Well this is my 48th post on this blog, and I bet you’ve been wondering when I would begin to monetize things. There were 47 posts without a single ad, affiliate link, or promotion … surely you knew the other shoe had to drop! I’ve made it clear that I’m in this business to make money … like you. I think my best bet (for this blog at least) is to help you make money by enriching your website content. So yes, I’m selling data.

I have lots of ideas and data already available, and plans to acquire more. Today, however, I added my first database to my Web Content site: a list of  13,000 news headlines from the last quarter of 2007. That database is just $7 for the first 30 days, half the regular price. I have plans to automate the sale and delivery using PayPal’s IPN, but have not yet actually written the code, so if you buy in the next few days the sale will be hand-processed and may take a while — that will be corrected as soon as I get the time to write code to handle it.

As with any database, I implore you not to use this information in bulk without either selection or modification. That is a sure road to duplicate content problems. You are not the only one with this data, so use it creatively. Select parts of the database, using keyword searches or other criteria, and use only those fields that will benefit the SEO characteristics of your site.

This blog is about Web Empire’s of course, so I assume you have, or will have, more sites. Use the same database in different ways on different sites. Select different data, use different fields, randomize the order — or sort on different values — to achieve unique results. Follow the link to the site, above, for an example of just one potential usage for some of this data.