Erik’s Blog: Board Shorts and Business Suits

With the sale of Weblogs, Inc to AOL for a reported $25 million the blogosphere has exploded. People are throwing up blogs about anything and everything; promoting, pasting ads, and trying to turn them for a profit. Personal blogs, news blogs, rants, pictures, self help, and I am no exception. Along with blogs there has been the recent sale of some top sites such as myspace.com which went for $580 million. With all this money to be made why not jump on the bus?

I have recently been immersing myself in blogs, articles, and conversations about using the internet to create income. Passive income is the main objective for me. To put in the time and effort to create sites which can sustain themselves and put some money in my pocket. One blog that is more of an inspiration rather than a how-to is Steve Pavlina’s. Somehow the man gets 3.2 million page views only 1 year after he started. Now he has tons of really useful content and is pretty interesting to read, but he must have done some heavy promoting to get to that point. The other blog I regularly read is Yaro Starak’s. His blog Entrepreneurs-Journey.com has become sort of a portal for me into the world of making money through web site creation.

One of his recent posts was about creating niche websites to get just enough traffic to make $1-2 a day using AdSense ads. I won’t get too into the details of how he says you should do it (check his post for that) but the main idea is to find an untapped niche that gets a decent 1000+ overture searches per month and put up a good informative site about it. If you would do one of these a month for 12 months, make $2 per day, that would come out to $38,000 a year. The sites you create don’t have to be anything more than what you initially made. Just leave them to make money for you, passive income.

As I mentioned I am using Yaro’s blog as a portal to many more entrepreneurial sites and blogs, one of which Jonathan Wolds I have found very interesting. He is busy creating a digital empire around the niche site creation method. He currently has 10 niche sites ranging from his Mold blog to his Sump Pumps page. Jonathan develops sites around certain niches that aren’t all that exposed on the internet and gives really informative content to his readers. He spends a lot of time creating them and it shows. I plan on following his progress and gaining insight into the world of niche marketing from his methods.

Inspirational articles

If you aren’t inspired to join the revolution let me point you towards two more articles. Both of them are in Business 2.0 and both will have you running out to buy your first domain, or your first 15 domains. The first article I have mentioned before called Master of Their Domains is about people taking passive income to a new level. All they’ve done is register a domain name, signed up for a site parking service and watched the money come in. The domains they have receive what is called type-in traffic. I explain more about it in my domain state article. Mainly you just have to know that one of these sites allowed a domainer to sell his portfolio of 101 domain names for $3.6 million.

The other article, also in Business 2.0, is titled The Return of Monetized Eyeballs. Another inspiration for anyone leaning towards online income, this will tip you and tip you fast. It’s about all those sites built up then sold off for big money. The ones before the dot com bust, and the growing number after the dot com bust. It’s message is a good one; build a site, bring traffic, prove it can make income and then sell it to someone who thinks they can make more with it. Take Tom from myspace.com, $580 million is a nice chunk of change.

Yaro, from the above mentioned blog just purchased smallbusinessbranding.com, so this idea of flipping websites isn’t just for the super rich. He writes a nice little article on his site as a primer towards what he wants to do with SBB. He doesn’t give the price but he elaborates a little on how he costed the site and what he offered the previous publisher. Another average Joe that I’ve come across in my speed linking through these sites is webby media. The blog hasn’t been updated much but the few posts that are there are quite interesting. He developed blognetworklist.com and sold it off only months after developing it. It’s a great site, very well planned out and offers interesting information, sold for an undisclosed price. My guess is something decent, he hasn’t posted since he sold it so I would imagine either something big in the works or he’s traveling with his riches. Who knows.

Where do I go From Here?

Just look around the web, mainly check blogs, but people are flipping websites left and right and making a pretty penny from them. Affiliate linking, services, Google AdSense, and straight-up partner advertising; whatever the method people are making money, so why can’t I?, why can’t you? Through these other bloggers I have gained a drive to create an online “empire” of sites in order to make myself some passive income. With that passive income I plan on reinvesting in other passive income sources; Stocks, bonds, other sites, real estate. Things that make me money while I sleep.

To do that I have begun first with my blog. Here I am posting my progress and building this site as an outlet for news on what I am doing and how things are going. It is going to be more of an inspirational site rather than a monetized six figure blog like that of Steve Pavlina’s. If I get to six figures I’m not going to complain, but that’s not the drive for this blog. The six figures I hope to build through other sites.

Domain Names
As I mentioned I have been building my domain name portfolio. However, my plan isn’t to focus on type-in traffic. Rather, I want to focus on building traffic through content. People are making a lot of money on parking type-in sites but most of the high income sites are taken. Sure there are always new names popping up that will make you some money, but right now that isn’t where my drive is. I know developing sites will take a lot more time. That’s somewhat of an issue with all the other things I have going on, I work full-time as an engineer at a tissue engineering company, not too mention some of my other lofty goals. However, it’s what I will learn and the connections I will make through site development that I am more interested in. Getting a few good business contacts means a lot to someone who plans to build an empire, be it online or GE style.

I currently own 17 domain names and don’t think a single one of them gets much type-in traffic, if any. I haven’t posted my portfolio because as I mentioned my plan is to develop them and I wouldn’t want to let a great idea slip out before I get my content up. I will post about them here the day I launch each site and you can check them out then. I also will post parts of my portfolio as I see fit. Such as pure type-ins that I don’t think are going anywhere and the someone might want to buy. That’s just good business.

Building Sites

My mind has been racing these last few weeks, soaking up ideas like a sponge and formulating new ones on the fly. I will stick with content and service based sites for the time being and I plan on building them on several different platforms. Wordpress is great, it’s what this site is powered by, and it’s just too easy not to use. Right now I am using Dreamweaver to make the site I plan to launch within the next week. It’s all html coded and I haven’t really exploited all of the resources that Dreamweaver has but will build from this initial site and see how it can make site creation easier.

I realize making 12 sites in 12 months will take a lot of time, especially quality sites. However, I am going to rely on my new found joy to stay focused. Also, like I mentioned in my post about becoming accountable, as long as people know my goals this alone can have a very powerful effect on sticking with them to accomplishment. Who wants to be that guy who is all talk and no show.

Promoting Sites

Promoting websites is a lot of work. Even if you know everything there is to know about the particular topic of your site and you can write pages upon pages of content quickly and easily, you still have to promote the site. Search engines will only bring in so much traffic, sooner or later you’re going to need to get traffic by other means. Linking, posting in forums, buying AdWords, whatever it takes. You have to get out there and promote your site. My goal is half a million people visit my sites by the end of this next year. Will I get there? Not sure, but I gotta try. The time spent promoting sites will initially be the most time consuming. That is where this blog comes in and where one could help you. I plan on building enough return traffic and getting enough links with this site that people will come back to learn and find out more, and then help me promote my sites for me. We’ll see how it works.

In Closing

As I mentioned the main goal is to build sites that create passive income. If I spend the next year developing at least 12 sites I hope that 2 of them create a decent passive income. There are a lot of ideas passing through my head, some good, some not so good. I will spend a good amount of my time over the next few months building traffic here and seeing what that amounts to. I will keep you informed as to my progress with the numerous domain names and sites and let you know any launch dates I might have.

Take care and happy Building.

Aloha,

Erik