Steve Poland has a new blog called Techquila Shots where he writes about ideas that he has for startups. He freely goes over the general idea and even provides hand drawn diagrams for that “Hey give me a napkin, I have an idea I want to show you” feel.
So far most of his ideas are social media ideas, but that is what is hot now anyway. He has a couple that are related to cell phones which are very interesting. His idea #10 is a social networking idea using cell phones. Very cool!
If you aren’t familiar with Steve Poland, he has done several guest posts on TechCrunch and is the founder/CEO of Vested Ventures, a web strategy consulting firm.
Given that he runs a consulting firm, putting all of these ideas out there for anyone to take my be a brilliant marketing move. If someone liked one of these ideas and pursued it, they just might hire him for consulting. Not a bad idea.
I recently wrote about small niche sites and yesterday I came across this affiliate package that utilizes you eBay affiliate ID to create a mini-site. This is very similar to what Amazon allows you to do with their affiliate program as well.
At first glance the site doesn’t look like a legitimate deal. It looks more like one of those viral sites most of us have seen from time to time. So my first stop to check on it authenticity was the Digital Point Forums. If there is any place to look up a money making opportunity, this is the place to do it. I found a thread where the software was announced and it appears that several people were impressed with it and are now using it so that was enough for me to continue looking into it.
I already have an idea of where I might use this initially as a nice passive income opportunity to a new venture that I am working on with my dad.
I’m curious though as to if anyone else out there has used any of these affiliate programs to any serious success?
Matt Coddington of the NetBusinessBlog has a nice two part series on building niche minisites for profit. In part one he covers finding and researching a niche using various simple methods. Part two goes into building the site and setting up the monetization of it.
What I like about this approach is that he shows that you don’t really have to have a niche site for something that you know a lot about, just something that has the potential to draw a lot of traffic (he uses a video game as an example). He also keeps the building of the site very simple to minimize his effort and as a result minimizes his costs.
Depending on the particular niche involved, the lifespan of one of these may not be all that long, but that isn’t the point. I imagine just about anybody could put one of these together in under a week with minimal technical skills. Even if you took two weeks to put on together, covering research and development, the payoff could be well worth it for the lifetime of the site. Remember the idea isn’t to build a big business around one site, but a business around many small sites that are tightly focused and you largely setup and forget, except when the paychecks come in.
The whole passive income approach of this really appeals to me as I would love to have several sources of passive income and perhaps one source of non-passive income where I spend most of my efforts. Think of it as diversifying your income. Just as most successful bloggers diversify their sources of monetization, you could diversify your sources of internet income from small sites.
Edit: Some may consider this kind of revenue generation ’spam’ or some other black means of making money. Personally I think it is just creative and well, entrepreneurial. Others may disagree.
Seth Godin has a really cool idea concerning captchas. The idea is to commercialize them by using logos and such from sponsoring companies. This is a really cool idea and actually something that I could do 
I did some quick research and it seems that most people don’t really like the obfuscated character images anyway (including me). They can be hard to read or use colors that not everyone can see clearly, etc. Some are also experimenting with audio, including Captchas.net and Google. One interesting implementation being done HumanAuth by Gigoit.
It would probably be harder to get the advertisers and the end users than it would be to build the system.
For those not quite familiar with captchas, you can visit the wikipedia explanation, but it is basically a means for a computer to tell that a human is the user instead of another computer. It is used quite commonly as a means to prevent spamming in blog comments and such. The most common means of doing this is generating a serious of graphical characters that the user must input to confirm they are in fact a human.
