One of the money making strategies I was experimenting with was blogging about random topics from highly searched for topics.

The three sources that I picked this up were

1. Lycos 50
2. 
3. 

If I were to follow this today, I’d be posting about

• Lindsay Lohan’s possible sex tape
• Britney Spears guess appearance on How I met your mother
• Ashley Alexandra Dupre - whoever she is
• baba booey (??wtf??)
• dagmar midcap - dagmar what??
• Djimon Honsou - again no idea who he/she is
• Pregnant Man - really?

You get the picture, there’s some interesting random stories in there like the girl who became a man but is now 5 months pregnant - fark! However, after a bit of posting, I noticed that the click through rate on the ads were super low and the blog had no theme and no direction. I wasn’t blogging about stuff that interested me and it felt like that I was just posting for the sake of posting.

As a business model, even though I was getting some immediate hits from search engines, this wasn’t sustainable as it was based off trends that did not last long. As soon as the trend dropped off, the search traffic would also drop and rely on the next trend. I was chasing trend after trend and because of the sporadic topics, repeat visitors were few and far between. There was some small money to be made but it was too labour intensive and not enough immediate return. Perhaps if I kept it up for a year and kept churning out 10 articles a day, I might have seen some good results… but that’s too much hard work for my lazy ass.

Popularity: 12%

Thanks to Navjot Singh for letting me know that CashQuests.com has been sold via this auction at Sitepoint. I was very surprised to see CashQuests being sold, even though I rumoured that it had already been sold once in July. Apparently the eventual buyer was iEntry.com @$15,000.

The beauty of this sale having happened via a public auction is that all the due diligence details that are normally hidden from public viewing is visible for everyone to see. CashQuests gets around 500 unique visitors per day (that was a lot lower than I expected!) and makes about $1400 per month. That makes $16,800 a year. With that in mind, it looks like iEntry got themselves a bargain! I would have put this blog in the $20-$30k range. However, you have to really think why someone would see their own blog for less than their annual revenue? Perhaps the blog was already on a decline and ‘Kumiko’ was smart to jump ship early…

Despite being a bargain of a price, I personally wouldn’t have bought it. Even though the auction advert says the blog “is not associated with any particular person or writer”, I sincerely believe that it was the original author who made all the difference in establishing the blog’s personality. “Kumiko” (or whoever he or she was) wrote with so much flair and passion that it was one of the more enjoyable and fun blogs to read. I would never have been able to replace her style and enthusiasm… and the earnings would have taken a quick nosedive. Sadly, judging from iEntry’s pitiful effort of a website, I have the same grave feelings about where CashQuests is heading.

Popularity: 12%