When people ask me how to make money online, I give them one simple answer. Find something you love and go make a site about it. While the answer is simple, when you dig deeper there’s a little more to it than that. This is why I decided to give out a few of my ideas for creating a niche site. I’ve included some pointers to help you find your niche and some of my favorite niche site ideas, and even included a special word of warning at the end. First however, let’s clear up what a niche actually is and how I feel the word should be represented.

Niche defined…

1. A situation or activity specially suited to a person’s interests, abilities, or nature.
2. A special area of demand for a product or service.

To me, to find the perfect definition and therefore the beginning formula for success, you need to marry the two definitions above. To complete the formula you need to add in the human element of not just offering something in demand, but something that is helpful and contributes to your readers. In order to capitalize on your investment of time and energy, you have to find an activity suited to your interests in a special area that is in demand and is worthwhile and helpful. When you begin to look at it this way, it starts to feel like a profitable business is a more attainable goal. Now, you just need to figure out what YOUR special niche is.

The trick then is picking the right niche for you. First and foremost, it has to be something you feel passionate about. For me, I usually try to merge my hobbies with a project to make the most of my time and creativity. This is a fantastic and rewarding way to be able to do something you absolutely love and make a profit off of it. So, the question to be answered is, what interests you?

What do you spend your time wishing you could do more of? Is it sports, gaming, travel, art, music? Look around at sites that already exist and play CEO for a minute. What would you do differently? Find people that are talking about your favorite interests and really listen to what they are saying. You should be able to pick up a few ideas of what’s need and wanted.

Following my own advice of being helpful, I’ve come up with a few ideas of niche sites to help get you started creatively. Feel free to use any of these and adapt them to help launch an even better concept.

Travel

Have you imagined yourself the fantastic globe-trotter? Here are a few niche ideas for travel lovers.

• Travel With Pets: Resources and ideas for pet-friendly travel
• Food & Culture: Marry a love for food with new culture and travel tips.
• Minimalist Traveler: Tips for frugal and minimalist traveling.
• Backyard Tourist: Keep your travel tips local and share local insider finds.
• 100 Miles from Nowhere: Places and attractions that are 100 miles away from you. Invite social activity by having others list their favorite places that are within 100 miles of their home.

Food

Are you a foodie and want to impart your succulent tips for amazing entrees on the world? Consider one of these niche ideas.

• Food TV Reviews: Help users keep up by featuring a best of the best recipe selections from your favorite celebrity chefs or network stars. Add a personal feel by actually testing out the recipes and sharing the outcome with your readers.
• Recipe Central: Target a favorite niche of cooking and devote your site to featuring your favorite recipes from that niche. Some category ideas include healthy cooking, quick snacks, vegetarian dishes, breakfast all day, desserts, and foods that help with diseases or prevention.
• The Restaurant Review: An excuse to eat out and get paid for it! Review local restaurants and provide links to their websites and menus to become a one-stop shop for restaurants in your area.
• Bizarre & Wonderful: Invite your users to explore the strange side of food and give history on some unknown or bizarre traditions from other cultures.
• Gifts of Food: Some of the best present are crafted in the kitchen. Help others find the joy in a handmade gift with ideas and recipes for giving food as a gift.

Arts & Crafts

Do you have creative urges you need to find a venue for? Try setting up a site that focuses on your passion.

• Artist’s Gallery: Feature your own art as well as other favorite artists. Consider an area that focuses on teaching or pointing out different design principles from artwork to gain more rapport and understanding of your field.
• Crafty Inspiration: If you love to craft, why not share your creations online with complete how-tos and tutorials.
• Scrapbooking Layouts: Inspire other scrapbookers with layout ideas and sketches. Invite your readers to expand their skills with weekly challenges.
• Genre Specific Crafts: The crafting industry is fairly large. Help other readers out by honing in on one specific genre such as tech crafts, food crafts, easy children’s crafts, educational crafts, fabric crafts, etc.
• End Writer’s Block: Help out fellow writers by sharing your works and giving tips on how to be a better writer. Go a step further by building a community around it and letting your readers help each other.

Reading

If you’re a book lover, a reading-focused site may be what stirs your creative strings of passion.

• Fan Sites: If you love a particular author or genre, devote your site to information and reviews related to your interest.
• Must Read Lists: Take Amazon’s lists idea a step further and create a website targeted around your favorite must read lists. Invite other readers to share their favorites and vote on others. You may even want to create a monthly reading group that talks about a specific featured book each month.
• Magazine Central: If you’re a magazine lover, share your passion with your readers and provide links and updates to some of your favorite magazine columns. Create unique content by writing about your thoughts and ideas on some of your favorite articles.
• I Heart Blogs: If you read blogs, you often find yourself bookmarking, flagging or saving some posts for future reference. Share the love and create a blog fan site to showcase and share your thoughts about your favorite blog posts.

Sports

Can you imagine your entire day filled with sports talk? If that thought fills you with the giddiness of a school girl, you just may have found your niche.

• In Review: Channel your inner sportscaster and provide weekly reviews of hot games and news in the sports world. Create an even deeper niche by targeting one specific sport or geographic area.
• Stats, Stats & More Stats: Create a nostalgia-based site and highlight the stats or history of famous or lesser known players. You can also highlight stats of new and upcoming stars and follow their success or failure in the sport.
• #1 Fan Site: If you are especially loyal to a particular team, create a site dedicated to your passion. Make it easy for readers to find the latest updates on their team, create ways to discuss with other like-minded fans and create downloadable content such as desktop wallpapers and game schedules to keep your fans informed.
• How-To Guide: Some sports lovers make great coaches. You can translate this experience to the web by offering how-to videos, skills training and even workout regimens.

Business

If business or entrepreneurship topics light your fire, try one of these ideas.

• Hobby + How to Make Money: You can marry any of the previous topics and share tips on how to become profitable or run a business in that industry.
• Business Resources: The web is filled with expansive how to make money programs, get rich schemes, and business advice. Weed through the tips and share the ones that have worked for you.
• Business Tools: Every business needs a variety of tools for startup – everything from point-of-sale software to time management and invoicing programs to record keeping. Help fellow business owners by creating a site devoted to review, explanations, and tutorials for these tools.

Ready to get started? What’s your niche?

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I’m a firm believer that the past is a heavy contributor to who or what you are today. Your belief system, your way of doing day-to-day things, and even your ability to process through decisions and determine what’s best for you or your company comes from your past experiences. With that in mind, it has become clear (at least to me) that the best place to start my story (also known as my blogging venture here at Jenn’s Zen) is to give you a clear look at my past and how it has shaped who and what I am today. I have learned a lot, and I have been fortunate enough to be in situations and positions that have granted me incredible insight and knowledge into an industry that is molding and transforming many current and future businesses and entrepreneurs. Yes, folks, we’re talking about the Internet.

My first foray into the idea of creating a business via the Internet was through the self-taught approach of beginning web design in 1996. As a young, single mother, I needed an avenue of income that would allow me time to raise my child the way I wanted (at home) and give me sufficient income to live the life I always wanted (the good life – of course!). As luck would have it, I met and married my husband through this dream and we formed the business officially as a team. We were armed with plenty of zeal and positive thinking. We definitely hit large ups and downs as we plodded through building our business. Within a year, however, two things became very clear.

The first was that we were in the wrong business for me at the time. To help set ourselves apart as experts in the web design and marketing industry, we decided the best approach was to create a “sample” site to show that we “got it.” Lots of businesses offer services to help you, but how many can say they’ve actually used their own service and understand things from your perspective. We felt that if we could make something successful for ourselves, it would help us help others to do it too – and it worked, too well.

This is where the second epiphany came in. I could do more good on a larger scale working on our pet project full-time than I could in our current business model. Before we had this realization, my time was constantly being torn between working on a pet project that I loved and helping people create their visions of success online (something I loved dependent upon the client – but that’s more zen for another post!). This constant battle of trying to give 100% to each aspect of the business was counterproductive to the main motivation for becoming self-employed. My family time was dwindling and overall we weren’t happy with the direction things were going. I wanted to keep our business something we could still do at home, so based on our options and goals for the future, we gave up the web design and focused fully on my pet project, Lovingyou.com.

Referring to this business as a pet project is a bit of an understatement, which brings me to the first lesson I want to share:

Be prepared for success.

As professionals, we all undertake a variety of projects, clients and prospects because we expect to do well with them. However, often we don’t actually put any steps or procedures in to ensure smooth sailing when we do achieve our targets. It’s almost like we’ve surprised even ourselves when we actually accomplish our goal. This is especially true for start ups. Lovingyou.com went live “officially” in October 1997 and by Valentine’s Day in 1998, we had grown so huge so quickly that we crashed our entire hosting company’s servers by 11am. They refused to host us after that and gave us the sage parting wisdom that a site about love and relationships will never bring a profit and we should quit while we were still ahead. Enter lesson #2:

Don’t let anyone else’s opinion about your goals become your own.

It surprises me how often people seem attracted to other people’s “well meaning” advice. If you believe in yourself and your product or vision, don’t let anyone stop you. Even if you fail or don’t meet your expectations, you’ve still learned something that will help you in future ventures. Don’t fall into the trap that other people have to understand where you’re going. Often, as an entrepreneur, you’re going to be the only one that “gets it.” That’s okay. That’s what being an entrepreneur is about. Stepping out and creating a new way of doing or looking at things. Just keep true to yourself and your values and you’ll do well. In fact, that’s just what we did.

After we were shut down, we had to do some hard thinking about the direction of the site. We were faced with an unseemly large hosting bill to keep going and were forced to consider how we were going to make money off of this venture. This “shut down” was actually when our realizations about our future came into fruition. It was certainly a risk, as the site was purely an act of love and I was worried that if it became our major source of income I wouldn’t feel passionate about it anymore. I didn’t want to risk it becoming a chore. This is how I learned lesson three:

When you’re doing something you love, it doesn’t feel like work.

It sounds so cliche, however from my own experience, I’ve definitely found it to be true. When you love what you do, everything you do becomes a natural extension of your work. I could go anywhere and glean advice, ideas and inspiration for articles or new content or features to add. It actually became more liberating and even more rewarding as we gained more and more traffic and income.

However, even when you’re passionate about something, projects can grow so out of control that you just can’t do it alone. This is when I discovered the next lesson:

Ask for help when you really need it and be open to at least trying the ideas presented.

In our beginning days, I solicited help from family members and anyone else who was willing to contribute. Not everyone’s ideas were great, and we certainly made a few mistakes along the way. However, we grew stronger as unit and it helped us communicate even better later down the road. We also made sure to use third-party subcontractors for things we couldn’t do ourselves and even helped our bottom-line by engaging in various partnerships with said subcontractors. Business is about building relationships. Not just with customers, but with your employees, family, friends and co-workers. You can do a lot by yourself, and trust me I did, but you can do even more with the help of those who understand your vision and have something valuable to contribute to it. This task is much easier when you follow lesson #5:

Know and be able to communicate where you want to end up.

Our first goals were insanely lofty. We wanted to be a top 100 site. We never made it, but it didn’t make it an unworthy goal. We did hit in the top 500 once and we were consistently in the top 1000 for quite some time. Lovingyou.com was featured in numerous publications, radio shows and TV programs all over the world. In addition, Lovingyou.com was the number one visited site in its genre. Those achievements may not have been our original goal, but they were impressive just the same. I have a book with the following quote on the cover sitting on my desk as a daily reminder of this philosophy – “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.” It never hurts to dream big and plan for that success. I never complained about just missing our end goals, and you’ll more than likely find that you won’t either. It’s the bigger dream that helps us focus and channel our energy to get up and do what we need to do to get things done each day.

Now, in true spirit of Jenn’s Zen, it’s time to look inward. What are your goals? Where do you want to be with your own company? Do you love what you’re doing? Are there ways you could improve things? Share your thoughts and let’s figure it out together!

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