Some days ago I anticipated on Twitter that I would have started a new challenge regarding making money. I know that many people are very curious to find new ways to diversify their income so I decided to focus my next 12 months on finding and experimenting new ways to make money.
Since I am already proficient with working online, my first obvious choice is to try some internet marketing stuff. I’m not really new to this as I am already making some money online, but I’ve never been doing it seriously.
For those who don’t know, internet marketing involves using internet channels to promote something, which is usually a product. In my case I will create some websites and I’ll try to rank them on google so that people can find them. I’ll also be selling other people’s stuff in those websites in order to make some money, that’s the ultimate goal of course.
The idea is simple and I have some friends who are making a lot of money this way. The only hard thing is to rank on google and thus receive visitors. I’m going to talk a lot about this.
I want to make clear that it’s not my goal and intention to manipulate people, indeed I want to create useful stuff that can help them. Ultimately google tends to prefer genuine stuff so it’s hard to think I could do otherwise anyway.
What I’m going to do
My plan is to create two websites per month, for a total of six websites at the end of the experiment. Of these, I want three of them to rank in the top 5 by the end of these 90 days. If the model is successful I can replicate my strategies and finally retire in an exotic island :)
Each website will have a minimum of five page and it will be optimized for multiple keywords. I’ll then focus my energy on promoting each website through articles and links so that google can rank them. I am already working on a plan that I will publish on a future post.
What you’ll get
My intention is to share everything I’ll learn with you here, so that you can have a complete picture at the end of the experiment. I’m going to write down every single activity I’ll do, as well as the time spent and the tools used. However, since I’m going to use paid tools, I’m not going to share them until the end of the experiment, as I don’t know yet if they are worth their price. The only tool that I can recommend already is market samurai.
Note that I don’t know yet what will happen, but I’ll work hard to make this experiment as successful as possible. You can expect at least one post per week about this experiment.
This should be fun!
Go get them done and post some good results while you’re at it. :)
reply to this comment
Sure Daniel, thanks for stopping by.
reply to this comment
I’m really looking forward to see the result in this challange. I’m currently doing a similar thing for my new e-commerce site but I’m having some trouble building backlinks.
reply to this comment
Hey Stefan, building backlinks is the hardest thing, and I’ll try various strategies.
reply to this comment
Good luck. Hope to hear a good result. :)
reply to this comment
I hope that as well!
reply to this comment
I really like your blog and all, but I highly dislike these meta style posts.
Making a good blog is about content. Not “SEO Tricks and Tips!”.
Those of us who read your blog don’t read it because of some Marketing 101 class. We read it because you write good articles. Sure, there’s other people who also write similar blogs who are interested in this topic, but the rest of us probably aren’t.
I know you’re trying to make a buck, and I totally support that (adblock is disabled here), but I fear that much more of this and you may ostracize your readers.
reply to this comment
Hey Aaron, thanks for your feedback.
You’re correct that I’m trying to make a buck, but I don’t want to make it through the blog, indeed if you turn on adblock here you’ll see no difference.
I decided to write about this challenge because it was requested, but I’m not going to stop writing about other things.
Personal development for me involves many areas, and I try to explore many of those. I do that through challenges because I want to be as real as possible. I understand that some people may not be interested in everything I try, and your feedback is indeed showing that.
I’ll think more about your comment and at a solution, perhaps I can give more detailed info somewhere else.
reply to this comment
Emm, maybe one of the Websites can center on this experiment?
reply to this comment
I’m still thinking about that.
reply to this comment
I thought about going this route once. I ultimately stopped because I found the successful ones were those that did manipulate people. They have 50-100+ sites advertising products, with fake pictures and identities, as a “life changing experience.” They set it up to be done quickly with Wordpress and rank high on google with backlink off-shoring.
I’m happy you will likely promote products that you believe in, but please be aware that in order to truly make “enough” money with this, you’ll likely need to mass produce “rip-off” sites, too.
I hope you don’t go down that route. It is enticing to make easy money and be able to travel, but it feels wrong to me.
Good luck to you.
reply to this comment
Hi Kyle, I’ll be mostly promoting products that people already want to buy, so this shouldn’t be the case. For me this is mostly a challenge so I’m not attached to money as a driving factor, even though it can be a way to measure success.
reply to this comment
Wish you the very best and I will definitely follow you.
reply to this comment
Thank you Rajiv!
reply to this comment
Hi Oscar,
Keep it up!!!!
Its a fantastic idea .Challenge yourself!!!
Making money is not that bad an idea provided you see and feel them this way :))))
All the best to you and do keep us abreast how it moves.
Cheers
reply to this comment
Hey Darpan, I don’t think making money is a problem when you are providing some value. After all we’re all doing some job already right?
reply to this comment
I think it very possible to make good money by providing very good content. And to be honest I’ve tried the “making masses of sites” and I hate it – its not nearly as simple doing this as it at one time was.
Thus its much more about focusing in on good quality SEO to obtain high rankings in Google (not so much in Yahoo as yet, but they may be changing with their new Bing.com format), and this way you can get a whole lot of visitors to only a few websites, rather than amassing rubbishy and/or spammy sites.
I take Aaron’s point up above and that is a good point to make, but its obvious that there is still going to be a lot of really high quality writing offered up here by Oscar. And if it came down to it, he could actually rank his web pages without the desire to make money from them – just show it how its done. For example, you can rank for a competitive “AdSense” market but without monetizing in any way.
But Oscar intends on investing in tools to help him to obtain the necessary links so its only fair that he tries hard to make some income from these sites, and re-investing in the tools, which in turn will (hopefully) gain better results.
I’ll be following for sure Oscar!
Kind regards
Joseph
reply to this comment
Hey Joseph, glad to see you here. I think you summarized the point perfectly. Thanks for your comment.
reply to this comment
Oscar,
Sweet! This sounds like some fun experimentation. I’m getting ready to be more aggressive about my experiments. Looking forward to your progress.
reply to this comment
Hey Moon, hope we can learn something from each other ;)
reply to this comment
I’ll be very interested to read how this goes, it just happens to be something I’m considering at the moment. I like my job on the whole (its certainly more fulfilling than the sales assistant job I had with a large U.K takeaway food business), but the wage needs a little top-up if I’m to do some of things I want to do out of work (travel, music festivals etc).
I’ll be following this one and hopefully starting out with my own ideas.
reply to this comment
Hey Owen, glad you’ll be following this experiment! I’m going to publish the first update tomorrow!
reply to this comment
Not just reading anymore – doing too! Can’t wait for the next installment :)
reply to this comment