Note - this is a paid review and not influenced much ( :razz: ) by me getting paid. If you would like to order one for your website, please check out my Advertise page :)

Normally websites that are asked to be reviewed aren’t really fun to do so… the website owner takes the review more for the traffic it could deliver and the high PR links rather than wanting a honest, detailed look at his website - one that usually isn’t very interesting.

In this case, however I was asked to review a website that I found genuinely interesting - why not, as it is one that will help me online. Ideamix is the creation of William Montanaro, who is a personal friend - he ordered a review to get some feedback, as well as the exposure that comes with a review on TUK.

First off, the website’s design - I love it. It’s simple, yet clean; kind of looks like a sales page for Wordpress. Content is king, and that’s what’s most featured - at the moment, there’s not a single bit of paid advertising. The website loads up with a random idea on the front page, and the logo looks very Web 2.0ish… which we all know is the big thing nowadays, and the colours match which is always good.

The concept is that Ideamix will provide you with one different idea to make money online every single day - that’s 365 ideas yearly, and you can start to understand how useful the website could become. With such a scope of ideas, there’ll be something for even the most basic of internet newbies and it is something that people can look over, and constantly come back to if they want ideas on new things to try.

Although the website is okay at the moment, I do have a couple things that I feel are off about it, and hopefully this will help with increasing the potential of the website in the near future.

Monetization - at the moment, I cannot see a single little bit of monetization on the website, apart from a link to a book through Amazon that kind of looked like an affiliate link. Sure, selling ad space may not be a good idea, especially as the website is fairly new; however, there is certainly the place for a decent amount of affiliate links - to hosting, which will be required to implement quite a few of the ideas and to various other programs like NeverBlue Ads which would be required for the email/zip submits idea and BANS (which takes less than ten minutes to signup for their affiliate program). Well placed affiliate links can lead to residual income being generated months after an article is written, so why not include them?

Promotion - Google and Alexa can tell you a lot about a website - at the moment, all I can see is that the promotion done on the website is minimal (perhaps a good thing with regards to my next point). It’s been posted to Stumble Upon, and posted on William’s own website, but apart from that - zilch. There are very few backlinks to the website itself using one of the standard backlink checkers on the Internet and with an Alexa rank of 3,500,000+ I think it’s safe to say there’s minimal traffic - that has to be increased, as added backlinks and traffic is what a website requires to become successful.

Due to the lack of backlinks the website has no PR - had it been promoted, even slightly more than it currently has been there is a good chance that it would have had gotten some in the recent Pagerank update. Personally, I don’t hold PR too highly, but advertisers certainly do - should William decide to go down that path, he will get a lot more should his website have some.

Content - while the content is the first thing you see when visiting the website (apart from the kick ass header), and it is located in a good place I’m going to have to say that a lot of it is lacking. Not in style of writing, as I personally like William’s style, nor even in spelling and grammar, as both of that is bang on as far as I can see, but in length. In my opinion the majority of users that will be visiting and making use of the website are relative newbies to the whole internet marketing game (in their first year of online business), and for them simple instuctions won’t work - they need things throughly explained. I’ll take an example - the recent image hosting article. Image hosting is quite a complicated way of making money online to start up in, especially for newbies - I’ve seen guides for it written that were upwards of 10,000 words and still had stuff left to explain.

Now, I’m not recommending William write more than 10,000 words for the website (do that 365 times and I’d probably kill myself too) however that post (and quite a few of the others) could be explained a lot, lot better - I’m thinking 1,000 words minimum. In the case of image hosting, you could talk about choosing a domain (with tips), then talk about different scripts (with recommendations), different specific types of monetization (with a short blurb on each one and affiliate links) - that’s enough for such a post.

Putting in the work now may seem difficult, or even near impossible but once those ideas are written about (and if they’re done well they’ll certainly be linked to) they’ll generate income. At the moment, the image host article isn’t even 200 words - that’s jack all. Even at 1,000 words, doing one article a day (or even one every couple days) should not be too difficult, although thinking of ideas certainly will be :)

What I really like about the website - I absolutely love the ‘Randomize’ button - I don’t know how hard it would have been to code, but nevertheless it’s pretty cool. Once the website has its full complement of make money online ideas, it’s quite conceivable that visitors could spend hours just clicking that button and checking out various way of making money online.

Hopefully this review will help generate some traffic to the website, but more importantly offer ideas on how it could be improved - if you have any comments, leave them below; if you have any ideas to make money that you haven’t seen discussed, use the form and submit them :)

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