3 Little Ideas: StumbleUpon, Notebooks and Swapping Stuff

If you’re not in the market for a new project, you can skip this one. If you are, consider these three ideas. Not sure if they’ll be useful to you, but I had to get them out.

• 1. Start up a blog or website dedicated to StumbleUpon. It could include profiles of great stumblers, tips, hacks and how-to guides, and updates about the pages causing a buzz at the moment. Pros: established and passionate reader base, very high likelihood of your articles getting plenty of stumbles. Cons: difficult to monetize. (Note: there are probably sites attempting this but a cursory searched revealed none. I’d also think that if it were doing it well we’d all know about it. Most of you could really pull this off, I think.)

• 2. Start a blog about Notebooks (the old-school kind). Creative/organized types who use notebooks are fanatical about them. You could include reader-submitted scans, hacks, trivia about how famous people in the past have used their notebooks, info on stationary, etc. Pros: easy to monetize (aff links to notebooks and stationary), would be quite fun if you’re a notebook aficionado yourself. Cons: you’d have to be a naturally inventive person to keep the content up to standard.

• 3. A swap site, based on Bookmooch.com. It would have to use a different algorithm to be original, but the basic premise is: you give away a book you don’t want to someone who wants it and get a point. You use that point to get a book you do want from someone who doesn’t want it — they get a point. Work out a different value system and repeat the process for: comic books, or trading cards, or CDs, or DVDs, or any relatively cheap collectible item. I like the comic book idea best. Pros: potential for virality, powerful monetization options (look at Bookmooch for inspiration there). Cons: technically difficult to execute.