Ad Revenue Driven Websites - Step 3 - Choose Your Idea

Saturday, August 18th, 2007

Categories: Ad Revenue Driven Websites

In this week’s installment of Ad Revenue Driven Websites, we’ll be looking at selecting what idea to run with after you’ve Developed Your Ideas. The guidelines for selecting your idea are generally the same as the steps taken to develop your ideas. I will discuss some more general criteria for selecting your idea.

Here are a few additional questions you can ask yourself before you go with an idea:

How Much Time Can You Put Into the Project?

Is this a baby you can nurse until it’s successful? Do you only have the summer off, and return to school come September? If your site will need a community to sustain itself, it is important that you’re present to make them feel heard and solve any problems they might have. Otherwise, they will feel neglected and move on to different websites.

Set Your Goal - What Is Success?

Also important, what is success considered for you in terms of this website? Are your goals determined by your number of pageviews? Are they dependent on how much revenue you get each month? Set yourself a realistic goal, and if you’re more of a keener, set multiple goals for different time frames.

How Are Your Social/Business Skills?

This is a key one to look at. The technical people that I know (eg. the people that can do the dirty work, programming, etc.) typically don’t have social and business skills as their strongest points. If you think this is a problem for you, do you need someone representing you? Do you need a second voice to your website?

If you want to go out there and develop a forum community, do you have the social skills and the likability that will get people to stay at the website?

If it’s the case where this isn’t your strong point, consider set-it-and-forget-it websites. Examples include: file-upload websites or one-pager where users can create a custom Flash picture viewer for example. This, of course, doesn’t mean you’re exempt from inter-personal skills. You would still need to market/advertise your product and that does involve some communication.

That’s all for now, if you’re looking for the rest of the articles in the series, you can find in the Ad Revenue Driven Websites Category.