We all know that there are a handful of blogs out there that essentially are printing their own money. The few that come to mind all share one thing in common: in addition to being set up to generate income, they all add value to the internet. No matter how well marketed, nobody’s going to come if all you have is snake oil.
So throw all your get-rich-quick blogging schemes out the window if you don’t have the content to back up your ambition.
A friend of mine’s sole desire is internet wealth. We are very different people. Whereas my primary motivation has always been to add value to the internet in regards to something I had the passion to sink my time into, hopefully making money in the process, his passion was to find formulas that would generate internet income.
He did so without much success for the first couple of years. He even created one blog that actually took off, getting anywhere in between 1000 to 10000 uniques a day. This blog also created quite a healthy social structure, with one of the more active comment communities I have ever seen on a blog, but it made very little money. It was a tough niche to pair with product, and I think to this day he never makes more than $300/month off it, despite the high traffic. Ultimately he handed the reins of the site over to others, because he was investing a lot of time into it for little return.
Along the way, he developed a host of other sites designed with the sole intent of generating revenue with little effort after the initial setting up. These sites generate anywhere from $30 to $300 a month, which works pretty well if you have enough sites.
Right before Christmas he finally did it. He hit the nail on the head and discovered the right formula, or at least, came up with the idea and execution for a single site that generates a lot of money with minimal effort. It’s an Ebay Affiliate site. He markets the hell out of it on Craigslist, and this single site has generated anywhere between $1000 to $17000 a month in it’s first six months.
Luck is a big part of this. He finally hit the right formula. He could try to duplicate this success for the next two years and get goose eggs, but the important thing is he found it after a lot of trial and error.
So I am not going to use this article as a platform to preach to you how to go forth and get rich on the internet, but I will share some thoughts on ways you can guarantee income, to varying degrees of success dependent on the amount of effort you put into it and the intangible factor of whether or not it’s what the masses are looking for:
- Overwhelm them with sheer numbers In the event you can’t make a site that hits the jackpot, make twenty sites. If they all make $50 a month, you’re now pulling $1k a month in additional income from them. Obviously you can’t devote the time to making all twenty sites quality web content, so do your homework, pick areas you feel have a lot of search interest, and devise ways for those sites to turn traffic into money without a lot of effort on your end. You’re now the internet equivalent of a slum lord, but you’re also more likely to turn some income this way than sinking all of your hopes into a single site.
- Be an entrepreneur Sink a lot of time into getting a site off the ground, ranking well on Google, and developing a community. Then either sell it, or turn it over to others to run so you can move on to the next project. This is how the restaurant industry runs, by and large. This will probably generate the same kind of monthly income as the above example, and will require a lot more time on your part initially, but in the end you will be adding value to the internet, unlike our first example.
- Diversify Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. In a perfect world you want income from different sources. Like mutual funds, you have some protection in case one of your sources of income becomes unreliable, or disappears altogether. Adsense, private advertising, affiliate programs, utilize all so that your site or sites are pulling in money from more than one source. My friend’s Ebay affiliate site that makes so much money, what happens if Ebay decides next month that they don’t need an affiliate program anymore? Spread it out.
- Write for other sites If you’re a good writer, you may be able to market yourself to other sites, depending on what they’re after. Whether it’s quality content, Digg bait, or comment fodder, if you’re writing for enough sites, you may make enough income to fulfill your internet ambitions.
- Hold out for the winning ticket Ok, you’re greedy and you want that one site that generates big numbers every month.A) If you’re certain about your niche, you have first rate content, you’ve done your job with Google so the site ranks well, and you have a solid strategy for monetization….
or:
B) You picked a target that you are sure will convert. It’s the right place at the right time. You have an aggressive marketing strategy that will have this site turning big numbers in no time with little or no effort after the initial setup….
Both schemes can hit and turn into monsters. Unfortunately, this is the dream that people have had since money was invented. Your odds of turning the above into reality are very slim. If you insist on treading this path, give your site six months. A winning site will start converting very soon. If it’s a dud after six months, it will always be a dud. Move on to the next idea, and buckle down for disappointment after disappointment, because if it was that easy we’d all be doing it.
You know how I feel about all this. I would like to make money from my internet endeavors, but not at the expense of adding even more garbage to the internet landfill. I also had a big revelation about a year ago when I realized that my then two year old son was taking a back seat to my internet endeavors. I don’t want to be that kind of dad, I love him too much. Ultimately time spent being a good dad is a hell of a lot more important, and rewarding, than being a good internet entrepreneur. I have branched out into web design to supplement the income I generate from my websites and internet writing, but I carefully manage the time I spend on it.
The one sure thing I can tell you is this: if you are trying, you will make some money doing this. How much depends on how smart you are about what you’re doing. Pay attention, see what others are doing to get results, and don’t spend your whole life waiting for that one big hit.
