Create a niche website for a niche web service
I recently helped a friend create two Chinese language learning websites. One was for Mandarin, the other for Cantonese (a Chinese dialect). Mandarin is by far the more popular language (it comprises around 90% of the Chinese learning material you find at bookstores like Barnes & Noble, Borders, or Amazon).
Can you guess which website gets more traffic? The non-Mandarin one, BY FAR.
If you want to make money online, know that the days of being able to easily/cheaply promote popular or general interest sites through SEO are all but gone. To capture free search engine traffic these days, your best bet is to get creative and specific with your keyword targeting. Offer specialty products/services that customers will find via targeted keyword searches. This may initially sound difficult and limiting, but in reality it allows you to:
- Focus on what really interests you.
- Get higher SEO ranking faster.
- Avoid high cost-per-click and maintain better profit margins.
- Not appear alongside 100's of alternative products
Yes, in the online world, it's time to start thinking "niche marketing".
Make money online with a niche or local job site
If
you interact frequently with people in a specialized industry, or if you live
in a city that doesn't have its own local employment website, consider creating
a niche job board. It's a relatively easy thing to do with these tools:
- SimplyHired.com offers the "Job-o-matic" instant job board, and pays you whenever someone clicks on a sponsored job.
- Indeed.com (recommended) does the same thing as SimplyHired, but also offers "Instant Job Site", which allows you to take a commission/percentage of job posting fees.
Create a subscription-based website
I've
made hundreds of thousands of dollars with subscription/membership websites.
Some examples include:
- a rental listing service
- a discount travel opportunities website
- a language learning website
- a private web surfing service
But those are just some of my ideas; the array of subscription sites that I see people creating to make money online is seemingly endless. Reflect on your knowledge and interests, consider the needs in your local community, and in the online community. Also, reflect on the types of websites you've paid to access in the past -- could you improve on the service that you received from them, or could you offer a similar service for a lower price?
PayPal now has an option to manage subscriber passwords, and there are plenty of open source scripts as well.
Make money online with a niche/local dating site
This
is along the same lines as creating a niche job site. Most likely, you're a
little late/underfunded to compete with Match.com, eHarmony, and those guys.
However, there's always potential for focusing on a particular type of matchmaking
based on common interests, hobbies, lifestyle, orientation, fetishes, geographic
location, etc.
And you don't need to build anything from scratch. You can start with the open source (free) dating system OSDate. If you need help installing/modifying that script, consider hiring a web developer on Rentacoder.com or eLance. The OSDate developer also offers skins (themes) for just $5 each.
Create product review and "top 10" sites
For the last several years, most Google searches would be led by website that "rated" other websites. For example, if you searched "make money online", some of the top results would be "Top 10 money making systems" or "Reviews of best online opportunities", etc.
Google has recently decided that including such websites is not in its best interest, likely because the ratings are often not very objective. However, you'll still find these sites being promoted in places other than Adwords. They basically make money by "recommending" other products/services, and receiving an "affiliate commission" or fixed per-click rate for referrals.
To give it a try; search Google for "affiliate programs" and find products/services/websites of a particular category that interests you (e.g. "learning Spanish" or "email marketing"). Then create a mini-site that reviews/rates all the affiliate offerings related to that category.
Obviously, success will require Internet marketing abilities and efforts outside of Adwords.