Financial Hack

I have come across an interesting dilemma with one of my websites and I thought it would be interesting and worthwhile to throw out to any readers for their opinion on what they would do in this situation.

What happened was that I kept forgetting the days that I started blogs, so I created a site to remind me when the “blogoversary” of the blog was (aptly named blogoversary.com) I thought that this was a perfect name and couldn’t believe that nobody had taken it. After I had already purchased the domain, I realised that people were referring to it as a “blogiversary” and not “blogoversary” — a check of Google for both terms brought back results of 90,000 and 7,000 respectively. This, of course, was quite disappointing to find out, but I put up the site anyway, placed the button on a couple of my blogs and didn’t think much more about it.

This past week (after about 2 years) I decided to clean it up a bit and make some minor changes that had been bothering me about the website. In doing so, I realized that the site had grown enough to where blogoversary (526,000) had displaced blogiversary (147,000) as the term used to describe a blog’s anniversary on the Internet. Even more surprising, there are over 3000 blogs that are currently using the blogoversary button on their blog.

First and foremost, I’m glad I didn’t give up on the idea completely when I found out that someone else had the term I thought I had. I was fortunate that the person that owns blogiversary never did anything with the domain allowing blogoversary to gain momentum and become the default term (luck always play a role in these things). None of it would have happened, however, if I had completely given up and done nothing.

When you come across a problem you have, it’s likely others have had the same problem. Putting my idea of a reminder to people of when they started their blog was something that others obviously had trouble remembering as well, or so many other blogs would not have decided to use the blogoversary button. One of the best ways to create niche sites is to look at the problems you have and if someone hasn’t solved the problem, you have an opportunity to do so yourself.

If an idea is good, it will make its way around. Except for placing the button on my blogs, I have done no other advertising of this site. People somehow found it and passed the word around despite my total lack of effort in promoting it.

I think one of the best moves I made was that I made the site extremely simple. It was made basic for ease of use for myself, but that also translated into ease of use for others. There is no long form to fill out in order to get the button for the site — in fact, you don’t even have to leave the front page to do so.

I wonder how much it not being monetized helped the site? Since I really didn’t think anything would come of it, I never bothered to monetize it in any way which could have very well been a good thing in helping to spread the word around about it. I think people feel much more comfortable without ads all over the place when they place a button on their site.

Some of the things that made this site successful despite itself make it difficult to monetize. I’ve been thinking about ways to do so and have come up with some ideas which I will share later, but I’d love to hear what, if anything, would you do to the site to further promote and monetize it?

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