Big Ideas to Make Big Money

Big Ideas Bring Big Returns!

Most people will tell you that the only way to be successful is to work really hard and really smart. Effective and focused effort towards specific goals is a fairly risk free way to achieve economic and personal success, just ask any doctor, dentist or lawyer. Riches are there for those willing to put in the time and work. However, we live in an age of ideas. This is the idea economy and the rules are changing.

Sure hard work toward high leverage activities will always bring results, but there are more and more examples of creative entrepreneurs bypassing the traditional routes to fame and fortune. A little luck, a lot of experimentation and a great idea are often all that is needed for extraordinary returns. This is the second installment of my big ideas topic. You can find the first here. I will soon create a specific page dedicated to these great ideas, so stay tuned.

Remember that you can’t copy a great idea verbatim because in talent oriented markets like showbiz, music and ideas only the absolute best get all the returns. There is not much left to share for all the people who are just good or mediocre. A Hollywood movie star can make more than $20 millions per movie, while hundreds of thousands of struggling actors require day jobs to fund their dreams of stardom. You are not going to out Twitter, Twitter. No one is going to do Facebook better than Facebook. Don’t expect an exact copy of another site to bring your riches. The reason popular sites got so much attention in the beginning is because they were unique. Newspapers aren’t going to write about the 15th Digg clone.

However, there are amazing opportunities to mix, modify, simplify, repackage, out-create, out-market and out-deliver with novel ideas. Phenomenal returns are available to those with a penchant for idea management. You just have to keep trying until you get it right. Find great ideas and repackage them with a new twist. Make something much easier to use. Take a simple concept and add more features. Copy ideas that are working in other countries. Take your ideas to other countries. There will never be a shortage of opportunities for creative thinkers.

Here are some more people who have earned disproportionate returns on their efforts for the shear quality of their ideas:

Try presenting this idea to venture capitalists: “Pictures of cats with funny captions.” Fortunately, this simple idea for a business never required much funding. Icanhascheezburger has had huge traffic with the corresponding advertising revenue. They have branched into many variations on the funny pictures theme and now have over 40 million page views per month. This is a fantastic example of a simple concept growing almost entirely on the basis of user-generated-content. Customers are creating the site.

Whateverlife. com

Ashley Qualls started the free MySpace layouts website Whateverlife. com as a teenager and has since managed to turn it into a huge Internet property for teenage girls. More than 60 million pages views and $70,000 per month. How much did you make when you were in high school?

Images of people’s secrets on postcards. The site makes money by selling books of the images and has traveling exhibitions. This is a great example of an artist combining his passion with something commericially viable.

Smashing Magazine

If you know I anymore I am missing, please mention them in the comments below and I will add them to the list.