Web Maps, Video, and Audio for Fun and Profit

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Over the past few days we’ve looked at a few different ways you use some new web functionality to drive traffic to your website (see How to Annotate Google Maps, How to drive traffic with Flickr Photos, Using Web Videos to Build Traffic). Now I’d like to take look at ways to bring it all together and build links, and expand into some new business areas.

Let’s go back and look at my Annotated Google Chicago Vacation Map. While I just did a superficial drive by showing you what could be done I think there’s a lot of potential for something like this. For example what if I marked Chicago’s 50 tallest skyscrapers, from that map I linked to an informational page about each of them and had a decent photo gallery with interior and exterior photos, do you think I could get some decent links from travel, tourism and other state government or educational websites. How about if I added a second map marking some of the important architectural and historical building for the same area. You could probably pull something like that together for less than $1000 dollars and in less than 30 days if you put your mind to it. Add in some hotel affiliate links, some restaurant reviews and you could start to monetizing the site. I’m not sure that adsense would work everywhere but definitely on the hotel, and restaurant pages. The Chicago Architecture Foundation runs walking tours for $25 to $40 per person. You could probably pull together enough information and sell podcast/Mp3 audio recordings with paypal for $10 - $20. Use the maps, and pictures to sell web based audio. After you’ve got one city down it’s pretty evergreen (long lasting) and you can apply the process to another city much more quickly and efficiently. Talk to your accountant and you can probably write of vacations to the city as a business expense (disclaimer I’m not an accountant and not qualified to give tax advice).

Looking for an idea that’s a little more mainstream than architecture, how about sports. Why not create an annotated map of every baseball stadium in the United States. Again try to use the new web tools to get attention and get links. Put up a page about each stadium and then another about each team. There’s no shortage of ticket affiliates or adwords baseball tickets inventory. You’re trying to limit yourself to content that needs as little TLC and updating as possible. Once you get the season schedule up it can run on auto-pilot until playoff and world series time (don’t forget predictive SEO). After you’ve got baseball down expand into basketball, football or any other sports. Speak to your accountant about deducting your season passes.

I’ve just got a head full of ideas like these, but not the time or manpower to bring them to reality. So go ahead feel free to use them and build on them to come up with your own ways to profit from maps, video, audio on the web.

Sphere It

One Response to “Web Maps, Video, and Audio for Fun and Profit”

1. Graydon Says:
   May 21st, 2006 at 10:59 pm

   Great ideas… very close to some of the items I’ve put together at Marlin Creek. I’ve expanded to include mapping samples at testmap.marlincreek.com.

   Considering what you can do with cheap hosting, open source CMS site software and your existing tools (i.e. digital camera, editing software, etc..) I think that $1,000 is on the extreme high end.

   Graydon
   Marlin Creek
   http://marlincreek.com
   http://testmap.marlincreek.com