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I am happy to say that this week with school starting, I broke the $20/day barrier...this month I will make the most ever so far at about $800 or so, all profit!
I sell BOOKS from Amazon, among other things. Not a big money maker, and tons of others do the same, so I am not too worried about being secretive about it :)
It also illustrates that one can pick up any product and break into the market and make some extra money. I don't know about you but $800 isn't pocket change for me :) 20" LCD monitor here it comes ;)
One thing I have to say to noobs about what they should do is , JUST DO IT!. Build a site, even if it has one page. It takes a few weeks to a couple months to get found by the search engines, so it's important that you at least get your domain going. Of course the more pages you have upfront, the easier it will be for you to be found.
Once you have the barebones of a site, I would really start getting some content. Write about a hobby of yours if you feel there's enough interest out there. Try and add an article every week or so. Break big articles into multiple pages, etc. Only YOU can decide what to build your site on. Read some of the more exhaustive threads on the topic on this forum.
I would say that the most important thing afterwards would be inbound links. I contacted over 300 sites in the span of a year. Find out what sites link to your competitors, then ask them to link to you. Obviously the better content you have, the better luck you will have with getting webmasters to link to you.So, content again.
Link exchanging boosted up my site to Pr5, and got me in the first page of serps for some major keywords, which in turn has netted me affiliate sales and adsense income. Whereas before I would have to seek out link partners, these days they find me!..it's quite an 'ego trip' when your site gets to be the one others are requesting link exchanges with! I've even had pr6 and pr7 sites sending me requests.
Anyway - I just wanted to share this , and hopefully it will serve as a motivation for those trying to break into the field.
It can be done!...
My site has a general topic (computers) and is aimed at the tech enabled people.
I'm close to $20 a day, but I can't see how I could raise that to $100 a day without getting much more traffic (more than five times the amount I'm getting now).
I see what you are saying, but once you know how to make $20 a day, then you can just do more of what you did to get there.
C.K.
I'm close to $20 a day, but I can't see how I could raise that to $100 a day without getting much more traffic (more than five times the amount I'm getting now).
in my case 'do more of the same' has meant to build more sites.
In the next year I plan on making a really huge affiliate site (on 1 topic though) and pumping all my profits over this year from my little network into it.
I imagine I could get my affiliate site generating some huge income. We shall see in a year.
I'm hoping to break the $40/day this month, with a new site I've put up and I also started doing some light PPC to merchant, but these changes may be better reflected next month after the site gets better indexed and I learn a bit more about PPC.
Depending on one industry for your income in a market where one can move as quickly as one can work is commercial suicide. For example, I make great money from personal finance, but it dies a death between mid November and Xmas. Toy sales are the opposite. Travel is year round, but peaks around public holidays.
Don't get suckered into doing more of the same thing - to quote a good friend, "If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you always got" (Apologies for my friend's poor grammar).
to quote a good friend, "If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you always got"
Lol. Your friend must be famous, because I've heard that line too, but with the right grammar. Must be the Brit version? or did he have one too many when he said it? :)
Incidentally, it was that same line that made me quit my job(4 more days to go), as the prospects of living such a boorish life working the 9-6 made me shudder.
Once you've mastered the basics, spread out into other markets and use everythig you've learnt.
Thanks to everyone who's posted on ww as your comments are invaluable - my wife says thanks for the shopping money.
Anybody making money with expedia?
I can see some of you are actually making quite a few dollars from your website and some of you even have more than one website.
great story. This is what made me post the original message - once you get down to the math, it's almost impossible NOT to make money on the internet if you know how to make even $1/day from one site. I have 4 sites and so far this month it's been averaging $30-$35/day all together. All I gotta do is multiply that by 10 to become financially stable, and from then on it will all be play money.:)
Ok, I gotta change my pants, they're wet.
But how do you find the inspiration to start a new site every day?
Can you give us an idea about how the sites look like, how many pages do they have each?
great story! stories like that just makes me feel that it can be done! thanks for sharing.. and keep up the good work!
Affiliate wannebees , as cabbie said dont limit your goals there are many many people making multi 6 figure a month in just Affiliate marketing - just get into the game and claim your share!
[edited by: gopi at 12:22 am (utc) on Oct. 16, 2004]
Let me Salute the King!
>But how do you find the inspiration to start a new site every day?>
Good point.I made these sites months ago and haven't really done much at all lately.
>Can you give us an idea about how the sites look like, how many pages do they have each? >
You don't want to see them! And I don't want you to see them.I would be embarrassed by their crudeness.:)
Most are one page specials:0)
You don't want to see them! And I don't want you to see them.I would be embarrassed by their crudeness.:)
Lol. I wouldn't want to show mine either, for many reasons of course, but one of them would be because they are so bad looking :)...
Or are lots of them just subdomains?
cabbie, the domain name that you bought.. did you get it in the hundreds($)? I was also wondering how you'd know that the domain name had existing traffic already, aside from seeing it with content or using the google bar page rank or searching it on the search engine, is there a tool we can use?
any update on this?
I had a really good first week, with a few sales of $100 or so in commission which helped me boost revenues up, but I think those were more luck than the normal flow of sales. I am not sure if next month I'll be able to reach the same amount.
On the other hand, I've put up two more sites, but they haven't been spidered yet, so we'll see if they will help me keep the growth going. I've also enlisted some external resources to help me with my link campaign, which in the long run will boost my PR.
i really dont understand how people can get new sites up and ranked relatively easy without a ton of work.. the ammount of effort needed to get links and promoting the sites would be nearly impossible with 1-2 new sites every week or two weeks.. how do you know how many inbound links are enough and can you really expect to get 10-20 good inbound links and have that be good enoguh to eventually grow into a decently ranked site..
when i see people talk about 100s of sites i wonder if its just a site about a particular item which is part of a bigger class and just mimicing the site design/concept to more products or is it unique ideas and sites applied to different markets or retailers.. like is it a single toy and all the relevant info to promote that one toy.. then another site promoting a diff toy in the same way..
i would prefer to create sites with minimal upkeep and that are more refference and information resources rather than blogs/news/content sites.. i recently built a really nice deals site geared towards a certain niche which i think would do really well but the ammount of effort to keep it up and promote it on a regular basis would be huge.. i've saved it pretty much for a rainy day when i cant think of anything new to create..
i think i could build sites all day but getting the traffic and promoting the sites is what has me stumped.. any ideas? any way to cheaply get help with this? or how what a good target for inbound links would be to get things going and eventually have it grow on its own?
-tom
