Launching a new niche website has been on my mind for some time now.
Ideally it would be a small, very simple, niche website which can generate about €10k/month without too much time input from me.
Although I have had several ideas, none of them have fully convinced me that they would become a successful niche website (for various reasons).
After dedicating nearly two years to a previous website in 2018 (TrendFriend) that failed to generate any revenue in excess of €5.00, I have grown more cautious about the niche website idea selection process and dedicate a lot more time to evaluating ideas before launching them.
These are the questions I consider for my niche website ideas:
- How can I drive traffic to it?
- How will it generate revenue?
- To what extent can it be automated?
- Can I operate it entirely online?
- Does it align with my current activities and the domain expertise I have developed?
- How simple is it? Is it something that can be launched without the need for raising external investment?
- What is the level of competition in its space?
Three niche website ideas which I decided not to pursue:
1. Workation List
This would have been a list of top places to go on workations. I notice that workations are a growing trend and thought this would be cool.
What put me off this idea was both how it would make money and how it would receive traffic.
It could generate revenue either through ads, affiliate commissions or some type of partnership. But none of these revenue streams seemed particularly appealing to me.
Driving traffic to a site like this isn’t easy and I noticed that there are not a lot of google searches for terms like “portugal workation destinations” so that would be difficult too.
2. Freeparking.ie
This website would have listed all of the free parking spots around Dublin (and maybe the rest of Ireland). I thought this could be a great idea given the rising cost of living.
Two things put me off this site:
1) again, how it would make money
2) it would have required quite a lot of work to find free parking spots around Dublin and keep them up to date
3. ToplessRunning.com
This was going to be a website listing all of the best places in the world to go topless running.
It seemed like fun and the article “Life Lessons from running topless in Dublin city” that I wrote in 2020 received so much traction that I believe there’s something in this.
Perhaps this would have made money by creating a community and organising events for that community, however this is not something I particularly wanted to do.
The Niche Website I am launching
After all of that, there is one idea that I think is worth pursuing, fulltimewebdesignjobs.com
This will be a very simple job board type website specifically for people looking for full-time web design jobs.
Why I think this is a great idea:
– even though Linkedin and Indeed have web designer jobs, a website dedicated specifically to web design jobs allows us to tailor every part of the website towards web designers. I’ve seen this done for other specific job types and think it works really well (e.g. productmanagerjobs.com, www.vetjobs.ie)
– given that the audience will solely be web designers, it gives you a nice selling proposition to companies who are looking to attract a web designer(s)
– platforms like Upwork and Fiver have become very popular, however they don’t have full-time web designer jobs on them, just freelance jobs. There are still a lot of web designers out there who want full-time jobs
Jobs board websites also have the potential to attract significant traffic using simple strategies and generate revenue through various channels, such as featured job listings and premium subscriptions. This presents an opportunity to build a sustainable online business that can be operated remotely. A large portion of this site could be outsourced and automated too making it very appealing.
Overall, the combination of my passion for web design, the potential for revenue generation and the flexibility of an online business makes the creation of a full-time web designer jobs board an exciting venture.
Conclusion
The only way to prove that a niche website is going to be successful or not is to launch it and see – so that’s what I am going to do with fulltimewebdesignjobs.com.
The website is still being developed but it will be ready to launch within a few weeks.
Thank you for reading as always,
Gary
