Ideamix - Money Making Ideas

You have almost certainly heard of one of the two sites below:

If you haven’t, well let me fill you in…

In 2005 The Million Dollar Homepage was launched by a student from England. The index page of the site consists of a 1000×1000 pixel grid (one million pixels), on which image-based links were sold for $1 USD per pixel, in minimum ten by ten blocks.

The purchasers of these pixel blocks provided tiny images to be displayed on them, a URL to which they were linked, and a slogan displayed when hovering the cursor over the link. The aim of the site was to sell all of the pixels in the image, thus generating one million dollars of income for the creator.

By the time that all of the pixels were sold, the site had grossed $1,037,100. The Million Dollar Homepage became one of the most successful stories of a young entrepeneur making money online, and soon spawned numerous copycat websites.

However, not a single one of them has had the impact that the original had. Alex Tew (the founder) even tried his hand at another similar site but it failed, showing that perhaps The Million Dollar Homepage is a one-off.

In 2008, Pat Hankinson created a site called The Social Millionaire. The site was similar to The Million Dollar Homepage in that you buy links on the homepage in the hope of exposure because of the traffic driven to the site.

Pat’s idea is slightly unique in that he is trying to use the social networking space to drive traffic to the site. Unfortunately, despite getting a fair bit of coverage from the blogosphere, the site has only sold around $3,500 worth of links at the time of writing.

The reason I have listed the two sites above and given you a bit of background knowledge on them, is that these sites are a great example of creative ways to make money. Whilst not all of these types of sites work, they have huge potential and it really doesn’t hurt to try.

Selling links on the homepage of a website is nothing particularly new, and you’re going to have to make sure you do something totally different to the competition, or you simply won’t make money.

Sites like Tagcheap are now selling scripts which will allow you to quickly and easily create your site to sell links on. Whilst the basic format is solid (and the design is great) you aren’t going to attract much attention simply by setting up a site and letting it roll.

The best thing to do is to add some viral marketing to your project, using social media is a fantastic way of doing this and I still believe that Pat Hankinson didn’t quite capitalize on the current state of the web. If you can create a brand behind your project, and even offer something more than just links, then your project probably has a chance.