How to Make Money Online with a Simple Idea

“NYTimes: Once Just a Site With Funny Cat Pictures, and Now a Web Empire“  is a great example of when an idea works online, you milk it for everything it works and run with it till it dies. A web entrepreneur saw the potential in the popular cat-humor blog, ICanCheezburger.com (full disclosure: personally, I despise cats), and invested $10k to buy it and expand on the idea. He built a large network of mostly humorous, simple, blog-based sites.

Some examples of their successful sites are – Fail Blog (photos of anything gone wrong), There I Fixed It (bad repair jobs), Tots and Crafts (kid’s art projects), and a ton more. They come up with these ideas through market research – monitoring forums for humerous topics that seem to be gaining popularity.

You can tell that all of the sites are built on basically the same exact template – meaning, any time they think of a catchy cat-humor-ish idea they can deploy it almost immediately, do minimal marketing, and watch it grow. Of course, that low barrier to entry means anybody can start one of these easily. BUT, since the Cheeseburger Network attracts 16million visitors per month and they probably have tons of links to their sites (ie. they rank highly in Google), they can probably boost any new site to the top of the search engines quickly. THAT is the barrier to entry. Of course, since people with their own portfolio of sites see this tactic working they will try to create these kinds of sites. Cheeseburger already has a lot of their ideas already launched though, and the odds are slim of visitors wanting to visit a new funny-cat blog when there’s already a popular one out there.

They’ve also expanded to selling merchandise (books, t-shirts) based on the site concepts. They have expanded to over 40 employees and have not used any additional outside investment.

If you look around online you can find a lot of examples of this type of network of sites (although a lot of network owners want you to think they’re all unique sites). Anybody have any good original ideas to share with us in the comments? JK, if you have a good idea it’s probably best if you didn’t go sharing your secret with the world. But, if you want to talk about anybody else’s great idea go ahead!

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