The free research trick I use when I have no idea what to build next
So, if you have decided you want to build a website but you have absolutely no idea what it should be about, you are stuck at the hardest part. Not the technical part. Not the writing part. The bit before any of that, where you are sitting with a blank page trying to invent a good idea out of thin air, and every idea you come up with sounds either too crowded or too silly to bother with.
This is for you if you have not built anything yet. Not for people optimising a site that already earns. For someone who wants to start, is willing to do the work, and just needs to know what is actually worth working on.
Here is the part nobody tells you: you do not have to invent anything. There are hundreds of finished websites listed for sale online right now, and every single listing tells you what the site is about, how much traffic it gets, how it makes money, and how much money it makes. Other people have already run the experiment. You can just go and read the results.
Wait, what are these sites?
There are marketplaces where people sell their websites, the same way you would sell a house. Somebody spends three years building a site about camping gear, decides they want out, and lists it for sale.
To sell it, they have to prove it is worth buying. That means publishing the numbers: monthly visitors, monthly income, where that income comes from, how old the site is. All of it sits there in the listing for anyone to read.
The one I use is nicheinvestor.com. There are others, and you will find them once you start looking, but that one is enough to get going.
To be completely clear: you are not buying anything. You do not need any money for this. You are going to read the listings the way you would flick through property listings for houses you have no intention of buying, purely to see what is out there.
Why bother, when I could just use a keyword tool?
Because a keyword tool tells you what people are searching for. It does not tell you whether anybody has ever earned a penny from it.
You can find a topic with 90,000 searches a month and still have no idea whether it makes money, how it makes money, or how long that takes. So you guess. You build for eight months. And then you find out the hard way.
A listing hands you the whole picture at once. Topic, traffic, income, method. It is the only place I know of where you can see all four together, for free, without having to ask anyone.
How to actually do it
This takes about half an hour, and you need nothing except a browser.
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Go to nicheinvestor.com and find the listings. Look at the newest ones first.
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Open anything that catches your eye. Do not filter by price. The expensive ones are often the most interesting to read.
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For each listing, note down four things: what the site is about, how much traffic it gets, how it earns money, and how much it earns per month.
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Keep a simple document, Google Docs is fine, and paste in anything that made you stop and think.
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Do this for fifteen or twenty listings, then stop and look at your notes.
That is genuinely the whole method. The value is not in any single listing. It is in reading enough of them that you start to notice the patterns.
What am I looking for?
Two things, mainly.
Topics you had never considered. This is the big one when you are starting out. You will find sites about subjects you did not know anybody cared about, quietly earning real money every month. Most beginners choose from the same tiny handful of ideas, food, fitness, personal finance, because those are the only ones they have ever seen. The listings will show you fifty more.
How the money is actually made. You will see the same few methods over and over: display advertising, affiliate links, digital products, or some mixture of those. Pay attention to which method suits which kind of topic, because that connection matters far more than the topic on its own. A site about a subject you love with no obvious way to earn from it is a hobby, not a business.
Then look at the boring numbers, because they set your expectations properly. How much traffic does it take to earn $1,000 a month? How old is the site? Almost everything you look at will be older than you expected and will need more traffic than you hoped. Far better to know that now than in eighteen months.
A word of warning about Flippa
flippa.com is the other big one you will come across. It is worth a look, but hold everything you read there very loosely.
There is far more listed on Flippa, and a lot of it is rubbish. Inflated traffic figures, income claims backed up by nothing but a screenshot, and a fair number of outright scams. Sellers there are not vetted the way they are elsewhere.
For what we are doing, that mostly does not matter. You are collecting ideas, not handing over money. Flippa is perfectly fine for the question does this kind of site exist, and does anybody think it is worth something. It is not reliable for is this particular site really earning what it claims.
If you ever do move from browsing to buying, and there is no reason you would this year, use a proper broker and get the figures verified.
What to do with what you find
After twenty listings you will have a document with a handful of ideas in it. Now cross out anything you would not want to write about every week for the next two years, however good the numbers look. You are going to be living with this.
From what is left, pick the one where you already know something. Not expert level, just more than a beginner. Your old job, a hobby, something you have dealt with in your own life. Knowing the subject saves you an enormous amount of time and makes your writing better than someone researching it all from scratch.
Then go and find two or three of the actual sites in that space from the listings, and just look at them. See how the pages are laid out, what they write about, where the affiliate links sit. You now have a working model instead of a blank page.
So, that is it. Half an hour reading somebody else’s homework, and you come away with a shortlist instead of nothing at all.
Go and have a look. You have nothing to lose but an evening, and you will almost certainly come back with an idea you would never have thought of on your own.
