The 411 on Word Cloud Sites
Posted by Miles Evans
Cmon how many of us went through the whole million dollar homepage kafuffle with a sour taste in our mouth? You remember Alex Tew's dollar-per-pixel advertising page that raked in over a million dollars in just a few months. To raise money for university, pfffft.
Well okay as jealous as I am I didn’t think of it first, Alex really deserved the ad money and it was certainly a clever *cough* scheme. I think what left a bad taste in my mouth were the people attempting to resell the idea via million dollar homepage copycat scripts. People thinking they were going to recreate Alex’s success were sort of the butt of a cruel joke. To my knowledge none of these suckers accomplished anything substantial. Even this guy promising to smash his Dodge Viper are lacking advertisers.
Enter Joel Comm and his 500words website launched late last month. A word site works the same as selling pixels except that you are selling a limited amount of hyperlinked words. Joel was paying close attention during the million dollar homepage debacle and realized that the only people making money on the buzz besides Alex Tew, were the people selling the copycat scripts to the get rich quick crowd.
As 500words started to sell links from readers on his newsletter Joel promptly started selling his Link Sizzler script for building these word sites at $497 a pop. As the meme spread this price rose to what it is today at a whopping $897! Reputation ruining profiteering at its finest. Over the last few days I have counted four more copycat word site building scripts following Joel down the snake-oil path.
Now since Joel has completely sold out (pun intended) his 500words website, and opened a new one, he has claimed to have made over $50,000 in just over a week. He doesn’t say how much money he has made selling an overpriced story and php script that will obviously not work for anyone but himself. I would guess it’s not likely enough for anyone to ever take him seriously again.
Posted Jul 12, 2006 at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Trackback URL | Del.icio.us | DIGG!
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Comments
Terrific sum up...Miles. You have hit the nail in the coffin by saying everything and seemingly saying nothing.
Kudos ! ....and I can't agree more with you.
Posted by Jayadeep Rath on July 23, 2006 7:14 AM
I follow the happenings of Joel Comm and I do have to say he made a ton of money in the last month ripping people off with the idea they could re-create the buzz he generated with 500words.com. His e-mail list is in the thousands, maybe tens of thousand and that gave him a huge advantage over any future imitator.
I have to give him credit though, he sure does make a nice living doing what he does.
Posted by Shaun Carter on July 23, 2006 7:31 PM
Whereas I agree with you on the notion that it's highly unlikely anyone without a massive list is going to copy Joel Comm's word cloud success, I do think there is a place for word clouds on the internet.
The point is to get the focus of word clouds as a get-rich-quick scheme first. That won't work...
Then having a word cloud other than the already established blog plugins, does give you other nice opportunities. Like offering word cloud links as a free service to your list subscribers or members of your membership site.
Or you can use them for link exchange as a colorful alternative for the existing link pages which I frankly find to be quite boring in most cases.
There are other scripts around these days now which don't require you to fork out the same amount of money as Joel's link sizzler script.
And you can still make some nice money on the side as long as you don't try to make your cloud your main income stream.
I've done quite some research into these word clouds and I've found that many of them are set up completely the wrong way. Almost making sure that nobody will ever want to visit them again.
But integrate them into a full-fledged conten website and you *will* have recurring visitors.
Make them theme related and don't try to create pages with hundreds of words and people can even consider them a good reference page.
It really all depends on how you manage your word cloud...
I just released a free ebook about word clouds called "Word Cloud Secrets - Tagging for Profit". I'd be interested to know if you stick to your stance after reading this. If you like, you can download it here:
http://thinelectrons.com/blog/word-cloud-secrets/
Thanks!
Patricia
Posted by Patricia Ritsema van Eck on October 5, 2006 4:57 AM
This 500words.com guy Joel Comm, started his business in June/July, 2006... I started the same called http://www.keywordtraders.com in January 2006. But I had to move out for an assignment and I couldn't market the site. I had done some marketing just to let people copy the concept. Few companies had approached me to buy the concept. I was greedy not to sell them the concept.
My software was not user-friendly, I admit. People need simpler and easier interface.. Where I may have lacked. It's lesson learnt to provide benefit to Joel Comm.
So he got the credit for starting the "one word one link" site (my slogan in KeywordTraders.com). It is people's luck. Everything should fall in place.. Time, Effort, Budget and LUCK.
He is lucky and I am not -- that is the only difference.
So let him earn... There are no limits to ideas. New ideas will again come to everyone to create a new sensation over the net.
No hard-feelings.
Posted by Karun Thapa on October 12, 2006 9:40 PM
I must admit that I tried to imitate Joel's success but fell a little short. I have a list of about 2000 and it was still hard to make a profit. Nevertheless I had fun and I am also giving the script away for free. You can download a copy now to use .
Posted by Word Cloud Money on December 4, 2006 1:54 PM