I am currently on a gap year (well just dropped out of uni because I was doing the wrong course and living with awful people) and I want to raise some money before returning to university although I dont really have any money to invest in anything. I do currently own a domain which would be ideal to put student information on although it wont make that much money, so I am looking for something else to do but I have no idea where to start. I want about £15000 before I go back, I would like more so I can afford to pay my tutition fees straight away and not have to live in halls again but I dont really think I would be able to make more than that. I dont really know anything about article marketing, dont want to do affiliate marketing. I could perhaps do small template sites with affiliate marketing on them, how much would someone pay for a site such as this? Skills I have: Adobe Photoshop, intermediate Adobe Imageready, can do animations etc. HTML and CSS, probably basic to slightly intermediate compared to most people here. I can install forums/cutenews etc but not really do any modifications although I have never tried. I was thinking maybe web design and I have done a website for a small business before and got about £100 for it, but the person it was for was a friend. Do you think it would be possible to get 2+ design requests a day for £200+ each? (Then again I dont really know how much people would pay for a website by me) Anyone have any ideas, I tend to do modern, simplistic designs. Another question, how much would I be able to sell an active forum for with around 50000 users and 600000+ posts
Not sure about the forum price. But if you were looking to sell your designs then you could possibly sell templates for wordpress. Checkout sitepoint.com/marketplace and have a look at the templates section. The wordpress templates virtually always sell (so even if it didn't sell the first time you advertised it, you'd just have to put it up again the next week and it would pretty much sell guaranteed.) But you'd only expect somewhere from $75 - $150 for your templates. Another good thing is they are considerably easier to make than a full website template. A lot of people still want that 'blog' feel with their wordpress template so you wouldn't really need to manipulate much of the layout, just sort of change the header/banner, backgrounds, fonts, colours (give it a new feel). If you're really looking to make a lot of money though I think there could be a fair bit of work involved if you were just going to make templates though, just an idea.
It's not my forum, someone has offered to sell it to me, its in a pretty good niche, would be good for affiliate marketing actually (if thats allowed on forums), I know I probably wouldn't be able to afford it but I would like some estimates. I'll look into wordpress themes, thanks for the suggestion Do you know how long roughly it would take to make a good wp theme?
Any other suggestion and can anyone answer the question about how long it would take to make a wp theme?
Make one and find out! There are too many variables to say for sure. Good luck with your plans, although this is an ambitious goal. If I was you, I'd get at least a part-time job too, then you've got money to fund things like advertising, as I imagine if you get it right you could be very good with any project if you put enough money into it.
How long is a piece of string.... On a serious note, once you learn the markup required for a template to work with WP, how fast can you type?