, you can rent out ad space to specific advertisers for a surprising amount of money. Instead of those annoying little ads, you could have one discreet expensive ad.
So for the past week I’ve been wondering, how would you go about doing that? Of course the main ingredient is content. Something worth viewing. Then it hit me, that would be the content. The building of the site will be the content of the site. My biggest skill, and favorite interest, is learning how to do new things. Especially technical things. Perfect.
The basic idea is:
a) This is a Do-It-Yourself project.
b) I don’t know how to do it, yet.
c) Information on how to do it is available for free on the Internet.
d) All I have to do is research it, and learn it, and do it, step by step.
e) Each step, and misstep, would be the content of the site.
How do you get a domain, how much does it cost, where do you find templates, how do you tell search engines about your site, how do you monitor traffic, what is page ranking, how do you accommodate traffic builders like Digg or del.icio.us, how can visitors suggest improvements, how would you get an advertiser, what would they pay? The topics are endless.
It would be a naked site, totally transparent. Everything on the site would have complete instructions on how it was done. All code would be download-able for free. All financial information would be posted, what everything cost, who the advertisers were, what they paid, down to the penny. Day by day traffic statistics would be displayed. Any books purchased that helped me would be listed as affiliate links. The more transparent, the more content, the more valuable it would be as a resource to anyone interested in building or running a moneymaking website/blog.
I think the next logical step is to look around the web and see if anyone is already doing this. Am I the first? Who are the competitors? What new ideas will I get by looking at their sites?
If this works, this little post will be the first post on the new site.