THE BIG BILLBOARD - What is it?

[ramone_johnny]

Hey guys,
Im new here but have about 6 years web based experience. I run 4 online businesses and thought id do this up for a bit of fun.

Would appreciate any comments or thoughts on it

Be nice to see a bit of money coming in on this one!

http://www.housemates.com.au/other/thebillboard.asp

RJ

[akula]

RJ, welcome to ye

I'm quickly becoming a fan of yours. Great work. I really like your approach to opportunity selection. Aussie startups r-o-c-k :-)

Ok...let me give you some feedback about thebigbillboard

In your position as a ceo, you have to make decions on where to take this project so as to generate above average returns for shareholders and avoid getting fired as a ceo. The advice below is intended to raise some issues which you may take into account when making these decisions.

SWOT Analysis (weaknesses): The weakness in your SWOT for theboard is message irrelevance. You are selling ad space, making a bet that your site gets dugg for novelty reasons, and making the assumption that the marketing messages will interrupt enough people for your product to generate some sort of return for the customer (even though, the messages will be irrelevant to the majority of the people who see them).

That's a milliondollarhomepage kind of marketing plan and it might work because it has worked. Then again, it might not (plenty of evidence for that) - because you're putting the fate of your business into the hands of digg users, rather than your sales force.

To minimise the possibility that selling advertising which won't reach an audience (i.e. I buy an ad, but theboard has no traffic), let alone a relevant audience (i.e. what I sell is promoted to people who don't want my stuff), let alone reach the relevant audience enough times to convert prospects into customers - you need to leverage your strengths to create a great advertising product.

SWOT Analysis (strengths): What you have with theboard is a great ad purchasing technology. It allows people to quickly buy advertising. That's a strength which you should leverage.

Many webmasters are looking for alternative advertising solutions to help them monetise their traffic after they've had bad results with Adsense. You should be able to offer them a script which plugs into their site and helps them do what theboard does - but only on their own web pages.

In terms of a comparison, this basically means that Alex Tew should have also sold a script which allows any blogger to sell pixels on his/her site.

Finally: The point of this thread isn't to make any judgements. It's to identify weaknesses in your SWOT analysis and offer a solution on how to leverage your strengths to manage the weaknesses.

That's the sort of thing you can do to "see a bit of money coming in on this one".

[ramone_johnny]

Hey mate, thanks for the comprehensive reply!

As I said I was just foolin around on this one - nothing too serious. Im pushing it as banner ads on one of my other websites - www.egaragesales.com.au

If youre interested Ill show you my other sites too.

RJ