Forum Moderators: skibum
To start off with my goal is clear and attainable. My current situation is this; I run a few small niche sites and average around $120 a day profit, so I am looking for over 2000% growth.
Here are the rules:
1) Within one year of the site going live (< 2.5 months) I want to hit this
2) I will not give up
3) It will be with a brand new domain and site
4) I am starting with just over $5,000 (however, more may be added if the checks lag behind too much, but that will be accounted for).
5) It will use affiliate programs as well as AdSense
Here is what has already been done:
1) 1 link from a previous site has been pointed to some placeholder content, google has indexed the site with no title, I may add some more links soon
2) Site design has been outsourced, almost complete
3) An outsourced programmer has been confirmed for the CMS
4) An LLC has been formed for the company
5) 10 contractors have been hired to write continuous content
Here is the timeline:
1) Design done within another week
2) Programmed and ready to go live within 2.5 months from now
Expectations:
1) I imagine I will need a few million impressions per month to obtain this, but I want to be at this level within 1 year
2) I might have to hire a full time programmer and a few content writers along the way
I am sure a lot of other unexpected things will happen along the way, but just wanted to make an initial post much like rfungs, I will next update when the site is completed.
Wish me luck.
P.S. Multiply my daily goal by 365 ;-). I may not respond to PMs, don’t be offended, I’m just busy.
me too.. I be watching this thread with interest ;)
I'll definitely keep an eye on this - I'd be also interested in hearing where you're coming from - so we can better relate to our own little place in the universe and how we may get to where you'll (hopefully) be. Are you successful already doing AM? mainly websites or PPC? are you a technical person or do you come from a marketing view? do you do this full time?
From what I've read on this thread, you're comtemplating using 11 writers, and off line advertising, and maybe taking it to an IPO. This is no "ordinary" affiliate site, that much seems obvious, maybe more along the lines of a smaller Shopping.com?
I can imagine that there are many(relatively speaking) people making that much money online, but they are doing so with several websites/Campaigns, which may or not be a better way of spreading the risk.
I feel relatively puny aiming only for $300/day in a year's time :)
I don't want to give away my idea per se, but it is not 100% like shopping.com, I can tell you that. I do have 11 writers right now, a full time programmer for the next 2 months and the designer just finished today.
I am a full time student at one of the best engineering schools in the country. I am very busy to say the least. I am graduating soon and couldn't stand any of my engineering internships so I decided to start my own business prematurely (it has always been a goal, like I said). I may apply for business schools soon as well as I think I could get into one of the top schools at such a young age because of my experience.
When I was 14 I started my first business and sold it when I was 15 for a very generous price and hence have some money to experiment with and not lose too much of my savings. It was an online greeting card site and got about 100,000 impressions per day with about 100K people on the mailing list.
As far as my background in AM or web, all I have is the above, but I am fortunate enough to know some people in high places which may help out later on.
Hopefully I can inspire you, rfung, to add a 0 to the end of your goal. Good luck to both of us!
That is about as far as I can go into the financials before I start giving away my business plan.
Hey, what about all that risk stuff you were talkin' about? Wouldn't that be risky... telling all of us your business plan?!? C'mon, do it!
J/K, good luck, it's a noble goal.
Thanks
Gil
If you are planning on getting clicks from general high volume keywords, they wont be very valuable, not even worth the $0.05 that you are paying.
Lets assume you are getting a 2% ctr on your ads. That is above average but not as good as it can get. It is also VERY hard to get with generalized keywords. You will need 5,000,000 ad impressions per day in order to get 100,000 clicks. Now, even a word like "Sex", which wont be worth $0.01 per click, only gets 150,000 searches per day on overture, and 300,000 according to word tracker. Now, you could get your 100,000 visitors buy using a handful (50+) high volume keywords, but you wont get a positive ROI (or else these keywords would have bidders).
So, unless you want junk traffic, how again are you going to buy 100,000 visitors per day?
I agree, it will be formidable challenge to find such traffic with AdWords
Think of part numbers, item numbers, model numbers, etc. Variations on all of the above.
I shopped for a Plasma TV recently and couldn't believe the bidders on any variation of model number, SKU, etc.
Anyone have a database/spreadsheet of thousands or hundreds of thousands of items, replacement parts, etc? Easy to create keyword lists, with pages matching that are optimized enough to rank naturally, etc.
Automotive parts DB anyone?
roblaw
Other than that, what would you do with with the traffic generated by all these product parts?
hmmmm...
Or, if that's too much trouble, you could just link to my site... same thing :)
How can someone without such contacts and not $5,000 to start such a business do such a thing?
I know it is possible, but without the contacts and cash to start out with.. it takes away the boost from the start.
but not having contacts or not being able to put a value to how much the 'contacts' influences ones success sort of makes the entire process that much harder to gauge.
This is just a thought, but if you're going to be spending that much time, effort, and money, you ought to set up a few periferal sites and link them to the main site. That way you can create a built-in audience for the cheap sites, and they'll get possibly thousands of hits per day without investing more money. Promote the hell out of site 1, and the other sites benefit from it for free.
Can you explains how one can link site without being penalized for cross link.
I heard something called 'Butterfly link structure' is effective?
How can someone without such contacts and not $5,000 to start such a business do such a thing?
Startup capital can help do things faster, but without experience it usually just helps lose the startup capital quickly. You can do it without startup capital. It'll be slower, but you'll learn a lot more along the way.
As for contacts, I'm not sure where that helps. I've always just worked with existing affiliate programs, often with just their standard commissions rates. Once one of my sites is more of an authority in the area, other merchants start contacting me and I can often demand higher commissions. But I can't think of a time where it helped to have contacts.
If you're planning on buying traffic, what's the relevancy of your PR and/or if you've been spidered? you would presumably be able to get traffic from the get go?
My view is that you're unlikely to succeed within your timeframe, but there's no question that you can do it.
Your comment about OV being unsuitable due to the low bidding your product requires also makes me wonder. Most of the stuff I have in that sort of range makes good money, but if the bids are this low then it follows that the rewards are also low.
In my experience, low bids equals low traffic, which in turn equals low returns. The ROI may be spectacular, but the actual numbers coming through will be low, making big bucks unlikely. For example, I make over 800% ROI on one product, for which I genuinely dominate the SERPS and paid listings, but as it's a low ticket item the average monthly net profit is only around $1000.
For loans and mortgages, where I can't dominate the SERPS and paid listings due to intense competition, my ROI is only 500%, but a typical month makes me $30,000 plus.
Unless you have found an untapped market, I can't see it happening as you expect. And if you have found an untapped market, it won't remain that way for long and this will drive the bids up and the ROI down.
More pertinently, most people who get their first $50,000 month tend to struggle to re-invest all the profits as it's just too tempting to start spending the new found wealth. The trick would be to diversify and spend some of that cash on new programs to avoid the "eggs in one basket" trap.
However, I think you have an excellent goal and I wish you every success in it's achievement. Please keep us posted :)
I still think there is enough PPC out there to eventually reach my goal. I know it might be quite the challenge, but hopefully, along with some free press, I can make it there.
hdpt00, I know you're not going to tell us about your new site, but I'm curious about your previous ventures.
Can you tell us what kinds of sites you've run in the past, and how you made them successful? Tell us about that business you sold when you were a teen.
I'm new to this stuff, and I am hungry for knowledge!
hdpt00 said it was a greeting card site...
I currently work for a company that is doing close to $5mil a year in sales, about half that is profit after paying wages, rent, utilities, and $50k/month in PPC. We don't have invetory so it's not a true e-commerce site.
There is hardly any competition for this market, hardly any at all, it's really unbelievable. Evry competitor we have is a joke right now.
I don't think it would be hard at all to compete head to head with this company, and by the end of the year knock it off it's pedistool.
I'm currently in the process of starting my own site that will compete with it, but seeing as I have basically no money to invest it will take me about two years to go head to head.
With 11 writers and some seed money for PPC you could make a pretty grand entry into this niche.
So I think there's an easier way for you, just open your mind and research your options some more.
Either way, good luck to you! I really like your enthusiasm!
sure there are better ways to spend one's energy - but the key is knowing the niche to go into.
If htd00's niche is greetings cards..why not tell us what yours is?:)
let's evaluate that and see if it's really the best way to go about it.
They don't call him "Success" for nothing.
didn't hurt to ask :)
but seriously, how did you/your company come about this idea? can you explain the research procedure, without going into specific details over your industry?
for instance, is this something that is targetted to a general audience, or it's for a specific industry? are they high priced items, or small ones?
I get the feeling that any high priced items are usually very industry specific, because otherwise we're dealing with general population products like big screen tvs and stuff.
