Some User-Generated Content Website Ideas

A good stream of passive income to add to your portfolio is user-generated content websites that I talked about In my previous post. When set up properly, they can be easy to run, and profitable without much work on your part.

Today I want to share with you a way to come up with ideas to run your own user-generated content website. When you think of user-generated content websites, think of online community. Is there an obscure group of people that you know who are under-served? A particular interest or hobby that you or someone you know may have? A particular subject matter that you or someone you know are passionate about?

Notice that I didn’t ask just about you, but also someone you may know, because you are going to set up a website to serve a certain group of people, of which you may not have any knowledge or interest in what they do.

Still have no idea? Let’s pull up my favorite free keyword research tool Wordtracker and search for “forum.” Forums are great for an online community type of website and a great tool to bring together a group of people who share the same interest.

Now work down the list (I prefer to go from bottom to top) and take note of the most obscure forum niches. Also make sure that it has good search volume and low competition number (click on the bar graph next to each keyword to see this information):

“knife forums” will get you ~73 visitors per day (If you can get your website rank #1 in Google for that keyword), and has only 19,200 webpages out there competing against you if you were to set up a site for knife forums. If you have never done any SEO, 19,200 competing webpages may sound like a whole lot, but it really isn’t, if you optimize both on-page and off-page factors.

So, you could set up a forum that talks about knife and bring all knife enthusiasts to your website. If you Google “knife forums” then you will see that there is already a knife forum website (knifeforums.com) and it’s ranking #1. Ok, we can either choose to compete, or narrow it down even further (maybe set up a knife forum for a very specific type of knife, like “rambo knife” <- do a keyword research on “knife“). Sure, we are eating a very small crumb of the whole bread, but eventually we can eat the whole bread this way. Once you set up a forum for a specific type of knife, you can expand your forum to a second type of knife and leverage off the existing forum members you already have captured.

Online forum is just one example of user-generated content website that you can set up and run. You can also set up free classified websites that allow people to exchange/buy & sell certain type of goods (ie. video games). Are there sites like that out there already? Sure there is! But using the niche-down principal, you have just suddenly gain competitiveness in the market.

So, start thinking what type of service you can provide to people - people who are in particular interest groups (religion, politics, weight-loss, make money). A good to go about this is to go to social networking websites such as myspace, facebook, and browse through the groups - that should give you plenty of ideas to spin off and do keyword research on.

Once you have determined the site that you want to set up, go into your hosting’s cPanel and look for the Fantastisco icon which will give you a plethora of scripts that you can install and have an instant website set up for you (forums, blogs). Hotscripts.com also gives you a variety of free scripts that you can run your website off (classified ads script).

Have fun!