I find it hilarious that my last blog post from almost three weeks ago is about blogging consistency. It’s very typical of me to go Gung ho on an idea for a couple weeks and then move on to the next one. I did a good five or six weeks on this one before getting distracted.
My distraction was the idea I mentioned in my previous post. A lot of my spare time (if there is such a thing) has been focused on ifimet.com, but now that it’s been a good three weeks I’m starting to slow down on that one. I also purchased two new domain names in the month of August too, so I’m already feeling the itch.
One of the reasons this idea struck me as interesting was because people love celebrities and it was a site you could contribute to (anonymously if you prefer) in a matter of seconds. I think the stickiness aspect might take some time though. The more questions posted for your celebrity faves, the more likely people might stick around to read and link jump to other celebrities.
Without an existing community, I always struggle coming up with ideas for attracting visitors without feeling spammy. I thought of using social media for this one, specifically Twitter, since it’s a good place to find a bunch of a celebrities fans in one place.
I’ve heard many people state that free is not a business model, so with that being said, many of my ideas suffer from a lack of a business model. On the flip side is that there are a lot of free websites out there that have become wildy popular for one reason or another, and that traffic pays the owner a very healthy salary every month through advertising.
I love reading stories where people hit gold like that. Take Markus Frind, the guy who built Plenty of Fish to learn ASP.Net programming, and ended up with a dating site that was profitable from the get go. He once claimed he was working an hour a day and earning 10 million a year. He just sold his company for 575 million.
Then there’s the guy (whoever he is) running a site geared towards developers that is raking in 40k per month that ShoeMoney talks about in his post about buying and selling websites. There’s people out there that do it. Why not us, right?
I’ll tell you the biggest difference from people like this and myself. They stick with their ideas. I chase butterflies. I’m willing to bet that any single idea you find on this site could turn into something great with the right person behind it.
I’ve still got some playing around to do on If I Met, but don’t be surprised if I write about this one being for sale at some point down the road. In the meantime, please go look for your favorite celebrities and post what you would ask if you ever met him or her.