by Unknown Webmaster on March 12, 2010
Since the newly added Non Gaming Forum on PAL has been getting a bit of attention from people looking to diversify, I thought I would share a little trick for finding new niches.
Flippa.com is a pretty big website marketplace – It is pretty much the equivalent of Ebay for websites.
If you go to Flippa’s auction listings and search for completed auctions where the sales price where higher than 1000$ you will get a huge list of websites that works. Adding “affiliate” or “poker” as a keyword also gives some interesting results. In addition you can often find both traffic and revenue numbers, which can be quite handy, if you aren’t familiar with the market.
This is what your Flippa search should look like.
More Stuff to do with Flippa!
You can also use Flippa to verify that the idea you have for a websites is actually viable. If nobody has ever sold a site like the one you want to build, or the sales price were low, there may be some kind of hard to spot problems that makes it difficult to make money of that kind on site.
Oh yeah, you can also buy and sell websites there…
by Unknown Webmaster on March 8, 2010
I have a tendency to randomly jump into a new niche that I know absolutely nothing about a couple of times each year.
The last topic I choose when I went wild were “bible studies”, and before that it were “Chinese antiquities”. So far these sites has been a huge waste of time, however, I have learned a couple of pretty valuable lessons fx. how to find expert writers in any niche.
There are scores of PHD students and other experts, who are just dying to get someone to publish their articles. This means that if you create a good looking site and get a bit of traffic to it, you can simply post a “experts wanted” ad on your site, and they will contact you.
These people won’t be writing promotional stuff for you, however, they can write incredibly good “how to” articles and guides. In addition, they will be very likely to go out and build links to your site, since they want people to see that someone is publishing their articles.
The best thing is that these people will be okay with being paid 20$/article, as long as you make sure to point out to your visitors that they are an expert, and since that raises the perceived value of your site, I have been more than happy to do that 
In addition to being good writers, these people can also be a big help when doing keyword research and figuring out what to promote. A question like this one can really give you some amazing information:
“I’m having trouble finding advertisers for the site, and since you know much more about the topic than I do, I were wondering if you know about any really popular and/or expensive products that I may not know about”.
