David Piccione.com

Fellow Vancouverite John Chow, is by all means a marketing and self promotion genius. I stumbled upon his blog a couple of months ago and became fascinated by the fact that he reports to be making over $10,000 a month from simply blogging about - wait for it - how to make money by blogging.

Now I have no idea how he manages to maintain such a legion of followers looking to get rich quick, but it’s not uncommon to see 60-70 comments on one of his posts. Nonetheless, he’s got a great mind and plenty of ideas to push traffic to his site and create new ways to monetize the world of blogging.

So How Does A Monitor Fit Into This?

One way that John drives people to his site - the way you’ll probably go over there right now, if you haven’t already - is to hold a contest. His contests are usually simple trades - do something for him and he’ll give you a chance to get something back in return.

His latest escapade involves what he terms a “blog contest“, and is sponsored by the MillionDollarWiki. If you’ve got a website or some cash it’s easy to enter, and he lays out the full contest details here.

The gist of it is that if you buy a page on the MillionDollarWiki at $100, he’ll give you 5 entires. If you use his coupon code, the wiki page will cost $90. Alternatively, you can write a post on your own website, and he’ll give you two entires. Hence, the reason you’re reading this.

The Loot

So, what’s the prize? John’s giving away a a 24″ wide screen LCD monitor and a signed copy of the best selling book, The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss.

John, consider this my 2 entries.

This site has been up and running for about a month now, and I’m constantly evaluating where I’m going with it. Since I’ve launched, I’ve changed the focus from strictly being about leadership to a more broad subset of my current interests. I’ll continue to adjust until I get to a point that I’m happy with the things I’m writing about and feel that it’s a good outlet for me to share what I think.

One area that I haven’t explored yet is my seemingly endless supply of ideas. I think some of them are good and some are nothing more than wishful thinking. The one thing I haven’t really done as of yet is share them here.

So from now on, every Monday will be dedicated to presenting one of these ideas and encouraging a level of discussion. I’d also be interested in posting some of your ideas and seeing what we can make of any of them.

How This Works

Every week I’ll post an idea. Some may have merit, some may not. Most will involve technology or the web. Evaluate and take the time to post your thoughts on each one. You can rate it out of 10 if you want, (Maybe I’ll build a rating feature soon) or judge it however else you would like. If you think it’s dumb, feel free to share why. If you think it’s great, do likewise.

If you have your own idea, email me and if I think it’ll generate some discussion, I’ll write about it as well. You’ll be given full credit.

Hopefully, this will become a good form to analyze and perfect our ideas before we sit down and expend time to work on them.

This Week’s Idea: Edit Queue Website

Concept - Blogs are huge right now, and many people are spending a good chunk of time writing content of all shapes and sizes.

The problem is that for many bloggers and other web professionals, writing is not a strong suit. To solve this, the idea envisions a website that could be a community queue of future blog postings that are ready to be made public, save for the fact that the author is looking for some editorial help.

Operation - This website would work similar to a wiki, where the article would be posted and other users could come and correct it or make changes as they see fit. The author could then accept the changes, and the “editors” would get some sort of pay off. That payoff could be a karma system, or a monetary exchange.

Money Making Potential - Low to Moderate. I’m not exactly sure if there would be incentive enough for bloggers to pay for editorial help. Ads would always be a possibility. There may also be a way to pool membership fees and then redistribute them every month to top editors.

Examples - A similar idea exists within http://www.kuro5hin.org/

So, what do you think? Potential, or Garbage?

Wow, what a week.

I promise I’ll take the time to revisit this post in the coming days. A lot of people have made some excellent comments both here and in their own ways on other sites. For now though, it’s Friday, and time for some of the highlights of the week:

The advantage of being a young entrepreneur debate isn’t going away, as Marc Andreessen props up the “it doesn’t matter” side with an interesting post. As I’m all out of fire today, I have no comment.

God help us if this is the next generation.

John Place posted 13 words that can change your life. I seem to be seeing this a lot lately, and I agree fully. Sadly, I think many people can never make it to this point of realization, let alone change things.

As a new dad, this one got me pretty good. All the more reason not to let life’s trivialities get the best of you.

And finally, for the sake of one more dig, someone just invested $100M in nothing. Literally.