Ask HN: How-to make solid profits from niche websites?
I often see newspaper articles and current affairs television programs, which tell the "success stories" of niche website and/or blog operators who earn six- to seven-figures each year directly from their sites.
I (and I think many HN regulars) would love to do something like this full-time and have some good ideas for sites but don't know where to start...
O learned HN gurus, if someone tasked you with starting a successful niche website from scratch, what would you do?
Any advice or links to relevant resources is greatly appreciated. Thanks.
P.S. For the purposes of discussion I define successful as: good enough to provide you $100k+ annually for working 40hrs per week on average.
Comments
I'd start with http://www.thirtydaychallenge.com/
I know many people and couple close friends that are making very decent living by learning seo/adwords/copywriting(or getting really really good at one of 'em).
The biggest hurdle that holds a lot of us back from this industry is our own intelligence. That is why we shrug in disbelief that a website with a cheesy 2000 word copy makes thousands of dollars in sales. For the time I dabbled with this stuff, that was the most challenging part: putting myself in my avg customer's shoes.
ie. if you goto the site I am recommending, most of us would dismiss it as a "scam." Hey, I did--it took a lot of convincing and showing by my friends before I learned that may be should put my suspicion on hold and explore further.
With that said, getting the initial sales funnel going is not easy and can require lots of patience.
Thanks for the advice. Can you please provide links to some of your friends' sites so I can see examples of what their "successful" sites offer? Thanks again.