Best website money making ideas for $2000?

Here's the situation. I've been given a bit of money from my mother $2000, to create a website(s) to generate a bit of income. She also gave me the money because she knows I've had a number of website ideas over the years, but hadn't had the funds to get them going, so she wants to help with that as well.

My initial idea was to setup a website which I've wanted to do for years which is a digital games store similar to indiegamestand.com but after looking into the development costs it seems it's going to cost too much.

So I've been looking around for other ideas. Something that seems a money maker are dating websites. I know of course that sector is completely saturated, but I keep reading how there's still money to be made. So here's my questions...
Is it still worth creating dating websites?
If it is worth making dating websites, is it better to concentrate on one website? or try to have a number of them?
Everyone says make your dating website niche, but all the niches seem to be taken, is it worth going for a small niche?
What are the single most important aspects of promoting a dating website? is it all about getting the attractive people on there? how important is SEO? Is it worth spending money on a SEO expert to handle that side of things?
Is it worth spending money on ads on other sites to advertise the dating websites?
Are the dating websites just a bad idea for the $2000, and there are better website ideas to generate an income?

Thanks for any advice!

 

What about all that time before your mom gave you the money? Did you learn any code or do anything to help you prepare for this project?

Ideas are nothing without a good execution. I know many people who earn $30K a month with very little to no start up money, you are lucky to have that 2,000 dollars from your mom, now go out there and do something. Unless you struggle and fail, you will never succeed in anything.

 

What are your strengths?

Are you the guy with the ideas?
Are you the guy who knows how to code?
Are you the guy who knows how to market?

Else, look for a partner and invest your $2k wisely.

Then again, it is only when you struggle and fail that you learn.

 

Hello.
Dating sites still work but in order to make them better or boost it, you need to go subniche, where you will have much more flexibility to rank and get the traffic you are looking for. First off all you need to have a good, outstanding website - attractive design, that offers privacy and discretion!

If you need some guidance PM me and I will offer more help.
Sincerely,
Matt

 

Why not look in to buying an established website already making money and then ask yourself, is there anything you can do to improve it? If so it may be worth looking at this option.

 

One advice: make sure all $2K go into creating assets.

 

You mean on flippa? most sites on there worth having are way over $2000.

What do you mean?

 

Meaning:
If you buy traffic, make sure it goes into creating a list - create a landing page with an opt-in form to capture emails.
Your Email List = Asset

If you don't, all your paid traffic will land on your normal page, the visitors will view your website, and leave. You'll never get the chance to follow up on them, or bring them back to your website.

 

Does an email list work though with a dating site? people usually pass through them pretty quickly, because they have found someone meaning contacting them after they have left is sort of pointless meaning keeping their email details would be pointless, or am I wrong?

 

Moneykrap is right. Dating is a massively competitive business and you will need to go sub niche to survive. You have $2000 to spend, how about setting up a dating website comparison portal filled up with CPA dating offers? You'd need to sign up to a few places like Peerfly and CJ and places like that and you would need to do Geo targetting but other than that, you could probably get in there

The one massively important piece of advice I will give you though is RESEARCH! $2K is chump change to the big boys, but not to you so spend it wisely.

 

Thanks for the advice. Yeah research is all I'm doing 24/7 right now, but as you probably know there's so much info out there, and trying to sort it all into what's important and what's not is a full time job in itself! I actually did think about a dating comparison site,but I couldn't figure out how to set one up with Wordpress (I've used WP a fair bit so feel comfortable with it).

My approach is pretty much to setup a lot of little sites, so far that's 2 dating sites (both sub niche), 1 HTML5 arcade, 2 video sites (both niche) and to upgrade my promoteindiegames.com website to a thunderclap.it type website. I'll be then hiring someone to do some small changes to all the above, and then I've got some money left over for ad spend. What kind of ad spend though I haven't much of a clue right now, banners on certain sites I guess.

Definitely interested in the dating comparison though, but like I said don't know how to set one up.

 

If it were me, I would go and hire a coder from elance or somewhere like that. Its definitely not a difficult project for a decent coder. I have a couple of guys that could do it but they are tied up in my projects just now. Its pretty bog standard stuff though. Or you could go and download a clone script from somewhere.

http://www.clonescripts.com/

 

Not sure my budget will stretch to hiring someone to do that on top of hiring someone to do the other bits, I want to keep everything WP if I can. The only thing I can really find for WP, is this http://themeforest.net/item/rehub-comparison-shop-review-affiliate-theme/7646339 but i'm not sure if that will do the job or not.

 

If you're really wanting to go into the dating scene have you considered those whitelabel platforms? It'll cost a lot less to get setup and will have a lot of users already so might work in your best interest - you will get less flexibility on it but less risk.

 

I might well be wrong, but I always get the impression with the white label solutions that you do a lot of work, just for someone else to benefit from it, I don't see it as a huge problem getting people on the dating sites I want to set up, so I'm not sure what the need would be for a white label solution anyway.

 

I believe the idea behind the white label solutions is for you to setup your site how you like, be it a niche area or a general one. You market it and get people to signup, once they pay to become a 'full member' you get a percentage.

You would benefit from their existing user base and support at the cost of the extra flexibility of setting up your own website.

If you're pretty confident in getting users then go for it and good luck .

 

in my opinion websites are like a business card for an actual business., so you should start by having a attractive product...and market it well, website is only as reference to your customers to see your merchandise..you will have to deal with them and talk to them on the phone, if you are new on the internet probably no one will trust you, to put on their credit card unless they know you .

 

Why don't you hire a good mentor who will advice you where to go in your future? I'm seeing so many ideas popping out here but on the end of the day, you seem like you don't have enough experience to pull a project and earn some honest money. Maybe it's just me, but that's how I see it.

The toughest job when having a website is to earn money with it. Have you even considered how you are going to monetize the website? Promotion, creation yeah yeah bla bla... That's easy. What you are going to do when you invest money into traffic and end up with 0% conversion rate? My first 10 trials with PPC were complete failures. I was always missing something. Until I figured out. But I lost a ton of money in the mean time and for now you only have 2K. That's a lot for someone but it is very small amount if you want to go with PPC.

From your questions like: ''how important is SEO? Is it worth spending money on a SEO expert to handle that side of things?'', I can see you have really, really small experience. And with that kind of experience, you are going to burn out.

Dating is probably the most profitable niche out there. You have thousands of people investing hundred of dollars everyday and pulling millions from this niche. But you need to have experience and know where and how to invest money and on the end pull something huge.

From my point of view, you have three options:
1. Try without investing money and save 2k and invest it smartly later.
2. Hire a mentor who will teach you things you don't know.
3. Jump on the first train, burn out and give up.

 

I appreciate the advice. Point 1) is basically what I've decided to do (hence why I'm asking other questions), and that's set things up as cheaply as I can, learn as much as I can about SEO (including maybe hiring someone to get things started) and then monitor everything and see which of my ideas start to take hold and which don't. Monetization wise it largely depends upon the site, for promoteindiegames.com the new theme has some premium options (paid to be featured etc) which I will try out, the HTML5 arcade will just be ads (as most arcade sites are), the dating sites will be a mixture of ads and obviously subscription, and the video ads will just be ads again.

The one area which is totally unknown to me is CPA/Afilliate marketing and all that. Someone mentioned a dating comparison site which is interesting to me, but I don't see how you set it up with WP.

 

My recommendation for Dating is definitely CPA/Affiliate Marketing. That is what most people use and what bring really huge money.
When you say ads for dating sites, on what ads you are thinking?