The Social Millionaire – Just Another Million Dollar Wannabe?

There have been a couple of sites that have made bank using the “million dollar” theme including The Million Dollar Homepage and the Million Dollar Wiki. The first ones were good ideas that gained a lot of attention, but is it still profitable to create a “million dollar” site?

Patrick Hankinson is a 19 year old Internet entrepreneur from Canada who has just started The Social Millionaire, a site that “connects consumers from all the major social networks to advertisers who want to reach this audience by keywords.” The goal is to “raise a million dollars while having a huge number of friends from all the social networks.”

So far, Patrick has made $2,613.99 and gained 354 friends. The million dollar theme has been beat to death but I think this is enough of a unique angle to give it an edge.

Basically how it works is that people buy keywords on the homepage for $5 each and their sites are placed under the chosen keywords. It works exactly like a directory minus the categories.

My main issue with the site is that as it grows, the front page will be overloaded with keywords. Unless Patrick has some sort of solution for that, most of the sites that paid for keywords will not receive any exposure. As for SEO value, the links do pass value – although how much depends on the structure of the site, the overall quality of the links included (unrelated garbage links will lead to Google devaluing everything), and how much authority The Social Millionaire builds up in the search engines over time (updating the blog with fresh unique content will certainly help in that).

For $5 it might not be a bad idea to be included in The Social Millionaire. I really doubt that Patrick will come anything close to making $1 million from the site, but I think it has some potential to do well. If all else fails, he can always build up his blog (although I’m a bit confused as to what his focus for it really is).

The Social Millionaire is sponsoring a $100 prize for the Craziest Internet Marketing Contest You’ve Ever Seen. Look for the WTW logo under a special keyword on The Social Millionaire. First person to comment in this post with the keyword wins an extra entry into the contest. Good luck!