Vibrant Blogging :: Apartment Therapy

ApartmentTherapy.com

From their mission statement:

Helping people to make their apartments better places to live.

The site's vibrant with comments on their excellent ideas for stuff-reduced living, low-cost decorating, and design.

How does a site come to be 'vibrant'?

Contests are a popular means toward that end. ApartmentTherapy.com has their own Smallest, Coolest Apartment Contest. Voting ends May 6, 2007, people, and one of the entrants - Rachel - is from Williamsburg. Vote for Rachel HERE.

Their goal is:

To connect people to the resources they need to redecorate their home, while reducing their reliance on stuff.

Monetization:

• A one-week text link goes for $165. Buy a month for $575. No Google Juice.
  
• A hand-coded text ad (for Google Juice) requires a 3-month commitment
  
• Stats:
  
• 17,000 unique users / day
  
• 190,000 page views / day
• Contest prizes from designers and providers of the stuff of home decorating
  

Authority. It helps to establish 'authority' if you have a book to hawk. ApartmentTherapy does: "apartment therapy : the eight-step home cure"

Niche. One way to go niche is to be geocentric. Apartment therapy is regional, having split the country into five regions.

Patience. Apartment therapy's been around since April 2004.

I'm surprised they haven't incorporated video into their bag-o-tricks.

Wburg.TV's going to incorporate a contest - a film festival - into our bag o' tricks come autumn. Keep yer eyes peeled. $35K in prizes.