Did Joel Comm make $20,000 in a day?

On 30 June 2006, WangInternet.com received an email from Joel Comm with the Subject, $20,000 in 24 Hours? How I Did It!. There was a link to his newly launched site 500words.com. The site was launched and I was thinking why didn’t I think of this idea earlier.

On the heading of 500words.com is the following:

Words mean things. And when you own a word on 500Words.com, it means that your word of choice belongs to you and you alone! Why waste money on an image pixel ad that provides no search engine benefit to your web site? A word link on 500Words.com provides you with a direct hyperlink to your web site. This site is going to be online for two years at a minimum. To select your word, simply click it to check availability. If you don’t see a word that you would like to own, click here to make your suggestion. If we accept your word, it will appear on the page with your hyperlink. If we reject your word, your placement fee will be returned. No adult, warez, gambling, alcohol, tobacco or hate speech sites allowed. This page will fill up very quickly, so select your word!

After looking at the site, I wonder if the $20,000 in 24 Hours is really possible with a site like this. So I went to the page, clicked on “Set your own keyword” where I can fill in the keyword of my choice and customize the font size of my keyword. For font sizes which are bigger, the cost is higher. To add custom colors which makes your keyword unique, the cost will also be higher. Now, to find out if Joel Comm really made $20,000 I will take the average keyword cost of $55 (Keyword:WangInternet($10) + Font Size:Medium($10) + Font Options: Underline($10) + Font Colors: Dark Blue($25)). Then I calculated the number of lines on the site which was 35. Each line has an average of 15 keywords. Therefore, I can conclude that there are about 35 x 15 = 525 keywords already on that site. Now we take 525 keywords multiple by $55, thats $28,875.

Now whether or not Joel Comm really made that much in a day, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that he made at least $ 20,000 from this site alone. It’s great isn’t it. Now the software to create a site like this is also for sale from another of his site at http://www.linksizzler.com. It cost $797.00.

Some key findings which contributed to the success of the site:
1. Have a list of reader’s emails to send to when you launch a new product or website.
2. Create a sense of urgency among your customers. Eg. This page will fill up very quickly, so select your word!
3. Have good reviews from others. You can create a mock review by yourself if you want to.

Now I wonder if the people who bought a keyword managed to obtain any good traffic from the site. If not it could be a waste of money. Any comments?