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Forums. Personally I think building a solid community with a forum is a lot of work. It’s hard hard hard work to be honest with you. The main reason is that YOU are going to have to post the living heck out of your own forum to get it started. Paid posting services and RSS “builders” are great for populating a forum if your just using it for SEO work, but it makes building a community that much harder. (Real people can tell).

Social Network. Web 2.0 is the buzz word and every Mary and Jane think they can pop up a social network and make big bucks…. Newsflash: It takes traffic. It takes effort - and of course it does help if your a heck of a programmer or have one your paying for. Dolphin, drupal, and joomla can all be tweaked to act as a social network and there is talk of a wordpress MU plugin in the works that will work as a community. Personally I can’t wait for that one. With the ease of setting up wordpress it should be pretty easy to at least throw up a “shell” of a social community quite quickly. For those of you with a bent on spamming imagine filling up 10,000 profiles promoting a different affiliate product and since it’s your own site it’s legit :)
Specialized Search Engines. I love these…. they make my job as a webmaster easier but I’m pretty sure that most regular users don’t use them frequently. A great example of this is the search engine I came across a few weeks ago that told me what yahoo answers were waiting for answers related to my search term. I use it (and have even been known to click an ad or two while I was there). Think of a niche need and fill it.

Affiliate Review Website. Lot’s of folks will tell you to write an affiliate review website… they are idiots. The money you make for the effort is nothing. Instead of reviewing dozens (or more) of products pick one, fill the blog up, and promote it. Should take a day or so - that’s it. Collect money all year long.

Don’t believe me? Take a look at this: Launch Formula Marketing .

Took me about an hour to set up the blog and first couple posts. Built a few links and let it sit. Added some more posts later but I probably could have skipped it. It earns a few hundred to a few thousand per month. Depends on if folks are paying me for customization or not. Since that script is $297 compared the $1500 competition folks are usually checking for alternatives.

Celebrity Blog. Same concept - more drama :)

Automated Blog Network: Automated blog networks or blogs that syndicate other peoples content do work, but they require a lot of recycling. Your going to get complaints and issues because some people just don’t want you publishing their rss content on your site.  Eli’s blog (blue hat seo) talks about some ways to cover your tracks.  If your a happy ‘white hat’ webmaster this is probably not up your alley.  Most of us bloggers really don’t care if you do it as long as your linking back to us and not changing our content.

Youtube Clone: There are many scripts out there that allow you to run a service similar to youtube. Your issues here are going to be performance, and storage space. I prefer the scripts that take rss feeds from popular video sites and just makes the site for you on the fly.

Digg/Technorati Clone: There is an open source script out there called pligg - and there are some others as well. Makes it easy to run a digg clone. Also makes it easy to dump links to your other sites pretty easy…. hmmmm.  From a white hat side it’s a great way to make ‘themed’ social networks.  Aggregate sites are the same concept just usually more targeted.

Aggregate Sites: You can use pligg for these as well or pull in your own RSS feeds. The point of these is to gather related sites together and display the rss snippets.
Made for Adsense Websites. “MFA” is a dying breed.  Getting kickd out of the serps, and banned from adsense are just a few of the reasons why.  It doesn’t stop folks from churning out thousands of these every day though.  If your going to do this - do it in bulk and realize you might just be wasting your time.  Good content and a good navigation structure can enable you to make sites that while they earn from adsense don’t get banned.

Affiliate Product Website. Instead of reviewing an affiliate product sell your own.  Make em - and sell them. Usually these revolve around info products.  You can do better for yourself with some of the other models.

Paid (monthly) Memberhip Site. Plenty of people will pay “MONTHLY” for your expertise or to be part of a closed community. I run several paid monthly(and one off charge) membership sites, and while they take a lot of resources to set up they are usually worth it from a ROI point of view. With as easy as it is to make video these days, it’s a easy way to teach things as well.
Design/Coding Service Site.  Do you have skills?  If you do you can sell those services to others.  It’s a great way to earn the seed money to start your ‘real’ website empire.  Don’t plan on doing this forever - it’s a lot of work and you should be using those skills to make money for yourself.

File Hosting Website. Lot’s of space and bandwidth needed.  Lot’s of copywrite issues, and lot’s of crap.  Ohh yeah - lot’s of competition as well.  A hard niche to break into.
Web Directories.  Absolutely you should run a few Web Directories - even if for nothing more than to ’sell’ yourself the featured ads.  It’s also a great way to earn good money as you age and rank.
Online Web tools.  Another hard niche to break into - unless your tool is unique and something people will actually use.

Commercial Template Sites. Have someone create a bunch of templates for you and go to town.  Or use something like template monster and just affiliate.  A great way to get traffic to these types of sites is to give away free templates with your link embedded in them - but plan on using a lot of PPC advertising to make any money.  A thought is to just concentrate on one type of template (web 2.0, blog, forum, etc…)

  

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