A bird in the hand is worth two in the SHOE

Wow, a week ago today, our page count was something like 470 pages sold. In one week, we’ve skyrocketed to over 900.

What caused this sudden burst of sales? What drove our traffic through the roof last week, pushing us to 1600 on Alexa, and 3600 for the week? How did a college senior manage to generate over $40,000 in revenue in ONE WEEK?

Did some divine force smile upon my site, wave its hand, and say “Let there be traffic. Let there be sales. Let there be links?”

No my friends, it was the Shoemoney Effect.

Shoemoney.com is the blog of one Jeremy Schoemaker, a guy with about as much “street cred” as you can get here on this little thing we call the internet. His blog follows his endeavors to make money online, and boy does he ever. He does things like tweak conversion rates on text ads to get them just right, pump tens of thousands of dollars into them, and make out like a bandit. He also wrote a program that would automatically snatch up expired domains with decent backlinks, turning them into profitable made-for-ad sites.

And then of course we have the famous picture of the check he received from Google Adsense back on ‘05:

That’s right folks. $132,994 from Adsense. There are rumors that at one time, he owned over 10,000 domains. He also owns the youtube of ringtones, nextpimp.com. This guy can’t be stopped. He’s a legend in his own time and on Tuesday, he smiled on my website, bought a page, and blogged about it. What followed at MDW was mayhem and a 40-hour sleepless shift to process all the sales.

Let’s take a look at the Shoemoney Effect on our Alexa Graph:

That spike occurred last Tuesday, the same day he posted. We topped out somewhere around 1,600 that day. Coincidence? I think not. His blog has over 10,000 subscribers and gets something like 20,000 page views a day. But whats more exciting is the fact that internet moguls like Shoemoney are really getting behind Million Dollar Wiki. This guy knows what he’s doing, and does it better than everyone else. And if he thinks buying a page on Million Dollar Wiki is a good idea, well then that really says a lot.

Let there be sales

This graph speaks for itself. For these four days, everyone on the internet was snatching up popular keywords on Million Dollar Wiki. This means you’re going to start seeing backlinks to Million Dollar Wiki all over the net. As of tonight, there are 8400 links out there in cyberspace pointing to MDW. Next time Google updates their pagerank, we’ll be pulling some weight, which will increase our search engine positions for our page owners, which will in turn drive more organic to the site, and the whole thing will feed itself in a positive feedback cycle.

I’m holding pages for ransom
That’s right, I’ve decided to hold a few pages for ransom. The Beer page, and the Cigarette / Cigarettes page are reserved for the lucky person who is going to pay $1000 apiece. The Cigarette and Cigarettes page is the best deal, because you get both pages for the $1000. If anyone wants to pick em up, contact me at graham at million dollar wiki dot com.

Next Stop: 1,000
We’re going to hit 1000 pages very soon. We’ve got less than a hundred to go. All aboard!

Special on Domain Names
If you own a domain name, I will sell you the page for your domain on Million Dollar Wiki for $50. This is a 50% discount. The catch is you have to own the domain name, and I have to be able to verify it. So, once again to clarify, if you own somedomain.com, you can purchase http://www.milliondollarwiki.com/somedomain.com for only $50. I will verify via whois records, or if thats unavailable, I’ll go with an email from the webmaster@yourdomain.com email account. Please contact me before attempting to purchase your domain, so that I can verify you own the domain for the page you are buying.

Things are definitely heading in the right direction. Soon we will be implementing page-packages for advertisers based on a theme. Ideally, one page owner, or a group of page owners with related keywords will join together for an advertising package. Then, we offer the advertiser an ad on all the pages for a certain fee per click or per impression. It will be great, and will surely boost the revenue for page owners. Advertisers have tried desperately to get into wikipedia, but wikipedia always declines the offers. Maybe this will be the next best thing? I’d like to think so.