The Big Word Project
The Big Word Project (TBWP) is a new site from Lee Munroe and Paddy Donnelly, where you buy words to have them linked to your site. That word becomes exclusive to you on the site so that when someone looks up that word on TBWP it will notify them that the word has been "redefined", linking to your site. I bought a couple of words last night and boy was I surprised...
The site is built on Ruby on Rails and word prices are determined by letter count, each letter costing $1. I snapped up two words, "mike" and "blog" at $4 each just to see how much traffic I could gain. I woke up this morning to find I had received 100 page views, almost double what my blog usually gets in a day. Ok, so that's not that much and you're probably laughing at the low page view count, but let's consider how young TBWP is.
Launched just 3 days ago, people have been buying up words to get in on popular ones like "designer" and "geek" before the masses descend. Traffic has been building from some notable blog linking and it won't be long before a considerable amount of that traffic is passing through to your site. Yes, I know this is a similar site to The Million Dollar Homepage, but I'm quite enjoying the little boost.
I'll continue to monitor how much traffic (and hopefully subscribers) this gain me over the next few days, and if there is a significant boost then I'll update this post with details. If you're already sold, go buy a word or check out their blog to see how business is doing.
Oh, and chances are you have actually arrived at akamike via TBWP, so I'd like to welcome you and remind you to subscribe ;)
11 Comments
Lee
Hi Mike, thanks for the support :-)
Gilbert
Thanks for the heads up Mike. I bought "gilbert" so hopefully I might see a traffic increase too.
Adam Snider
Hmm...this could be a cool idea. I might buy some words for my blog. And, I might get the boss to buy a few words for our company website, just to see what kind of traffic we can get.
I thought this might be good for SEO, but the links appear to be javascript, so they won't get indexed. Then again, this is a pretty obvious paid-link thing, so even if they weren't javascript, Google would probably devalue the links anyway.
Still, it seems like a potentially cheap source of traffic, regardless of whether or not it helps with SEO.
Joe Philipson
I bought photographer the day it came out :-)
Rajat Bhadani
I like the idea as well - let me buy a word and see what it does
Do you believe there can be some sort of synergy between our work as in us supporting you in wordpress coding?
Mike
@Rajat: I'm not sure what you mean. I do all my personal design, mark-up and wordpress/expression engine work myself. Any commercial work goes through Rolled Limited.
Jorq
Ive been keeping up with the idea and looks good. I did find a website doing the same thing for $1 a word though. I can buy 5 words from there instead of the 1 I was going to buy. Its at http://www.projectword.co.uk.
Sporkman
Actually, at least in the full by-letter listings, they appear to be regular html links. Bought a few words there myself.
FYI, I found this blog after googling The Big Word Project.
Mike
@Jorq: Thanks for the heads up, I wouldn't be surprised if many more similar sites popped up in coming months!
@Sporkman: Wouldn't they be devalued anyway, as Adam said? Thanks for pointing that out though :)
John
The bid word project is impressive i agree. but i had issue with the word i wanted being unavailable so i searched and looked around and found another great page called [name removed] with the same principles and got the word that i wanted for the same price. you should check it out, [link removed]
Mike
Sorry John, I have to remove that link. The site is pretty much a copy of TBWP, layout and text. I don't support that kind of thing. I expect there will be clones of TBWP but not as blatant a rip-off as that :/
To your starting statement, it is a bit of a bugger when your word is taken. You have to get in early, I guess!