joelandsonja: I am an experienced writer and website designer, and I have been looking into starting a new online business. That being said I was wondering if anyone could suggest any interesting items, products or services that I could sell online. I don't mind putting in the hard work, but I simply don't have the funds available to purchase bulk product orders for resale (which eliminates a lot of possibilities). I have a feeling this means that digital product sales are my only option.
You don't have to sell something to make money. I earn my living with a couple of own websites and ocassional assignments (I don't advertise myself as a webdesigner or something, but sometimes people I know ask me if I can do a website for them or someone they know) and I don't really sell anything there. I just pick a topic, make a design and start to work. If there's any relevant affiliate program, I put some of their ads on my site (got a website with information about different insurances, where I put ads for an insurance comparison). If there isn't a relevant affiliate program, I go with Google AdSense (I do this on my website with information about all the fairs in the country).
The most important part is to do something you really like - and to do it good! Don't do just another useless shop (this market is oversaturated). Don't be just another website with just the same crap you already find on dozens of similar sites. Make your site something special. Do things that others don't do. In other words: work! It'll pay in the end, because most website owners are afraid of work ;)
I'll make an example with my website about fairs. I don't just add the date of a fair between some ads... I make the effort to find the contact mail of the organizer and ask them if there are any special events on some days (fireworks, days with reduced prices for kids, etc.) and I find the right person to ask if there are any possibilities for park and ride (usually the tourism offices). And of course I don't forget to link to the timetable of the corresponding bus line (or whatever it is that drives to the fair). People who come from the surrounding villages may want to avoid the traffic chaos if the fair is in the center of a city. Getting this information together takes quite some time, but it's worth it, because I mainly have users who don't live in the city where the fair is (since most of the residents already know all the relevant things). Don't forget, I don't have to do this every year! I only have to update the dates and check if my other information is still correct (usually two mails). Initially it was a shitload of work, but once it was up, I had an "easy" job. And people come back to my website because they get lots of information.
Furthermore, I get good traffic from unexpected sources. I get many visitors from search engines due to "long tail keywords". There aren't many relevant search results for "park and ride xyz fair", "family day xyz fair" or "when is fireworks day on xyz fair". I've found my site mentioned as a source for further information in a couple of online articles from local newspapers too! And I get mentioned in forums a lot, when people ask something specific about a fair they want to visit.
You see, I don't sell anything there. I just gather freely available information and put it together. I make my money with Google AdSense (you get paid by click, so you don't even have to hope that people spend money - I refuse to use pay per view ads, since they often involve pop ups, videos and sound, which REALLY sucks) and ocassionally sell ad space on my website (I don't tell people that they can buy ad space, but sometimes they approach me and ask for it). That's it. All I have to "invest" is a few bucks in the very low three-digit range (annually), for the domain and some webspace. The money comes from the high number of visitors (~3000 a day - a bit less during the week, lots more on Saturday and Sunday).
No, don't "sell interesting items online". There are many, many others doing this already. Pick a topic you find interesting and think about how the perfect website for this topic should look like.
Then go and find good affiliate programs for it, not the other way around. You should read a bit into SEO too. As a writer you won't have lots of problems with SEO writing (just be careful to write your texts for your users and not for search engines!) and as someone who already knows webdesign, you maybe even find it fun to optimize your code for a clean, semantic structure and quicker loading times. Good texts and clean, semantic code are the two most important criteria for SEO (backlinks are important too, but you shouldn't mess too much with them - they're supposed to come from real users and not from webmasters). Other things come and go, because some people will find ways to abuse it, like the internal link structure,
emphasis (a few years ago people were spamming their keywords with strong, italic and underline), PageRank or keyword density... Those things still play a small role, but they're not as important as they have been. But good texts and code will always play an important role, since they're the grounding of your website. Trust me, I never cared too much for most SEO trends and my websites never lost their positions in the search results. That's because they're old, established and never tried to do something funny (black hat SEO).
tl;dr - Don't just set up another uninspired copy&paste shop. Make a useful website instead. Give it some time and it'll start to make money.
