Ideas for a $100+ a day website

Money TreeSticking with Thursday’s topic of website ideas I was chatting to someone at the weekend who has a few small websites but seems to be sitting around waiting for one big idea which he hoped would be the break between playing about online part-time and making more serious money.

A successful site that can generate $100+ per day is his main aim, or at present his dream because he is sitting doing nothing about it waiting for a sudden Eureka moment.

My take on it is that you really don’t need to be completely original to be successful, sure most of the massive success stories we hear about are brand new technology or ideas but to make $100+ per day you can build on what is already there. What you don’t want to do is copy everyone else and then complain that you are no further forward, I really quite dislike the way something is successful and then cloned to death with absolutely no originality or thought put in.

What you need is an angle, you can take a successful idea and put a spin on it making it original but not completely new. 4 years ago when I first registered RateMyTattoo.co.uk there were already a few rating sites, it was at the peak in popularity of the hot or not type of site and I took that idea and applied it to a single but very large topic of tattoos. Not anything new but doing it just with tattoos made it a fresh and interesting site to it’s audience. I sent out a few emails and About.com featured it which drove thousands of visitors per day to the site for a while and I later merged the site into my main one to create one larger authority website. In fact the other areas of my main tattoo site are not brand new ideas, I just worked on examples out there and improved on them.

originalThere was a site that offered subscription based access to images that was very expensive mainly aimed at tattoo studios and not individuals, so I created a gallery aimed at joe public, another site offered translations just in Chinese, I created a full translation service with over 6 languages! I did all this on one site that offered free areas, paid areas and product areas, all using ideas that had already worked for others.

I haven’t talked to Al about how his gadget site was first started, I’d take a guess that he wasn’t the first person to think about using a blog as a base for a website, he probably wasn’t the first person to start a website about gadgets and I am sure there were other sites reviewing gadgets, however Al saw the potential of putting all that together with multiple daily posts of high quality with paid writers and carved out a very nice piece of the market for himself.

You see you don’t need to be brand new you just need to see an opportunity and act quickly and decisively, in the end the way you do something and the content you generate can be more important to your success or failure than the idea itself.
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OK, I asked on Thursday that you consider sending in ideas that we can all comment on so thank you to those that have taken the time to contact me I do appreciate it, feel free to continue to send in your ideas, I have chosen the first one below for which I ask for your feedback on please.

Submitted by Garry:

Idea:
This idea is something I’ve been thinking about for ages but as usual have never taken it further. It’s along the same lines as confused.com with car insurance but with one major difference. When I think about getting a ‘new’ car, insurance is one major factor in my decision, so what I would want is a web site that I can put a load of different cars as options, then all my other details and get maybe the top 5 insurance quotes for each type of car.

So rather than get a quote, change the car, get another quote etc etc you would do it all in one go. Now this type of site would be of most benefit to the younger drivers where insurance is normally a limiting factor to getting a car as usually it ends up costing more than the car itself.
I haven’t seen or heard about sites that do this, but I haven’t done a lot of research into it as I just thought it was too big to attempt and would cost too much. The technical side is the main sticking point and getting hooked into the insurance systems, although there is probably only a few different systems out there.

So, has it got legs?
Do you have any thoughts or know anything about the technical side of it?

Your thoughts & comments appreciated.

About Scott Jones

Scott hails from the north east of Scotland and started earning online at the end of 2000 building websites for local businesses during which time he won an award from Lord Alan Sugar for Excellence in Enterprise. After having quite a bit of success with domaining Scott mainly runs educational evergreen websites which generate over 3 million visitors per month but is always on the lookout for a fresh thinking out of the box way to turn a buck. Follow on Twitter.

Comments

  1. Well that fits very well with my post today, taking something that obviously works and improving it or putting a new spin on it. My thoughts, I like it a lot Garry. I do not know about the technical limitations and that could obviously be the main hurdle but the idea of being able to input your details and then get quotes on various cars quickly is superb! Insurance can be prohibitive and as you say more expensive than the car itself so perhaps putting in your details and getting ideas for cars that you could afford, maybe getting the top 25 cheapest cars for you personally and then you can look to choose something you like and can afford to insure.

    • Blimey, didn’t think I’d be chosen to start the show!
      I sound a lot like that person you mentioned in the first paragraph too…. but it’s not me is it?

      I would be interested to hear anyone’s thoughts on the idea though, especially the technical side. There must be some sort of API to hook into for the main quote systems.

      It should also be mentioned that this is a UK targetted site.

    • Ingeniousmac says:

      I think it is a great idea! The thing you need to know is that you’ll need to partner with the insurance companies in order to acquire for each the underwriting parameters they use. This is imperative since you’ll want your clients to receive very exact quotes.

      I had the opportunity to work for an insurance company in Canada (RBC Insurance) who partnered with an online site similar to confused.com (Kanetix.com). That’s the way they did it. It also means that a verification process as to be put into place since from experience, people with bad or so so driving records, tend to ”forget” about accidents, claims, tickets, etc. At RBC Insurance, people would get a quote online and then be asked to call in, in order for us to double check all the info.

      Nevertheless, if you can get by all these obstacles this would be a great idea. Good luck.

  2. This ideas bit is closely related to the Enterpreneur bit. Some take there ideas to the next level, but most sit and wait for that, as you said, Eureka to happen.

  3. I think Garry’s idea is very good. People will go and use it becuase it just does everything it needs for them.

    Being 16 and looking into driving you would have a large audiance with a bit of advertising (not as much as confused.com) say for example in teen-forums or teen magazines.

    I like that idea.

    • I agree it would appeal to young drivers, but even I struggle to get reasonable insurance and I’m 31 with 11 years no claims bonus. Insurance is location dependent too so this angle on an existing tool would have quite a wide appeal… I think.

  4. I was thinking about a car insurance site the other day as well, with a social networking element so you can see what other people pay and compare who gets the best deals.

    For example if I saw another 26 year old with 4 years no claims getting a much better deal I could then ask his insurers for a quote.

  5. i am always having a hardtime thinking of a good niche..

  6. I think insurance depends a lot more on driving record and a lot less on the type of car (I just bought a new car). Would this be similar to esurance.com?

    I really like the social network aspect of people putting in what insurance premiums they are paying, location like state, country and also how they would rate their driving history - like good, bad, fair or maybe even descriptive like had 4 accidents in the past. That way people with a bad driving record might be able to see what they are in for.

    • In the UK cars are placed into Insurance groups from Group 1 right up to Group 20 ~ where my X5 fits in :) so the actual car can change the premium a great deal with us as far as I can tell, I like the social aspect as well, that would avoid coding API issues and connecting to get valid quotes, let the public make the content.

      • I still struggle with a rubbish citreon ZX which is about insurance group 5!
        Anyway, the social side does sound good where you don’t actually do the quotes but ask people to contribute building up data for different groups, age, location etc etc
        That would certainly make things a little easier, but may not have the appeal that getting actual quotes has.
        Maybe that would be a natural progression once a community has been built up.

  7. One issue is the how will you get the quotes?

    Could you get it as a XML feed? You would need to get it checked daily too.

    • Sites like confused.com make a live connection to the merchant site using php and something like fsockopen to get the data. They run the script in the background and use AJAX to update the results page live as the data comes in.

      Once all the data has arrived they send an email to confirm it.

      Its cool stuff.:)

  8. I know of people who have managed to bring several different insurance systems together onto one platform for comparison selling, that was back in 2001 and was considered very high tek. To hook them together on the web and have user access to them may not be that simple - I don’t think the insurance companies are willing to put their info out there for all to see (we might figure out how much profit they are making). Seems to me the best way is to have users post their info and to work out some error handling code to minimize variances and outlying entries. The best part about having users enter it - you are not region specific, anyone anywhere can take part and benefit from the service making your audience global.

    • Moneysupermarket.com can pull together quotes from 50+ insurance companies.

      I like the idea mentioned above of being able to get multiple quotes on several cars so that you can see in one swoop a comparison of several cars and average costs.

      I just ran a quick check on my car and I got a quote from them starting at £232/Year up to about £700/Year. A nice list is generated.

      The only sucky part is now that I want a quote on another car I need to repeat the whole process again which took about 5 minutes.

  9. It seems like a community contributed site would play an important factor in creating content at a rate that makes $100/day justifiable.

  10. I dont think people should email in their ideas. They should just try them out and not give them away.

    • I think the idea is that people can use Scott / Al (?) as a sounding board, of course there is some amount of trust involved in the whole thing.

      Think of it this way, you have 10 ideas, do you seriously have the time to try all of them? You may be better spent investing all your time and effort in a single idea.

  11. It seems that link exchanges, posting comments of forums and other blogs and any other methods of advertising are useless..when you see how much traffic you get from about.com. I believe this is the best way to get exposure and get your new site off the ground: get your site recommended by the big guys is the industry. Would you like to tell us (or maybe have a separate post) how did you manage to accomplish this?

    Thanks

  12. I just realised that $100 a day is $36,500 a year atleast.

    That is a very big income.

    I am going to try and aim for that.

    • Obviously depending on what country you are from, but yes it is a substantial amount.

      • I don’t think 20 sites is too much at all. If they are all mini sites, like in another of SMM posts then they are very easy to make and set up. I would have said 20 is a fairly easy target. Just think, 100 sites making $5 a day, that $500 a day.
        When you start to think of the potential that is possible, writing 100 individual pages of content doesn’t seem like a huge task.
        Of course, it all takes a little time. I currently have 3 mini sites, a forum, 2 blogs and my business site and my income from them is about enough to buy a pint of beer a week :) :) so a long way to go yet.

    • Indeed it is Abdul. I am going for the slightly different route with lots of smaller sites making $5 or $10 a day. If I had 20 sites making $5 dollars a day then that would be the same as $100 a day from one site…. I’m way off that level now… but getting things in place to get there sometime.

  13. This is a great post, but I don’t think people tell their ideas. First of all they try them out and only if doesn’t work give them away.

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