What type of website should I build? – Part Two
In my first post on different types of websites, I covered some type of websites you can build for your internet business. Here are the rest of the website types for your business.
• Forums – Forums are places where people share common interests together online and post their snippets, views, reactions, and opinions over the web. Forums are much similar to the “clubs” we see in real life. As the club members meet in a club venue, similarly forum members meet on a “forum website” or just a “forum” (which you intend to build).
If you are a newbie, forums are the best place to find people with similar interests who would give you the push necessary for marketing your business and gathering important tips for writing new articles.
Pros
1. Attracts great deal of traffic once it is established as most of the content is user generated.
2. Encourages discussion and debates among various members giving you the necessary “buzz” for your site.
3. Great for networking and building relationships with people.
4. Easy to setup as it requires nothing more than a good forum script and a web host with good amount of space.
Cons
1. Paid writers may be needed initially to start and initiate the conversations on the forum. Nobody likes to visit forums with near zero number of posts.
2. Small forums don’t have much monetization options other than forum advertising. However, once your forum goes popular, you have the option of starting a small subscription fee for viewing and posting in your forums.
3. It’s not good building forums on already established niches like webmaster resources, movies, or television. Large, well established communities have a lot of faithful members, and it’s difficult to lure them to post on your forums.
4. You will need to do a lot of promotion over the net as well as by offline methods.
• Portals & Social Networking – I clubbed these two entirely different types of websites under a single banner because there are already many authority big brand sites in both these niches. So it is advisable to only build them if you have a big untargeted niche which is financially profitable.
For example, targeting a small networking community for web developers or designers, and once you gather a large people base, you can make the most of the advertising monetization options.
• Direct Sales Ecommerce Site – Probably a little difficult to build if you are starting new. Ecommerce sites work the best when you need a product to sell of your own. If you don’t have your own service to sell and promote, you need to recruit partners who are willing to sell their services through your site for a cut.
Basically an ecommerce site consist of the following components:
• A system to manage sales and accept payments in a number of methods.
• A support system to take care of all discrepancies and issues raised by your customer.
• Affiliate partners if you want other people to promote the product on their site while the final sale occurs on your site.
Pros
1) Direct sales ensure that you make the maximum profits cutting the middlemen.
2) You don’t have to add fresh content as you need to in a blog. Your product, if excellent and well promoted, will sell itself.
Cons
1) Technically a bit more difficult to setup than a blog.
2) Lots of competition as there are already well established big brands like Amazon, EBay, and others.
3) Advertising budget is substantial.
Besides these standard type of websites, there are many sites which are build and survive on novel fresh concepts. A great example would be the MillionDollarHomePage. Don’t boot your novel idea – there are millions of services which offer a custom made script for your website if you give them your unique idea to develop upon.
Because in the end, developing a good idea is perhaps the only required skill to develop your online business.