think about ways you could market products to your customer base... affiliate sales is an easy way to begin as it doesn't require much time.
however you could probably get bigger margins if you handled more of the sales process, but this is a bigger time commitment. paypal and google checkout have made it easy to minimize the hassle and risk of merchant accounts. find a distributor that does drop shipping so you don't have to manage the inventory.
Here's a free idea:
what if you packaged your own "travel" kits for each region that offered small products tailored to the region's experience? this include general things like quick-reference languages book, but also more region-specific stuff for snake bites, malaria, etc... for less of a time commitment, you could put these together in an organized manner on the site and just link them to amazon and affiliates so people can a la carte shop. would also give you an excuse to stir conversation to get community's feedback on what they commonly bring to the area.
I've thought about packaging the travel info, like here: http://poorbuthappy.com/colombia/travel/print/ into a book, and sell it on Amazon, make perhaps 5$ per copy... I'm gonna try that next year. We'll see...
however you could probably get bigger margins if you handled more of the sales process, but this is a bigger time commitment. paypal and google checkout have made it easy to minimize the hassle and risk of merchant accounts. find a distributor that does drop shipping so you don't have to manage the inventory.
Here's a free idea: what if you packaged your own "travel" kits for each region that offered small products tailored to the region's experience? this include general things like quick-reference languages book, but also more region-specific stuff for snake bites, malaria, etc... for less of a time commitment, you could put these together in an organized manner on the site and just link them to amazon and affiliates so people can a la carte shop. would also give you an excuse to stir conversation to get community's feedback on what they commonly bring to the area.