View From Office Business Model

View From Office is a blog that allows people to up-load their office view for the world to see and comment on. In return for their time and effort, I allow the contributor to add a link pointing to their web site. This is the first user generated content Blog I have launched so it will be interesting to see how it plans out.

The biggest bonus with operating a user generated content blog, apart from other people providing the content, is that people are likely to talk about the project via word of mouth as their post is personal to them. It’s their office view after all.

Before I invest capitol into the project, I think it’s important we have over 1,000 office views, this will be enough content for users to become interested in terms of looking at offices in their industry, their own country and countries they are interested in.

Once I have 1,000 plus office views, I can then start working on getting editorial coverage - I’ll explain more details on this when the time comes.

So far I have not put to much effort in regards to marketing. I added a post to a few internet marketing forums indicating they can have a free link, this seemed to generate some interest. It was also nice reading the positive feedback users left on my posts.

After the buzz from the forums died down I had to come up with another plan on how I was going to get people to submit their images and spread the word. It didn’t take long before I realized that using Technorati would solve both issues.

Technorati is like a search engine for blogs, most frequently up-dated blogs are listed and you can search keywords of interest. I simply searched for “office view” and a list of blogs appeared with posts dedicated to their office views. I would leave a comment on their blog complementing them on their office view and inform them of my View From Office project.

The first day I left comments on 10 blogs, within 3 days 6 of them had up-loaded their office view to my blog and one blog even wrote a little review of the project with a link.

The main benefit of finding contributors via Technorati is that it’s easy for them to submit the picture as they already have the picture stored on their PC! This is the biggest concern I have for the blog: making it easy. People are so lazy, they don’t want to find their camera, take the shot, load it to their PC and so on

I’ll post another report once I have 1000 office views on the blog with my marketing strategy and monetizing the blog to create revenue from the traffic.

If you have an office and haven’t already submitted your office view, help me out and do it today!