I started my career in Internet Marketing (IM) on October 20th, 2010. Before that, I was the CEO of a technology company that I’d started in 2001 and sold in 2008 after growing it to a few million in sales.
Having come from a technology marketing background, I figured that I was pretty well equipped to succeed in IM. Wrong. When I first started, I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. I bought a bunch of crap courses and wasted plenty of my time and money.
Thankfully, it didn’t take me too long to discover The Challenge; a free online 30 day course that was extremely helpful for me. If you are new to IM and can relate to the overwhelm/lost feeling that I just described, head on over to the challenge.
Ok, I’ve Completed the Challenge – Now What?
After completing the challenge, I put up my first site, Car-DrivingGames.com, and exactly 42 days later, I had made my first sale online! Suffice to say, it was pretty exciting to have made money without even talking to another person to do it.
How much did I make? I whopping $1.60, but that wasn’t the point. I had graduated from not having a clue what I was doing, to having made my first dollar online (making a dollar online is the goal of The Challenge).
Since then, that same site has earned me just over $50, despited the fact that I made massive errors in my niche research and to this day, the site doesn’t rank for any of the keywords that I selected. Instead, my traffic comes from long-tail keywords. If you don’t know what that means, read my long-tail post.
How to Go From $1.60 to $2,000 a Day
Obviously, earning a few dollars a day from one website is not going to set you on the path to financial freedom.
If you want to go full-time online, you are going to need to pick a strategy for ramping up your income. There are many, many ways to make money online (hence why newbies tend to get so overwhelmed) and it is critical that you choose just one strategy and stick with it. The greatest mistake that newbies make is that they spend all their time searching for the perfect get rich quick scheme and they hop from idea to idea long before giving any one of those ideas a chance to succeed.
What to see what I mean? Check out this product, it is currently one of the top selling products on Clickbank and the hype is off the charts. I have not bought this product, nor would I suggest you buy it. I only show it to illustrate an example of the type of foolery that most newbies get sucked into. Hype, hype, hype, and more hype. Its really kind of sad.
Avoiding the Hype and Getting it Right
So what are you to do if you want to learn without getting hosed? I was lucky enough to stumble across a thread on the Warrior Forum from a guy named LMC, and in his post he went on to describe how he earns well over $500,000 per year from his portfolio of 235 niche websites (its now over 525 sites).
In reading the thread, the one thing that stood out was that he didn’t use any hype and he didn’t use any affiliate links! In other words, he wasn’t trying to sell any courses. What he did do was go into immense detail (the thread got to 14 pages before the forum closed it) on how he runs his business. To learn more about this, read my earlier post.
Going From 0 to 24 Sites in 60 days
After spending a few hours reading the forum thread above, I decided that his business model would become my business model and I set out to build as many sites as I could as fast and efficiently as I could.
The going was slow at first, because as I was going through the process of launching new sites, I was also having to learn about SEO, article marketing, backlinking, etc… (I’ve blogged about everything I’ve learned, so just read my older posts). Once I got things figured out, I then created operations manuals filled with screenshots and checklists so that I would be able to outsource the tasks in the future.
Now, aside from doing the niche research, I, like LMC, outsource virtually every little thing when it comes to launching a maintaining new sites and because of this, I can now launch a site a day, on average. If you’d like a copy of my site launch checklist, just sign up for my newsletter.
Ok I’ve Got 24 Live Sites – Now What?
Once I hit the 24 site mark, I thought that it was time to check in with someone who was further along that I was, and had a course that was tailored to exactly what I was going. I new that if I didn’t learn anything new, I could easily get a refund, so I really didn’t see the harm in buying the course.
The course I bought is the Niche Profit Course by Chris Guthrie, and as you’ll see when you watch the sales page video, Chris isn’t much into a lot of hype, nor does he suggest you are going to get rich overnight. Bravo Chris!
The Niche Profit Course is presented in a video format and will only take you about 3 hours to work your way through. Given that my business model is to have a large porfolio of zer0-maintenance niche websites, I was hoping that the Niche Profit Course was going to equip me with some very specific do’s and don’ts that applied directly to the business model I am pursuing.
My Key Take Aways
Chris didn’t let me down. His course was stuffed full of some exceedingly valuable information that I am now taking action on.
Take Away #1 – Chris includes a free theme with his course (regular readers will notice that this blog now uses this theme) and he devotes an entire module into showing you what the theme can do and how to do it. The theme alone is worth the $97 he charges for the course. What I really like about the theme is how easy it makes it for me to display the featured posts, my optin section, the social icons, and the controls for the navigation bar. I no longer have to edit code to get the fine tuning that I require.
Take Away #2 – Chris’ niche research module is excellent. I already had a pretty systematic process for niche research that relies heavily on Market Samurai, and now that I’m armed with a few of the extra tested ideas that Chris shared with me, I’m even more confident that I’ll launch fewer dogs in the future. For example, Chris shares how he gets his niche ideas, and then demonstrates all the free and paid tools that he uses to determine if the niche is a viable one or not.
Of all the areas you can screw up, niche research is the most common and most costly. Why? Simple, it takes just as long to build and promote a site for a bad niche as it does for a good niche, so if you get the research wrong, you are going to waste a LOT of time and get very frustrated. This is the reason why most newbies fail; bad research.
Take Away #3 – Unlike every other course I’ve purchased in the past, Chris actually gives out he URL of one of his sites and then goes into detail by making a case study out of it. For me, that was hugely valuable because I was able to compare how I’d built my 24 sites to his. Given that he’s been doing this longer than I have, I’m pretty inclined to go with his ideas on how a site should be built. This module was huge for me.
Take Away #4 – Prior to seeing this module, I was using my affiliate links in a way that wasn’t going to convert as well as they will now that Chris has shown me his way. How does he know what works so well? Extensive testing. Prior to seeing this module, I would use only one Amazon tracking ID per niche site. Now I’ll be using at least 3 so that I can track where on the site my conversions are coming from. Great idea!
Other Key Take Aways
- How to properly setup your income generating blog – if you haven’t yet setup a wordpress blog, this will show you how
- How To Write Content For Your Blog – writing content is always a struggle for newbies. Chris shares how he does it in detail
- How to Build Links and Get Traffic – if you are not yet familiar with how to get quality backlinks without a ton of work, you will really enjoy this section. I have also blogged about how I do it here.
Conclusion
Chris’s Niche Profit Course is by far the best course I’ve ever purchased for the type of niche website business that I run. If you are struggling to get your income to the level you want, and you have chosen the niche website business model, you will get a lot of very specific ideas and tactics from the Niche Profit Course.
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Who’s Trent?
Having sold his last business for over a million bucks in 2008 by the age of 38, Trent has since immersed himself in the study of internet marketing by going out and doing. Continue reading...
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Great post Trent. I too joined the The Challenge this year and it have made me $79.73. The biggest problem is driving traffic to the site so I’ll be trying out the Spinning & UAW route like you and Pat Flynn.
Trying to find someone at oDesk, but still haven’t had the $20 luck you had.
Your new WP theme looks great, only the Aweber form and Recent post/comments is a bit unlined.
Hey Eric,
Congrats on the $79! Once you have your on-page SEO done, backlinks are the key to getting higher in the SERPs. If you outsource to a VA, you might want to have a look at the SEOPress plugin on my resource page. It produces an on-page SEO score for each page and tells you/your VA what to fix to improve the score.
Looking forward to see how these sites turn out; sounds really good. On a side note you would have a link to that thread do you?
There is a link in the post that will take you to the thread, yes.