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Are you looking for something interesting to build a content website around?

When you are trying to make a success of something, it really does help if you have an interest in what you’re doing. If you can build your business around a hobby you like, then that is brilliant. However, many people don’t have a hobby or pastime, that they feel they could build an Internet business around.

Do you like watching movies and TV?

As most people like watching movies and TV, I thought maybe this could be an area you would find interesting to make money in?

Some of the most searched for phrases on the Internet are for information on celebrities, pop stars, actors, movies and TV programs. Now you’d think that with all the huge corporate companies in the media industry, they’d have the search engines sewn up for all the popular phrases, with no room for the little guy/girl like you and I.

Not so…

Take a look at these search figures which I just pulled from Overture’s results for convenience. This is the number of searches Overture claim they had in December:

Orlando Bloom 128297
Tom Cruise 179594
Brad Pitt 269704
Tom Hanks 29176
Angelina Jolie 695568
Harry Potter 1296502
Indiana Jones 25411

If you do a search on each of those actors/character names in Google, you will see websites run by fans featuring in the top 2-3 places. Some of them are doing a better job of monetising the traffic than others, but there is definitely money to be made here. Posters, T-shirts, video games, books and DVD’s are just a few of the things you could sell to people who are fascinated with their favorite movie stars. With www.Amazon.com, www.Allposters.com and www.CafePress.com you have three sites to start off with, that could help you profit from this type of website traffic.

Now, at this stage you might be a little concerned about how much competition there is for these popular celebrities. You’d be right to think that, but you have to look at this in the same way you would investigate any niche market.

Find Out About Hot New Films
Before The General Public

A very useful website to check out is www.imdb.com (Internet Movie Database). IMDb has a vast database on information on just every actor, actress, movie, TV series, producer, director you name it.

What I like about that site, is that you can also see which films are currently in pre-production or currently filming. This gives you an opportunity to build a fan site for new film, and get it established before all the big publicity starts for it. Obviously, until a film comes out, there’s no telling how popular it will become, so this approach can be a bit hit and miss.

There’s an option to subscribe to IMDb’s pro service at www.IMDbpro.com. The pro service gives you much more detailed information for $14.95 a month, with a 14 day free trial.

The pro version is great for spotting potentially big films or TV series before they get much exposure in the press. Everything is updated on a chart so you can see which productions, actors, directors etc., are getting the most interest. It’s a great way to spot new talent and potentially big future productions, by watching them rise steadily through the chart over time.

You can find out which actors are going to be in each production, and which studios have signed up to make and distribute them. This additional info can help you assess which movies are more likely to get the most publicity when they are released.

Now, this is a bit of a risky venture, because as I’m sure you know, films and TV shows get canceled all the time, and actors can be hot one minute, and cold the next.

What I’m personally doing is picking out a few movies that are still in the very early pre-production stages, but have a big studio behind it. Preferably something that has done very well as a book, so I know the story is a popular one. I’ll throw up a very basic website for each film, and get a few links into the sites so they get indexed in Google.

I’ll keep an eye on the IMDb database for updates on each film’s progress, and add more to my sites as times goes on. Once the film starts production, or just before, that’s when I’ll step up adding more content, and marketing the site more seriously.

By the time the film starts getting main stream press coverage, my site will already be established, and sitting pretty at the top of the search engines, just waiting for the traffic to flood in.

The great thing about getting in early is that you can snap up some great domain names before everyone else does. I should make it clear, that this is a bit of a speculative project I’m doing, but one that I find interesting to do, which is mainly why I’m doing it.

Who knows, maybe I’ll discover the next Harry Potter ;-)

I hope you found this interesting,

Jason Lewis