Shared Creation Projects

They in this case are the people with money.

If you review the postings in Shared Creation Projects you will notice some links to Idealo at the end of a number of posts. These are advertisements bought by Idealo for their price comparison site. When I was approached by Idealo - I looked at their site and discovered that they helped provide the tools that Shared Creation readers need at a good price. It seemed like a good match and a deal was struck. For this I thank Idealo very much.

This has gotten me to think - what is the best way to gain advertisers?

It was in the end a bit of a no brainer, but before the answer - here’s some background.

You can go out and tell people how wonderful your site is (or will be) and take on the challenge of hard selling your wares; or you can take the other road - work on your content and let the advertisers come to you. The second approach emphasises the democracy of the web and is very much the legendary web approach. Best summed in the ‘Field of Dreams’ line - “if you build it they will come”. This has been the Shared Creation approach. Write, publish and let the web guide people to you.

The first approach is very much the modern business view. Make sure you can have an idea to reach an audience, get money and then build from there. It may make business sense to encourage the money first - but it is very hard to build from nothing. I’m not saying it doesn’t work - Flickr and YouTube were built on venture capital - on this approach; but unless you have a vast idea and a solid business background - it will probably not help all that much. I’ve met web entrepreneurs - trying this on a business to business approach - and having a hard time of it.

Of course the downside with content first and let your work do the talking is that it takes a bit of an ego, a bit of patience and the ability to finance what you are doing for a while. In a world of instant gratification these are not attributes taken as virtues. But they are the attributes of an artist; and Shared Creation is all about creatively expressing yourself.

So why was deciding between these a nobrainer? Because more sites have become legends from their content and not their backers. Because its the most effective approach for some one working on limited resources and because it makes content king. Content is everything, without it why would anyone come to you?

So whilst getting a big money backer and building a multimillion dollar site may make sense - just expressing yourself can achieve the same results - and all you have to do is what you love.

Isn’t that a no brainer?

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