chaseman Posted March 3, 2011 Share Posted March 3, 2011 I'm experimenting with ways to create a profit generating niche website. Since I noticed that this forum consists of internet experienced members, I'd like to have some advice on this. I've noticed there are content driven websites, and tool driven website. And there are also a combination of both. Where you provide a tool so the users can upload their own content. I like the second and third option, doing just a content driven website is not really my thing as I've found out. I have already two ideas to create an internet business, but those are full blown internet companies which would take at least 6 month of work. So basically I'm looking for an idea that can be done in a shorter time, basically a niche website. Don't worry, I'm not asking you to give me ideas, the actual purpose of this thread is, that I'm basically trying to figure out what the main factors are to generate a profit, even if it's just a few hundred dollars a month. Requirements for a niche website: - find a niche where you can compete against the others - choose a good selection of 3 keywords for your website - give the people content (or tools) which are qualitative and unique than what the others provide and which they can't find elsewhere Till here it makes all sense, basically create something that is qualitative and unique, that people may be looking for. Factors of generating profit: - there are many ways, be it affiliate marketing, AdSense, letting the users fill out surveys, etc. => All of these REQUIRE one important thing and that is -> visitors If you don't have any visitors, you won't have anyone clicking on your ads. So does all boil down to the visitors at the end of the day? Another question comes up, now you have invested months of hard work into your niche website, how to get those visitors? - is it all about SEO, or rather something else? - is it about link building? - or is it about something else? I'm trying to bring system into the question "how to get visitors", it seems a bit unpredictable to me. Some people invest months of hard work and their website remains unknown while others create a gag idea while being drunk and they get thousands of visitors, because their website went viral. I'd appreciate any advice by the internet experienced people on here. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
xylex Posted March 3, 2011 Share Posted March 3, 2011 Stop linking "going viral" to generating a profit. The two rarely have anything to do with each other. A great presentation about making a profitable dot-com - Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chaseman Posted March 3, 2011 Author Share Posted March 3, 2011 Stop linking "going viral" to generating a profit. The two rarely have anything to do with each other. What you say makes sense, but I was just thinking of two examples where it DID generate profit, and those both WERE linked together, so your statement does not apply to all cases. - 1 million dollar website -> only got successful and profit making BECAUSE it went viral - chatroullette -> only got profit making BECAUSE it went viral Copy cats who try the same aren't making any profit BECAUSE they are not going viral. I will check out your link now, thanks for it. p.s Though I agree that in most cases going viral and making profit don't have to be linked, and I wasn't saying that anyway, I was just drawing an analogy that some people work several months and other crank out a gag idea over a few days, where the latter has more success than the former. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gizmola Posted March 3, 2011 Share Posted March 3, 2011 You are making this too complicated. Think about movie marketing. -Movie A is a romcom that sucks. -Movie B is romcom that is great. Movie studio A spends 10m on tv commercials and internet ads to market it's movie, it opens in 2k theaters and that generates $18m at the box office. After word of mouth gets out the movie dips quickly. 2 weeks later it's out of theaters, with a total gross of $27 million. Movie studio B spends 10m, it opens in 2k theaters, makes $18m, and then stays in theaters for the next 5 weeks, ultimately making $40m at the BO. Both movies get reviewed, but as public appreciation for Movie B is higher, there is a lot more attention paid to it. People write glowing reviews and proviles of the writer and director. Fans create sites in homage to it. A young actor in the movie starts getting oscar buzz and begins to be followed around by paparazzi and appearing on red carpets for other movies. This phase is a lot like search engines. In order for this to work, there has to be genuine interest. People need to be searching for the movie, or its stars. The more interest, the more value the search engines place, and the more long term traffic will be generated for it. But notice, that both movies had to spend money to get enough public attention for it to make any money. People have this idea that the internet is like a "Field of Dreams". "Build it and they will come." That just isn't the case. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Philip Posted March 3, 2011 Share Posted March 3, 2011 Eh, I'll do a shameless plug here. I have a friend who has done many years of profitable niche websites. He recently setup a forum just for this: http://www.makemoneyforum.com/ which has some pretty answers to the questions you had above. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chaseman Posted March 3, 2011 Author Share Posted March 3, 2011 This phase is a lot like search engines. In order for this to work, there has to be genuine interest. People need to be searching for the movie, or its stars. The more interest, the more value the search engines place, and the more long term traffic will be generated for it. BUT for that too happen, you'd have to get peoples ATTENTION in the first place, in the sense of your analogy, you'd have to get the movie into the 2k theaters in the first place. And THAT is my main concern in this thread. Fine you've created a nice niche website, but what then? How do you essentially get peoples attention? The funny thing is, even if you have a great keyword selection and SEO on your site, the search engines still won't rank it high, if the site has no visitors, and if the site is not linked to from many other website. But for that to happen, you'd have to get peoples attention in the first place. And if the site does not rank at least in the top 20, nobody will find about it no matter what keywords they type in. Or are there other ways to get the movies into the theaters and let the people find about it? (That's my question). People have this idea that the internet is like a "Field of Dreams". "Build it and they will come." That just isn't the case. That is exactly the point of this thread, I'm trying to figure out how to get to the people instead of them coming to me. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chaseman Posted March 3, 2011 Author Share Posted March 3, 2011 Eh, I'll do a shameless plug here. I have a friend who has done many years of profitable niche websites. He recently setup a forum just for this: http://www.makemoneyforum.com/ which has some pretty answers to the questions you had above. That's a nice looking forum, I'll look into it, thanks a lot. EDIT: thanks to this guide: http://www.makemoneyforum.com/topic/116-how-to-make-a-micro-niche-website-starting-from-scratch-mmf-guide/ I'm realizing that it's also to a major part the backlinks which make you rank high. If you compete in a niche with websites which have 600 backlinks you'll have a hard time, but if you compete in a niche with keywords that get searched for 1000 times a day, and the competition only has 0 backlinks, you have a much easier time to rank at #1. Link building was what I thought as well, but I wasn't quite sure about it. Now it's more clear to me. Special thanks to you KingPhillip. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gizmola Posted March 3, 2011 Share Posted March 3, 2011 I think you kind of missed my point. For simplicity sake I left out a discussion of movie distribution in the analogy. What needed to be taken away, is that the way you get traffic is you "market" your site. You need to have a "budget" and spend money. Long and short... you buy traffic. You can't put up a site and expect people to come to it, when you didn't advertise it. There are things like CPC deals or CPA deals (advertising networks) and Google Adwords. As for the mechanics of google... who cares if you're number 1 for 5 keywords that each generate 5 visitors a day? Worse yet, focusing on gaming search engines so you get traffic for people who hit your site, see immediately that it is not relevant to what they were looking for, and immediately leave is an exercise in futility, that far too many people seem preoccupied with. Not to mention that google is constantly working on ways to keep people who are attempting to game them out of their results. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chaseman Posted March 3, 2011 Author Share Posted March 3, 2011 Ahh that puts it into a different perspective, so basically it takes money to make money... So your point is that similar how a pizzeria around the corner is doing advertisement, I should be doing advertisement and market the website. Makes sense. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gizmola Posted March 4, 2011 Share Posted March 4, 2011 Ahh that puts it into a different perspective, so basically it takes money to make money... So your point is that similar how a pizzeria around the corner is doing advertisement, I should be doing advertisement and market the website. Makes sense. Yes exactly. I think this speaks to your example of people that spend lots of time on a site and have no visitors. That does indeed happen frequently, and they get frustrated, yet never realize the problem is that they never marketed or advertised it. Of course there is no panacea, and how you advertise the site depends greatly on the type of site it is. For example, if you are selling something, you need to buy into eyeballs just for that site. If you have a site that is a service, then you want to get the attention of people who are your target market. Then there's the example of a site like SBNation that did a deal with Yahoo to be a sort of affiliate blog network. SBNation has some other strategies that you can read about here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SB_Nation but having witnessed first hand how it blew up to 12m visitors and 100m page views in a year, was the deal they did with Yahoo to have postings from all their blogs appear in boxes for Yahoo's related sports content. Even though SBNation is a completely unrelated entity that is paying yahoo for all the traffic they are generating for SBNation, to the yahoo visitor it appears that SBNation is an extension of Yahoo. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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