5000 Dollars In 45 Days - My IM Voyage

OK everyone, this is going to be a long one, so please go get a cup of coffee or tea, go to the bathroom, whatever you need to do to make yourself comfortable for a spell. For those of you who have been following this challenge and who have given me encouragement and great comments/questions, I say thank you. My gift to you is this post, I hope it helps in your own efforts.

I guess the question that everyone is asking is did I make $5000 profit in the 45 days of the challenge? Well, yes and no. I say yes because I produced/acquired over 40 websites in 45 days. I also made some money with niche marketing and ebooks on the 40 websites. Together, the value of the websites and the money from ebooks/niche marketing/adsense totals over $5000. I say no because I don’t have $5000 in my bank account at the end of the challenge. Let’s do a breakdown of all the efforts.

In the beginning, I posted an ad at sitepoint.com advertising my niche website creation service. I was offering a complete website hosted for an entire year on our servers for a very reasonable (I thought) $345. That included niche research and customization for the customer’s selected monetization methods. Well, I got one sale, so add that to the total. I learned a few things from this experience, though. First off, I got lots of tire kickers. I wasted a ton of time answering all sorts of questions. Part of the problem was me not stating right up front what the price was. I did this to get more inquiries. Did I get more sales? Probably not. Second observation was that my ad only stayed up top for a few days. Even though I paid for a featured listing, it was basically buried under the other featured listings in about 5 days. This effectively turned my ad into a 5 day ad, not a 30 day ad. Take $50 from the total and also chock it up to experience. Third, and most importantly, the creation of a 15 page website is a lot of work! Also, this income stream is not one that I would say works on autopilot. Synopsis: eventually, you can build a website creation business by outsourcing the web development and the article writing. You will be on the hook for coordinating the efforts and talking to your customers. Final thoughts: viable long-term income generating method, lots of work involved.

Niche website acquisition/flipping. OK, one of my strategies was to create and/or acquire niche websites. I did this very diligently for a few weeks. I now have over 40 websites. I bought around half of them. Most were bought for $50, so add 50 x 20 or $1000 to my bill. I have not sold any of them. The reason for this is that I intend to create a membership site with these websites and show people how to take the two websites I give them every month and make money with them. If I sold them, they are all more than 30 days old, so they go into sitepoint.com’s established website section (meaning more money for me). As such, they are worth an average of at the very least $300/site. So this part of the effort yields 300 x 40 or $12,000 minus the $1000 acquisition cost or $11,000, roughly. Synopsis: very work intensive. Final thoughts: yes, you can make money with this method. If you troll the webmaster forums, you can find great website deals. All you have to do is add nice graphics and clean up the grammar/spelling. Then promote and sit. In two months, you’ve got a site that will bring in nice money. Another long term viable income generating strategy but again, does not run on autopilot.

Niche marketing: I did my niche marketing as outlined in Andrew Hansen’s Niche Marketing On Crack ebook. I did not put a lot of effort into this and I see that this was a big mistake. I created two blogs as outlined in the ebook. I promoted them on ezinearticles.com with a total of 4 articles. Today, both blogs are on page one of Google’s search results for the products promoted. The total income here was $230 in affiliate commissions from CJ. If I had put as much effort into this as I did the website creation effort, I would have around 60 blogs. If they each did the same as the first two ($115/each), then I would have another $6,900 and I would have this in the bank and succeeded with flying colors in this challenge because there is no money outlay and I don’t have to deal with customers. Synopsis: very promising income generating method, requires work in the beginning, but is a semi-autopilot business model. Final thoughts: this is a viable mid-term strategy. Even though I need to test this further, you can make money hands off with this method. You must be aware of a couple of caveats. The first is you must monitor your website’s standing in the SE’s and write an article every so often to keep the traffic going. The second is you must keep researching products to promote as your success is directly related to how hot a product is.

Let’s go with miscellaneous items. Adsense in all of this was about $35. This is totally hands off. It is also abysmal. Ebook sales came in at $57. Not bad considering the fact that this was from pretty much zero promotion. Definitely, this method has much more potential than adsense.

Here are some final thoughts for your brain. I have to say that the biggest barrier to my success was me and my attitude and my surroundings. As some of you know from this very blog, I had a hernia and complications which sent me to the hospital. The situation has not been completely resolved yet. Lesson here is your health is your number one priority. Another main issue is work environment. I gave up my office at the beginning of this year because I discontinued shipping physical products from TMG Computers, Inc. This website was generating around $4000/month in income. I stopped it cold turkey to focus on IM. In retrospect, maybe this was a little premature and probably very stupid. Oh well, you live and learn from your mistakes. The problem right now is having a home office has really eroded my productivity. If you have children, you know how bad this can get. I am in the process of building a separate office in our basement. Let’s do a breakdown of all the income streams:

1) Niche website service: $295 profit
2) Niche websites: $11,000 virtual profit - not acutalized
3) Niche Marketing On Crack: $230 profit
4) Adsense + ebooks: $92
Total actual profit: $617
Total virtual profit: $11,000

So, it is up to you the reader to decide if I made it or failed. Here are my next steps. If you want me to create an ebook of these experiences, I will do it and make it available for free. Please post here if interested. I will also be restarting the 45 day challenge armed with my experiences from the first challenge. In the spirit of this blog, I will do the challenge with a different approach every 45 days. Please feel free to post comments/suggestions. Thanks for listening and have a successful day.

TomG.