I decided to throw this out and see if you guys could use this. This is borderline greyhat but I think it’s an excellent service to the community. I recently teased of this in a previous post but figured I should throw it out there for you guys.
I recently started a Free Web Hosting site (Host.gd) just to expirement and find out what kind of traffic it would get, and what types of clients it would attract. This helps me on a few levels as I currently have a legitiment hosting business (Think411.com) and I wanted to see the differences in traffic. I have yet to monetize the free hosting site but I found an alternative way to make money on it, and solve a huge problem many free hosts have.
Basically, every free host out there must deal with the riff raff of scammers, leechers and pirates. This can hurt many hosts, suck there bandwidth, and cause some legal issues. Although I have done almost no promotion, I still have around 60 free clients in less then one month on my free hosting server. I have gotten paypal scammers, ebay scammers, and pirates all trying to host on my site. I don’t currently have ads running on the free hosting and this was starting to become a huge annoyance.
I started asking myself, how can I profit from this mess without putting ads on everyones sites?
Well here is the answer, let the spammers, scammers and pirates do your marketing for you.
Now this is much easier then you think, basically you just setup your default suspended page as a public service announcement letting people know that they have almost been scammed and/or directed to an illegal website. On this page you fill it with relevant keywords, and then stick Adsense on it. Adsense serves up relevant content based ads and suggests that people click there ads in order to read more information on how to prevent being scammed in the future. This results in some very high CTR and also a good PPC for the relevant keywords.
Every time I find a scammer on my site, I shutdown there site and between the time they sign up and I find and shut them down they have done all the marketing I need. I end up getting about 100 hits a day for about 4 days and then it dies back down until the next scammer gets canceled.
The basic motto of this article is that you have to think outside the box when monetizing your site. If you notice a problem start thinking of ways you can profit from it. You would be suprised with what creativity you can come up with!
Has anyone else thought outside the box and found a new way to monetize there site from a previous problem?
