"Attracting a lot of regular visitors ensures decent income from a website project. That's common sense. But, what type of projects will pull such a huge traffic? Even after scratching my head for several days, I am not able to find out that magic formula. Please help me," Mohan requested me.
"If you have millions of dollars to spend and thousands of top notch professionals to work in your project, you can create a magnificent website like Amazon.com. But most of us have to work on a shoestring budget. Resourcefulness is the only way to solve this problem," I told Mohan. "Every day a new story breaks out and catches the attention of millions of people. The life of such a story lasts for a few weeks and then another story takes its place. There is no field in the world where this movement does not take place. Millions of the Internet users search the world wide web for current, trendy information. If you can supply such information through your websites, you will always have steady traffic."
"Do you mean I must start a news portal - a website that supplies every day news and flashes breaking news continuously?" Mohan asked me. I replied, "No. There are thousands of big news portals. Do you really think you can compete with big news portals that employ hundreds of people and spend lakhs of rupees every day in maintaining their websites? That's not my point. Besides, most news items live just one or two days. You cannot make money out of them. You must take a news item that will be of interest to millions of people and that will live for a few months. If you build a website around such a theme, you will be successful."
Mohan became curious. "Can you please give me an example?" I said, "Two years ago, even a few hundred people did not know about Sania Mirza. Now she has millions of fans. If you had developed a website that tracked her activities and life as soon as good news about her started to trickle in, now you would be running a prosperous website."
Mohan thought about it for a moment and then said, "There are many successful and popular tennis stars. If I concentrate on Sania Mirza, I will get only her fans as my regular visitors. If I develop a website on Tennis and cover all the players, will I not be getting millions of visitors every day?" I replied, "You need infinite resources to create a portal on Tennis and a team of knowledge workers to maintain it. I am glad that you think big. But, you are an individual entrepreneur with limited resources. So, it is a good idea to always concentrate on one point and cover it fully and exhaustively. Once you start making money, you can employ people and work on as many projects as you like."
"That makes sense," Mohan agreed with my point of view. I said, "Every year the Nobel Prize Award Ceremonies take place in December. A few weeks before that the names of the Nobel Prize awardees are announced. Millions of people would love to know more about these Nobel Laureates. If you create a website that tracks the life and activities of the current Nobel Laureates, you will get worldwide traffic for four months - from October to January. It will be your season of income! You can concentrate on different projects and create as many seasons of income as you like."
Mohan was all smiles. He was happy that he had learnt something new that would help him generate hundreds of new ideas.
After six months, he sent an email to me. Read his inspiring success story: 'The first news item that struck me as soon as took leave of you was the world cup football competition. When I searched Google, it showed millions of websites on world cup. But I did not give up. I decided to concentrate on a niche and my niche was funny, abnormal and peculiar behavior of the football players. I had sizzling and hot stories on this niche every day. By the word of mouth my website became popular. On the final day when Zinedine Zidane, the French Player, gave a head butt to Marco Materazzi, the Italian defender, I covered it detail. On that day my website attracted 27,000 visitors and I earned $300 (Rs. 13,000) from various sources of ad income! I made more than Rs.75,000 in the past four months. At present this website gets low traffic because the season is over. So, I am concentrating on new seasons of income.'