I've been running www.heartheissues.com for about 9 months now, and quite successfully in terms of the website bringing in regular and significant (at least for a side project) income. However, the website is a niche website in that only a certain portion of the population is interested in politics and/or current events, which are the topics of the website. I'd like to start the planning stages of a second website with the idea of turning it into a business like with my current website. The only restrfiction i've put on it so far is that it should cover a topic with more general appeal to the overall population. Any ideas i should consider? I thougt about a collegehumor.com type website with large amount of multimedia content, but it would be very tough to truly build up a significant amount of content from the get go.
I have what I think is a great idea, but I'm going to keep it to myself I agree on the collegehumor thing. Before launch you'd need an awful lot of content, and you'd be competing with a whole bunch of other well established sites. That said, this is a very successful site, and the majority of the links in the main body of the page go off site in a new window, with only some of it being locally hosted. http://gorillamask.net/dbplayboy.shtml Still be a huge amount of work though - the owner of that site updates every day by the looks of things, and you also need to have time to find the things on the web in the first place. As the site grows I'd imagine your visitors would start doing that for you and send you stuff in, but for the first few months at least it'd be a daily slog.