Content sharing websites as a business idea are great way to build an online business by using content that is freely available to use or that other people share on your website.
And as internet business ideas go this is one of the smartest ways to build a website and online business, because you don’t have to come up with all the content for your website by yourself.
So what are some examples of content sharing websites?
Some of the more obvious ones of course are article directories such as Ezine Articles, Buzzle and Searchwarp.
But trying to build a website to compete with these types of sites is not a good use of your time, the competition is too stiff.
The good news though is that you can use articles posted on these types of directories on your website for free to help you build your content.
You will have to credit the author of the article of course, and it won’t be original content, so it’s not something to rely on to build an entire website, but it can help increase the size of your site and also provide quality information to your visitors if you find articles that have a lot of relevance to your topic.
But there are even better ways to use publicly shared content to help you build your website and I’m going to show you two specific ways this can work for you.
The first way is to build your site around a niche that has a lot of video content distributed on the internet through you tube and other video sharing sites.
First of all you need to find a niche that meets supply and demand numbers, and that you would be interested in writing about, because you will still be adding your own unique content to the site too.
But people love to watch video, so if you can build your site with a lot of video information on it, this helps increase your popularity with visitors and build your traffic.
And since you can use publicly shared video, you don’t have to produce everything yourself.
Now a good example of a genre that this fits very well is the do it yourself remodeling trend.
If you visit some of the big guns websites in this area such as Home & Garden TV and DYI Network, you will see that their websites have lots of video clips from their TV shows.
So how could you adapt this idea to your own website?
Well, first of all you would do your research and find a niche, let’s use an example of making your own lamps and lampshades.
If the supply and demand numbers looked good and you had some expertise in this area to share then your next step would be to go to YouTube and see how many videos you could find on lamp and lampshade making.
If you were able to find a good number, say at least 30 or so, you might have the basis for a great content sharing website that will be easier to build.
You will simply build your website pages around in-demand keywords, write about the topic in general or share some of your own knowledge and tips, and then add the videos to your page (this is called embedding) to provide even more great content for your website.
You can see some examples on this website where I have done this such as Business Idea #68 –
Custom Lamps.
There is a downside to this however; you will need to keep an eye on your embedded videos in case they get dropped by the video provider such as YouTube. Then it will be time to find a new video to add to the page.
Now there are lots of other types of niches that you could find to use this business idea with. Sports would be another great area to explore.
Something like snowboarding for example would be sure to probably have lots of great shared video content on the internet.
And the other important thing when you decide which topic to use for your website is to make sure there are some good options for making money with your website once you build it.
A content sharing website would be a natural fit for monetization models such as Google Adsense, but in the case of our lamp building and snowboarding examples, there would be lots of opportunity to affiliate partner with quality producers of supplies, equipment, instruction, etc., that you can recommend to your visitors.
You can also send your visitors to eBay for deals on used snowboarding equipment and lamp parts and shades too.
This website has hundreds of pages that people have added proudly sharing their birthday cake ideas and showing pictures of their creations.
This is all free content for the website owner and it has added hundreds of pages of free content to his website along with a lot of extra income too.
The site owner has used
Site Build It (SBI),
my recommended website building resource to build the site, and then he used the inexpensive content sharing add on module to invite people to share their birthday cake recipes and photos on the site.
He also has used the coolest kids theme to create kids birthday costume and kids party ideas websites, and believe it or not all of his websites get over a million visitors a month.
Now he didn’t just depend on other people to build his site for him, he had to build a good site first with lots of ideas of his own and then as it grew and started to get traffic he added the content sharing invitation.
And he still adds his own unique content to the sites and doesn’t just depend on the content sharing by visitors.
So he has the best of both worlds, and his success proves it.
Another example of an SBI website that uses this business idea is
GhostsAndStories.com.
The owner of this site started her website sharing all the scary stories she knew and could find to share, and then as her website and traffic grew she added the content sharing module and invited visitors to share their scary stories.
This in turn has added 100s of pages of free content to her website, and she now gets to pick and choose which stories she is going to add from the many submissions she receives daily.
Both of these websites are a great example of using content sharing to build a great website, but there is something else you want to be aware of here.
Which site do you think makes more money?
If you said the birthday cake site you are correct.
Both sites use Google Adsense as part of their money making strategies, but the birthday cake site can also recommend cake baking and decorating supplies and also used cake baking and decorating items on eBay.
But the ghost stories site has only a few products it can recommend for ghost hunting, and most of the people visiting the site are just interested in reading and sharing scary ghost stories.
Plus the niches are different in that everybody has a birthday and millions of parents are looking for ideas for their kids birthday cakes, parties, costumes, etc.
But ghost hunting and even scary ghost stories is a lot smaller group of interested people, so it’s a great definable niche, but not such a lucrative one.
Now I have shared these examples to give you some inspiration and information on how to think about using content sharing as you research a niche for your online business.
But you need to find your own unique niche, don’t just plan on doing another birthday cake site because someone else has had success with it.
You will just be up against an already established highly competitive site, and you won’t be doing something that is true to you.
Unless you really love kid’s birthday cakes – then perhaps there is a way to find room for you in this niche, but you would have to do your research and find out if the supply and demand numbers add up.
And that’s one of the great benefits of building your website with SBI, their BrainStorm-It keyword tool does all that work for you, and tells you whether or not the niche you are interested in has potential or not.
So if you are interested in building an online business it’s a smart move to think about how you might incorporate content sharing into the niche you are thinking about building your website on.
It’s one of the easiest and fastest ways to grow a website once you have established a solid base first.
