Website idea 13: Build a discussion board about eco-cars

The era of traditionally powered cars are soon inevitably over, as amount of crude oil decreases and amount of pollution increases. One doesn't need a crystal ball to foretell it won't take too many years before majority of new cars are so called eco-cars - hybrid, electric, natural gas, alcohol-powered, you name it . Web developers are already reacting to this new situation - but there is still enough time for you to take advantage of it.

My advice is: set up a discussion board for eco-cars while the competition is still relatively low. You just need to carefully decide the scope of your board. Is it about all the cars that are using some alternative power source? Or only hybrids? Or cars that simply have an electric motor? Or maybe still even more specific topic, like battery technology and mainteinance? You also have to consider whether you make your board in English or some other language. Remember that even thought more rare languages are not spoken by very many people, the amount of a competition is also lower.

The incomes naturally comes from the ads on your site. I assume car-related keywords are relatively valuable.

In the beginning don't make too many different discussion categories, otherwise the few initial users will be scattered around and can't communicate with each other. There are plenty of good forums softwares to choose from, such as Invision Board, vBulletin and phpBB, all easy to use and PHP / MySQL -compatible. You won't probably need dedicated hosting at least initially as most of the traffic are just plain HTML pages that doesn't rob so much bandwidth.

It might be good idea to add also a news section where you collect a hottest news concerning this topic. And also a link section where you can collect the sites of car dealers, repair shops, information sites, news sources and part suppliers.

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.