Website idea 10: Unsolved mysteries blog

It seems there are no decent blogs concentrated on unsolved mysteries. Sure, there are blogs about paranormal stuff but I'm afraid Average Joe doesn't find it very interesting. What I'm talking about are real mysteries: something curious has happened without doubt and we have only vague idea of it.

Try to search "unsolved mysteries blog" with Google and you find nothing relevant. However, I managed to find two unsolved mysteries articles from Listverse: here and here. Typically these kind of articles receive only handful of comments by readers. Just take a quick look of the comment count of these two and you start to realise why I'm writing about this topic. You can also compare the popularity of a query "unsolved mysteries" to a query "blogging" (the latter being without doubt very popular).

So, to me it starts to look like you could make a small fortune with the unsolved mysteries blog. You could use all the mysteries listed on those two mentioned Listverse articles. Additionally, I recommend at least these mysteries:

Wow! signal
Unindentified sound "Bloop"
Who really founded "the New World"
Foo fighter phenomena during WWII
What is hidden inside the mausoleum of the first Chinese emperor
Where is the Amber Room
Valentich disappearance
What happened to the Ark of the Covenant

Website idea 6: List of 25 most bizarre weapons ever

This is not exactly the kind of idea I described on my previous post but anyway: the name tells it all. Make a relatively small site where you have listed the strangest, most perverted and sometimes laughable weapons ever created. I assume about half of the men are interested in groovy weapons, and half of the population of the Earth are men. Therefore the potential traffic is huge. There are competing sources but usually hard to find, about only one weapon at the time and too boringly scientific.

Just list them one after another, add some photos, a brief description, link to some other source and maybe rating possibility.

It helps if you have some knowledge of history, but you will do allright without it. Start by asking on history forums what is the oddest weapon ever, then choose your favorites and search some information about them. If I may give some hints I would probably choose at least Dr Zippermeyer's Whirlwind Cannon, Goliath tank (pictured), Japanese suicide torpedos and American bat bombs. I also suggest you to check out very entertaining book called My Tank Is Fight.

Keyword value of content wont be enormous, ads will probably be about books, DVDs and radio controlled toy weapons. But the number of visitors would counter this.

Write it either in English or some other major language, both works.

Remember, Digg and other similar social bookmarking sites love this kind of lists and will be very useful making this site popular.

REMINDER: Three useful tools for you websites

Before posting more website ideas I'd like to present a couple of useful tools for webmasters. If you are going to implement any of my ideas you will benefit from these. All three are for free.

http://recaptcha.net/
An easy to use CAPTCHA solution for sites with user generated content. Use it to avoid spam and to slow down problem users. You can also use it to hide your email adress from spam bots.

http://www.statcounter.com/
Track how many people visits your site, where they are from, which link they followed to your site, what pages are they clicking etc.

http://www.addthis.com/
Nowadays social bookmarking is crucial thing to get new visitors to your site. The problem is there are so many services that you will have to spend lots of time to get advantage of them all. Unless, of course, you use AddThis. Just embed a piece of code to your site and your visitors can easily tag your site with their favorite service.

Website idea 2: Shipwreck wiki for divers

Try to google "shipwreck wiki" and you will end up with nothing. That's good thing for you, because now you have a chance to make a profitable website. How could wrecks be profitable? Because of wealthy wreck divers. I dare to say most of the divers would like to dive to wreck. The number of those who actually does it is significant: just google "wreck diving".

You could list information such as the position of a wreck, a history of it, a condition of it, depth, difficulty/danger, how impressive it is and so on.

In the beginning you can get a lots of information from Wikipedia and sites such as http://www.shipwreckcentral.com and http://www.ukdiving.co.uk/wrecks/wreck_list.php. These are needed to attract an initial user group to work on wiki.

You might also want to include underwater airplane wrecks as well. They too have their own fan base.

Type of the site:
Wiki.

Technical difficulty:
Easy, you just need to install free wiki software.

Worth of keywords:
High. Diving equpment and courses are BLOODY expensive, as well as traveling around the world .

Amount of mainteinance needed:
Medium. Some work is required for creating wiki categories, administrating collaborators and so on.

Level of competition
Low. Only couple of shipwreck encyclopedias online, and none of them seems to be on wiki format.

Revenue is created by:
Ads.

Website idea 1: Politician promise archive

Politician & celebrity promise archive is a place where promises made by politicians, athletes, artists etc are stored. Site visitors can search celebrities with a keyword and then see what they have promised and when. Later a possibility to comment and rate promises can be added.

This site is useful as especially politicians sometimes regrettably forget what they have promised. So do they voters I'm afraid.

Adding a promise should be made very easy, with just a text box for a sitation, a box for a source URL and a CAPTCHA field.

Technical difficulty:
Easy, some minor PHP/MySQL needed to get started

Worth of keywords:
Low. There will nevertheless be many celebrity names that might have some value.

Amount of mainteinance needed:
Low. Just add "Report content" button, if someone adds inappropriate or faulty information. There shouldn't be need for registration system, CAPTCHA's are probably enough.

Level of competition
Low. At least a query "promises archive" returns almost nothing relevant.