When I was studying entrepreneurship, we used to have to present possible business ideas and how the business model would work.
I lost count of the number of times people would come up with an idea for some type of free website and then just say “and we’ll make money by showing adverts”. I always think they might as well say “and we can’t think of a way to actually make money on this”. Probably 90% of people were basing their future Internet business’s on this.
I always try to avoid an advertising based business model, but last week I happened to notice a little possible niche where I thought it might be possible to drive some traffic to a website. Traffic (number of visitors) is one of the most important steps in a website as you can have the best product in the world, but if no-one sees it, no-one will ever get to use it. I’ve learned that simple statement the hard way over the last couple of years…
I spent about 3 hours doing market research on the niche, seeing what the competition was like, the number of searches for the niche’s keywords etc. and decided it was worth investing a little more time on.
I bought a domain name and on Friday I built spent about 5 hours building a website to put on it. (The whole process is a little more complicated than this as I design the site and domain name to perform well in the search engines for the particular niche based on the market research I carried out).
Instead of spending months building a new product to put on the site, I just want to see if it can get some traffic first. As such, I broke my own rule and signed up for a Google Adsense account that will show Google adverts on my site. It was pretty simple to sign up and it only took 5 mins to integrate into the site.
The site went live at midnight on Friday…
Total costs: Domain name £6.50
Time invested: 8 to 10 hours.
Total profits from Adsense after the first day: £0.17
Whooyoo!!!! already I’ve been paid about 1.7p an hour! The goal is to get the total made up to £1 by October the 1st. I’ll report back how it goes in the comments…
