I built a site that I thought would streamline two things I do on a fairly regular basis. 1) Create a list of new music releases, and grab the links to amazon. 2) Create a mechanism that allowed me to support "people" that I enjoy their work of.
With those two things in mind I created numuboard.com
Thing 1: numuboard.com compiles list of new music releases and places with product links to amazon. There are currently no reviews, ratings, or prices listed on numuboard.com. My personal shopping habits are such that I don't need to see other peoples opinions. If there is a new Pavement album released, I'm going to buy it.
Thing 2: I had previously hardcoded a selection of amazon affiliate links that went to various "people" on the internet in order to make it easy for everyone to support those people. After some conversation, I've since removed that feature and changed it so that you can just pass your affiliate code to the site by means of numuboard.com?tag=amazonaffiliatetag
If you have the time, I'd love feedback on the following: overall design are things like Price, Ratings, Reviews keep you from using this site? Any other features you'd like to see on a site like this?
--- P.S. I don't see this site as a profit-generator. If the site eventually breaks even then great. The cost of running this site is small and so it's theoretically possible for me to break even with a low amount of traffic. If you're interested in the calculations I've done towards figuring that out below. Numbers are used for example purposes only and do not represent actual figures.
Assumptions: Conversion rate of incoming traffic : 1%. Monthly cost to run site : $20.00 USD. Monthly allowable transfer : 200GB. Transfer Size of Website : 360KB. Average Cost of purchase : $5.00 USD. Average Referral Percentage : 10%
Break even: 4000 Visitors == $20 USD. (4000 * .01) * (5.00 * .10)
Number of pages views currently allotted: 200GB == 582542.222 Pageviews (200 * 1024 * 1024) / 360