Alright, so I guess this is technically the first money idea I had which is actually live now. You can visit the website at http://www.milliondollarterm.com. While this isn’t the very first idea that I posted about before, I was just staring at the monitor one day and thought this one was less time consuming.

The main train of thought was that I wanted to create something that could be fun, interactive and at the same time actually provides people the ability to make a profit should they decide to do so. I was trying to think of a board game type of look where people could place ads on these blocks to help them get exposure. I couldn’t help but to be reminded of that million dollar homepage awhile back and thought that the layout and approach might be good.

So the funny thing is that a million is usually the standard figure people use to label as a lot of money, so I tried to determine a good number value wise to determine how many blocks I would need to sell to reach that figure. First I was thinking like $25 per block space, but then trying to imagine selling 40,000 of them seemed a bit much as well as trying to fit them on a page. Strangely enough, 10,000 of them at $100 each sounded like a more well rounded figure.

Of course, the first thing that clicked on my head was that it seems incredibly similar to that other site at first, but I thought it wouldn’t matter too much since the direction isn’t really the same. Like most things too, a lot of the success has to do with the execution such as trying to get the word out. Example, some people start by going to friends and family while others use say a third party publicist.

So, let’s see where this takes me and the type of help I will get along the way. That would actually be great if it worked out too as I’m sure that I can think of ways to use it to help others afterwards while at the same time using some of the funds to continue this journey.

Been awhile since I posted anything in this section. I was trying to flesh out my previous idea, but due to current events it doesn’t seem like I can come up with the necessary time to execute it. I did think of something over the weekend which I will indeed publish since I don’t think it requires too much of a time investment.

I’ve already registered the domain and it should take a few days to flesh out.

After trying to register the domain on Saturday, today was the day that everything was able to process. It was kind of interesting as they needed a phone call to confirm that I was indeed the person who initiated the order. I suppose that is a good thing to prevent fraud. It was just kind of surprising as I never had this happen before for something so small.

Another thing this made me think of is how sometimes people place too many security features to help protect the company and its consumers which ironically makes it more frustrating to do business with. Best example would be like some retail stores where everything feels like it is chained up to prevent theft which intimidates you to purchase it.

I don’t remember the exact source, but I did read a research study before where a company used to lock all of its software products behind a glass case. It then decided to place the products in these security cases instead and surprisingly sales started to go up. Whenever you do anything security related that affects the way you do business, you always have to keep in mind about accessibility and user friendliness as well.

So with $105.54 to work with for this idea, the first thing I need to do is to register the domain name. I did just that yesterday as I initiated the order. This is actually a good example in terms of when you are looking to purchase some kind of service, do you go for the cheapest option or pay a little extra to get something more reliable? For this, my requirements were that I wanted to register the domain for one year to start off along with the ability to register the domain privately to help prevent spammers from accessing the site’s contact information.

If this was for a regular business I would opt to pay a little more to go with a company that I was confident with. Normally, I would have to pay about $15 a year to get what I want. It would usually be almost instantaneous as well as once I place my order I notice that the domain is then fully registered fairly quickly. After thinking about it for a bit, in the end the web hosting usually plays the main role when it comes to the performance of a web site, which I will be pickier with, and so I decided to be more frugal in the budget for registering a domain.

The result, to save money I decided to go with a company that charged $5.99 as it was one of the cheaper options for what I wanted. As expected, the service isn’t as prompt as I registered it yesterday and as of now I am still waiting for a confirmation that it has been successfully registered. In general though, assuming everything goes through, the trade off is that I went from needing to spend about 15% of initial my funds to about 6%. Those numbers are off a bit as my funds are in Canadian currency while the bill is using US currency.

Hopefully it goes through okay. I still have to brainstorm everything anyhow, so the wait doesn’t affect me too much.

As expected, I received my Google Adsense check this week which I will use as my starting pool of funds. I was also asked by some people on how they weren’t exactly sure how this particular program works and so I figured I would explain a bit about it.

If you own a website of some sort, Google Adsense is a way for people to display advertisements on their site in an effort to make money. Without being too technical, you can earn money in three ways depending on how you have it set it up:

1) Someone clicks on an ad. Depending on your topic and the amount of people bidding for the advertisement spot, you get a percentage of how much the advertiser paid for that ad. A more familiar term is a “cost per click”.

2) Advertisers can also opt to specifically target your site where only their ads will be displayed to your visitors. With this, you can also get paid an X amount based on how many times the ads have been displayed. It is also referred to as a “cost per impression”.

3) There is also a referral category where you get paid every time someone takes action to an advertisement. For example, there could be a site offering a free subscription of some sort. If the person visits their site and subscribes to their free service as a result of the ad displayed on your site, you will be paid a referral fee of say $5. Some use the term “cost per action” to describe to method.

It’s actually one of the more simple programs that people can do to make some money. Some sites rely on it entirely as its revenue source which can work out well. In order to receive your payment, your total income earned has to be at least $100. This is what the mail that I received looks from the outside:

It used to be a lot smaller to my recollection when I first started using it. This is what the check that I received just recently looks like:

So if you have a website and are looking for a way to generate some extra income, it can be a good way to start off as it isn’t too difficult to implement. I personally just use it in a passive way, but it can definitely be effective in generating an income should you decide to do so.