You could take a look at these threads:
thread-65952.html
thread-65448.html
I am in the same area as these guys and think it's a better idea to work at selling other people's successful products rather than doing the 10% shot at any success and 1% at good success. Finance is the hardest game to crack. It's the only one where you put up resources and can end up with less after your efforts and hence the popular jealousy/hatred of rich people. Whereas if you're down the gym you are getting henched to some degree... Business is hard and I have huge respect for anyone who can make a brick and mortar company with staff, overheads and taxes work. Most fail or are unimpressive. But once you learn all you need to know to make money by selling other people's products you can roll out sites with high success rates.
It's not difficult to start earning enough income online from some form of advertising that would allow you to live somewhere like EE, i.e. $300-600 per month and then build on that. You also have the option of branching out into international markets, rather than being rooted to the US, UK etc.
A quick starting point would be to find a database and enrich it and give people easy access to it. Governments produce lots of such data that either isn't searchable or is searchable in a poor way.
As an example take a look at this site:
http://www.onlinenewspapers.com/panama.htm
It gets about 20K visits / day. It's just a list of newspapers by country/region. That's a very basic level of enrichment. That site has major inbound links from authority sites as it's the best there is. It would be easy to blow it out the water by pulling in lots of other data sources and allowing more searching. I'm pretty sure that site could make between $1-3K / month in ad revenue, for just sitting there with next to no work. It's an obscure-foggey niche (which I highly recommend due to lack of competition). Newspaper subs are actually one of the best affiliate programs. With proper development it could do $10K / month.
Other similar databases that lie about relate to place names (gazetteers), historic sites, census / statistics, post codes / zip codes, campaign contributions... Such databases are freely available but typically not even indexed in search engines. There are some sites monetising them, but they tend to be very poor.
There's many avenues you can find preexisting data, enrich it to provide people simple concise buying options (from which you get commissions), ad revenue or a mixture of both. For the former see:
http://cpuboss.com/ or the latter
https://coinmarketcap.com/ . The latter is probably pulling in over $1M from a bunch of fairly simple pulls from API and a few cron jobs. The extent to that the data could be enriched is lacking a lot. I am very tempted to get into that niche quickly as it's probably going to be one of the biggest sectors over the next 30 years.
Look at something where your site becomes the destination in the niche for either/or people making buying decisions; and general niche reference.
Going down this route, you can keep your 9-5 and then spend 20-30 hours a week more grinding out your own sites deep into the night. I went for the option of living with the parents and working sometimes more than 100 hours a week, no break, no weekends, no rest. I know a guy who did the former and hit $3-4K / month in about a year to add to his $4K monthly salary.
I find that a lot of the big companies that you can drive sales to and get commissions from tend to have hopeless tech teams. Their companies are full of people who have degrees in online ads, programming, design, marketing etc. and they don't mesh them together and are just self-inflated monkies following outdated formulas. I have the 9th most visited site in a $3B market with two part time employees on $5/hour. The tenth most visited site has a giant office in London with over 100 employees. My long game is to push up to #3-5 and wait for the inevitable bloated buyout offer that any other site has eventually got from one of the big boys up to their nuts in VC.
Info products are a very good line as they can often offer commissions in the region of 50%, rather than the 4-8% on physical items. This is a big one at the moment:
https://mobe.com/become-an-affiliate-3/
One sale of their top tier product would be a nice year's income in EE.
You can have a look at what niches are available by seearching affiliate middle men: CJ.com, AWin and affiliate directories. Or look around reference sites in a niche and see what they are doing to make money.
Will be writing a datasheet on this some time next year...