Yet Another Amazing Idea Wednesday, November 12th Blogging, Money Making

After the success of revealing an all so amazing idea, I thought I would share with you all another potential money making idea I had. Now this is an actual idea with potential, or at least a lot more potential than my other idea, haha.

So why am I revealing it here? Well, a number of reasons. Basically I get ideas to generate money online all the time, yet I rarely have the time to actually go ahead with any of them, and some of them are quite big investments that would take me a long while. So by sharing them with you I may be able to help one of you guys start up something, or even start a joint venture! Also, after initially thinking it hasn’t been done, I accidentally stumbled across a site which is very similar to my idea, so the ‘unique’ potential has already flown out the window. It could be I haven’t searched hard enough and there are already sites offering this without me knowing – if that’s the case please leave me a comment letting me know! Another reason is the fact that I want you guys to come away with good information, and I don’t want this to be a blog with lots of ’secrets’, where I give you crap and keep the ‘good’ techniques / ideas to myself.

Anyway, enough with the tension, lets get to the actual idea:

The idea stems around advertising. Now if you own a blog, its more than likely you have some form of advertisements scattered over it. Now these adverts bring in money via an advertising ‘agent’, who sells the space for you, and each month you make a certain amount of money depending on the price you’ve set your adverts to be shown at. The revenue for this is normally monthly, and every month new people can buy advertising space on your blog. Yet pricing can be difficult, you may ‘under-price’ your blog, which means you wouldn’t get as much money as you could, or you could ‘over-price’ and get no adverts at all. As well as this, there may be people who are willing to pay more to show their advertisement on your blog, but can’t because your ad spots are already taken, so they go elsewhere and forget about your blog.

What I propose is an advertising website where you can sign up your blog and your advertising space, and then instead of adverts being ‘bought’ on your site, they are auctioned off on a rate that could be per hour, per day, per week etc. To give you a clearer idea, I’ll give an example – say I have two advertising spaces on my blog, and two people have bid $1 a week for advertising space. Now I get another visitor who decides they would like advertising space as they think its a popular blog! So they say they will pay $2 a week, and one of the existing adverts gets bumped off. Once bumped off, the previous advertiser is charged for the amount of time he was present on the blog – so if he was there for 24 hours, he is charged 14 cents – and is sent an email to inform him he has been knocked off. Obviously I use ‘per week’ as an example, but it could be per day - per anything really! I realise this is very similar to some cost-per-click and cost-per-impression sites, but this isn’t a design for a ‘rotating adverts’ site, but rather static adverts that will stay on your website for as long as the user is the top bidder - such as the 125×125 adverts you see on many blogs.

Now this method has obvious advantages for both parties, as advertisers are able to get their adverts shown as and when they want (depending on what they want to pay) and bloggers are able to make more money without having to increase prices per month. Heck, you might even get a few advertisers fighting for space which would increase the pricing to a lot higher than what you would think. It would work extremely well for a user that is trying to ‘hype up’ a project that is going live in 24 hours, as he can bid for all the advert space he needs in that one day, get the quick flood of visitors that he needs, and then be gone again, without having to buy advert space for a whole month!

There are downsides as well – people with more money are essentially able to ‘bully’ the little people out of advertising space – but its not to say you can’t combine auction ads with regular ones! As well as this, they may be able to get ‘cheap’ advert time at just $1 an advert! Besides this one item, I’m unable to see a potential downside with the advertising – especially as this is just the framework of an idea, and more features could be added on (e.g. manual advert bid approval, so you never get unwanted adverts on your site).

As for the advertiser site itself making money, you would either charge users and advertisers for being on the website (not the greatest idea), put advertising on the website itself (self-promotion), or even take a percentage of the auction money that is paid out on each advertisement. With a lot of users, and especially with some big websites, the latter has the potential to make a lot of money – even if your only taking a 6% cut at a time!

When I think about the idea as a framework, I get excited and want to get stuck in, but obviously the construction and maitenance of it is going to be a lot harder than I think in my head. Hell, in my pants was trickier than I thought, and that’s a pretty simple website idea, lol! Also the fact that I have seen someone offering advert bidding (albeit in the form and style of google AdWords) makes me a little bit more wary and demotivated to the idea and its appeal, but I suppose the site could be ‘niched’ to make it stand out a bit more – e.g. make it exclusive to ‘blog’ advertising as opposed to all websites.

De-motivators aside, I personally feel its a pretty good idea, but what do you guys think? Maybe one of you would like to take up the project, maybe some of you might want to motivate me to make the site so you can use it! lol. Or maybe you feel differently – that the site lacks the potential to go far, that its already been done, or that its simply a waste of time. Whatever your thoughts and / or opinions, let me know. I hope the idea is of some good to you all!

Dan