I am addicted to creating websites. Most of them have failed worse than the Chicago Cubs in the playoffs. (Did I just go there? Yes, I did!)
However, I think I am starting to get a little more wise to this interweb game. I have been giving myself a much better chance at succeeding by thinking out my website ideas and planning them a little more effectively. This is completely opposite to how my approach used to be. Every time I saw someone with a great idea, I purchased a domain and pondered a site that could rival it. A prime example of this was a website to to rival Whateverlife.com. Whateverlife was created by a 17 year old from the Detroit area that specializes in free Myspace layouts. There were plenty of stories making the rounds on the web about her making $40,000 a month from AdSense ads. Hey! I want to make $40,000 a month in AdSense!
I began by creating a pretty simple website. I designed a few of my own free layouts (being in a band taught me a thing or two about Myspace layouts) and downloaded a solid 100 more. I had a few of my friends talk up the website on Myspace, and away I went to watch the money roll in. That is how Myspace works right? Everything is supposed to go viral.
That website grossed me approximately $0.00. That was before taxes however. So the net was more like $0.00.
After a month of promotion and no real traffic to the website, I shelved the idea and moved on to the next one. What I needed to evaluate, however, was what went wrong and how I could avoid it in the future. How did this website fail?
The concept for this website is tied to the success of another site, in this case, Myspace. The site came about a year too late. I don’t believe in the theory that you have to be the first person with a great idea to profit from it, just look at how many bloggers there are making money in the make money online genre. Although there were plenty of Myspace layout websites around, it didn’t seem like it would be a lot of work getting near the top of the search word rankings. The problem itself was that Myspace was failing in general. I am aware that it is still a hugely popular website, but it lost all its buzz. Facebook took over as being the hip and cool place to go to social network. If you weren’t established before this changeover, your website is basically dead in the water.
How did Whateverlife succeed where my website failed?
Whateverlife was started in 2005 at the height of the first Myspace traffic wave. The creator, Ashely Qualls, basically dove headfirst in to a ‘perfect storm’ for web traffic. Myspace had just started advertising that you can customize your profiles with a little code, and she was on the forefront of making that code available to people her own age. The reason Ms. Qualls is a millionaire now is because she was smart enough to put advertisements on her website when most people her age wouldn’t have even thought of that. She also established her brand long before putting the advertisements on the website. As soon as she started her ad campaign, she was instantly seeing an influx of dollars on AdSense because most of her target market wasn’t tech savvy and could easily click on an AdSense ad thinking it was a link to someplace else on her website.
The moral of the story is your website might be failing, and there is nothing you can really do about it. This is especially the case if your entire business model is tied to another website. All the SEO in the world cannot replicate that ‘perfect storm’ that someone like Ms. Qualls walked in to. What you can do is adjust your thinking process in an attempt to predict that next ‘perfect storm’. You have be on the cutting edge and be creative. If you aren’t on the front line, you at least have to be on one of the first 10 lines. If you create a website because you heard on 60 Minutes that someone made 40 million dollars with a website, you are probably years too late. Another question you need to ask yourself if ‘Can my website compete?’. You do not have to be the industry leader in any field to make good money, you just have to be able to compete with the industry leaders.
With a little proactive thinking, you can avoid wasting a month on a website that was destined to fail from the start.
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