One of my dad’s biggest hobbies is German travel.  He’s been to Germany a dozen or so times, and has done the genealogy and found relatives in Germany as well.  When he’s not traveling to Germany — which, admittedly, is most of the time — he’s discussing it with others on community forums.  He even has his own website, a free Yahoo! site with information on German travel.

Personally, I think he should put together a professional, paid type of site.  If he had a website that he updated regularly, along with perhaps a blog, he could sell advertising space on his blog.  Because it is one of those special niches, I think there is the potential there for him to make a lot of money with ad revenue.  It certainly shouldn’t be too hard to get a higher search engine ranking using link building campaigns — after all, he’s already known on all the forums, which would be a huge plus for his website reputation and his potential for link popularity.  He could get plenty of contextual links from other blogs and websites, and from putting his website link in his signatures on the forum.  And if he actually went so far as to hire an Internet marketing service or a search engine marketing company, goodness only knows how far his website could go.

Of course, true to my dad, when I suggested it he said to me, "Yeah, but websites and blogs take a lot of work."  As if he’s not retired and already spending hours every day on travel forums as it is!

I guess he’d just rather do it for fun than for money.

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