What would be a successful website?

[Jake]

Your probably best off blogging about a specific niche, rather than trying to create the next Facebook, for them to succeed those innovative social sites spend a fortune and possibly years building up and promoting the site before seeing a profit. Appealing to everyone is probably not the way to go, it's just to difficult to make a broad subject matter site rank well, it's easier to get a site with a narrow focus to rank well, as a big fish in a small pond. There are open source forum engines out there, though they usually are run on paid hosting and require regular attention, where a blog can be run on a free host Blogger.com, wordpress.com, and require fewer administrator visits.

A successful blog will probably be one of the top results in the search engines for one or more search keywords related to the blog theme. Getting free traffic from the search engines is more practical than trying to profit from paid advertising. It takes a dedicated business like effort to create a site with sufficient quality to outrank the thousands of other discussing the same topic. Most people who try to make money on the internet fail due to putting in a half ass effort. One would have to write a couple of original, quality articles a week to attract the search engine's interest, there are SEO tricks to get links from other sites, etc to help boost the search ranking but "Content is king"

The most common blogger revenue source is Google Adsense ad blocks, I wouldn't add any advertising to a site until it has gotten rolling with some hundreds of visitors a week, ads can interfere with search ranking, one can expect that some tens of thousands of visitors are needed to reach the $100 min payout level for Adsense. When picking the topic of a site you might research the number of affiliate programs related to the subject, along with renting ad space you can write reviews, etc. that promote a specific product, and earn a commission for any sales. Sites like spyfu.com give a bit of advertising intelligence on keywords you can enter, like Sneakers, Video Games, warcraft, each search engine keyword has a different advertising cost, depending on the competition, you can earn around 1/2 the click cost of an ad appearing on your site, a higher paying subject with a decent number of advertisers beats focusing a site on a subject on which people spend no money.