My Next Big Idea

I am going to share with you another mistake I made while trying to set up an Internet-Marketing venture. Like I said earlier, I’m going to talk about what I’ve done in the past and the lessons I learnt from those acts. I can tell you the ideas that could work and the ones that are not likely to work based on my past experience.
I believe there are millions of people out there like me who would like to know what works with Internet-Marketing and what does not. If I’m doing something and its working I’ll let you know and even demonstrate to you how it’s working and if it’s not working you’ll be the first to know.
My next big idea was about the London Underground Network, popularly known as ‘the tube’. I actually went as far building a website for this idea. The website was called, www.thetubetest.co.uk, I believe I registered the domain name sometime in 2003. Like the name implied, the website was a test of your knowledge of the underground network. Questions were randomly generated from a database of questions and the idea was that whoever answered all the questions generated at a particular time correctly qualified for a raffle draw to win a travel card. I did not appear to have learnt any lessons from my past experience. Again, I wanted some kind of endorsement from Transport for London (TFL), the organisation in charge of the London Underground network. My flatmate then, who was working with the Underground, saw the website and thought it was a wonderful idea. This encouraged me further to seek approval from TFL. Needless to say I never got it and due to no fault of the respected organisation. Heaven knows the number of individuals and organisations seeking some kind of sponsorship or approval from them on a daily basis.
The good thing that emerged from that was this, there was a point when I started preparing myself for receiving approval from TFL and I started making calls to Internet advertising companies to ask them if they would be interested in sourcing advertisements for a site that had the backing of TFL. When I called the third company the gentleman who picked the phone, after hearing me out, said to me, ‘I think what you need is an affiliate programme.’ This was December 2004 and that was the first time I would ever hear about affiliate programmes! When I had my other big idea about dating disasters, I didn’t know about affiliate programmes. I only knew that if enough people visited a particular site, advertisers could be interested in advertising on that site and everything would fit in, somehow.
I would conclude this post by saying that the lesson I learnt was that whatever you want to do don’t give up. Even if you do not actually succeed in it you might make a wonderful discovery along the way that could give you a new lease of life.