Success on the Internet

Take a look at this page:
http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/

If you can believe the story he tells (look around, read the FAQ, look at the figures of how many spots have been sold in the top right corner of the main page), then this 21 year old college student has come up with a scheme that’s already (as I type this) earned him over $17,000.

The only cost that I can see is the cost of a domain name and hosting for 5 years, which shouldn’t have set him back much at all.

There are more ways to become successful on the Internet than anyone could ever imagine, and they don’t have to be illegal or immoral.

I give credit to this young man, he got an idea and ran with it.

Now there are copycats, I found one already, but I won’t give him the benefit of the publicity if he can’t get his own idea, or at least improve on it.

How long has it taken Alex, the pixel genius, to reach $17,000 in earnings? Whois shows that the domain name was registered on August 23rd, so in 23 days, he’s got hosting, built the site, gotten out press releases, and sold a bunch of spots. Impressive.

I would say the young man has a future in marketing or advertising, if he even needs to work after this.

What’s next, the billion dollar home page? Stay tuned.

But let’s look at this situation a bit closer from a technical standpoint.

I was tempted to buy a block or two myself, I’m sure there will be a lot of sites, forums, and blogs linking to Alex’s site. So it will most likely acquire a good deal of PageRank, and it would seem that being linked from a high PR site would be good.

But how good will the link be once all the spots are sold? Think about it. If everyone bought just one block, there would be 10,000 links. But people are buying 2, 4, 10 at a time, so let’s say there will be 2500 outbound links from the page. Not much will be gained from a link on the page.

How about traffic gained from being shown on the site? Right now, with very few blocks sold, getting the page to load is a major problem. It will only get worse. Here’s hoping Alex has a deal with the hosting company and lots of bandwidth, because he’ll need it. The main problem, however, is how many people will even wait for the page to load before they click away.

Good idea, but needs improvement.

Where I’m going with this discussion is …

In order to be successful on the Internet, you don’t necessarily need a new idea. You just need an idea, and it can just be a way to make an existing idea better. Cheaper, faster, smaller, bigger, funnier, whatever.

Go for it, find something cool and/or useful, and make it better, and make it yours, and I’ll write about you, too!