Make Money With An Online Community & Market Place
By Richard
Think nichey here.
The idea is to get a bunch of people involved, creating content through forums and posts, and then sell them all kinds of products and services related to their interests.
Whether you sell products you make or others make or users make, it can be a big success.
Best of all, it is uber passive income, because the work up front is limited to website and marketing work, as opposed to also content creation – your users after all are creating all the content for you.
Obviously the problem with this idea is that you either reach critical mass or you die.
An example; the niche of knitting has the site Ravelry as the main community site and it is killing it by having a marketplace where community members can sell their patterns (designs) to each other and Ravelry takes a cut off everything.
Perfect, passive income in the truest sense of the word.
That said, there is really only one Ravelry in the knitting community (it got critical mass) and the people behind the site actually work quite hard because they don’t outsource any work, and well, once you have built up a community site it can become quite technically complex, so it may not turn out as passive as you hoped.