Great tip about the Facebook / MySpace groups.

I hadn’t thought of that before as a Market Research tool.

A site I used to work for developed a forum to keep people coming back to the site in-between “monthly newsletters” - which would bring in the revenue each month.

Once it hit critical mass of around 10,000 people, the site started to generate its own content.

When I left, there was talk about expanding and allowing users to create even more user-gen content (blogs etc).

Because of the huge depth of user-gen content on the forums, the site ranked on page one of Google for practically any search term in this industry!

Think about Wikipedia’s rankings - and translate that to a single niche.

This took care of the issue of replenishing users - with 50+ new signups daily, the site’s membership was growing naturally.

Site content “took care of itself”… We just had to worry about the monthly newsletter, and monetizing the traffic each month by promoting products already in the shopping cart system.

With so few staff, such high margins, and such a large database, it was the most profitable business I’ve seen to date.

Brent