bfellow
Regular Member
- Jan 3, 2008
- 322
- 373
Hello BHW,
Decided to post a journey thread to help keep me motivated and focused on my goal. I didn't want to start the thread until I had an idea, a goal, and a plan of action. Now that I have it, I'm ready to start this thread.
My Background
I have been in Internet marketing since 2000 working for either myself or for large corporations as an engineer or as a consultant focused on web development, SEO, and SEM. I consider myself a pretty decent programmer focused on the LAMP stack for web dev. My greatest personal success in internet marketing (solo, not working for a company) was a site I created in 2005 that at it's height was bringing in $750 a day from Adsense. After college I sold the site and took a job with a large company. Ever sense I've dabbled in IM on a personal level, but never fully committed to getting back to generating all of my income online. Now with a series of transitions in my life taking place (just married, health is hurt from corporate stress, desire to have a kid in the next couple years and want to be a present father), it felt like it was time.
My goal
My goal is to replace my corporate income and get to a point where I can pay my bills with IM. To hit this I need to make at a minimum $6,000 a month or roughly $200 a day. I currently generate $0 of income online.
What I'm Doing
I've decided to focus on creating comparison sites that are monetized by affiliate programs. Each website I build will focus on a product category that I can get into at least 5 different affiliate programs per website. These sites will contrast and compare prices between products. Pricing data is automatically scrapped each day. My goal is to have at least 500 individual products listed on each site. This will help chase after lots of long tails, while also building authority sites. Each site will have sister sites that carry related but the same products. And example in a niche I am not in would be building a site that focuses on car mufflers, that has a sister site that focuses on rims, and another sister site that focuses on wind shield wipers.
What I've done so far
I started last weekend by buying a recently expired PR3 domain name in a category I plan on focusing on. I then spent about 36 hours over 3 days building my own CMS and price scrapers. I signed up for four affiliate programs, creating a 160+ page site to start. This site will be expanded over the coming days to hit my goal of 500 pages per site. I already have a sister site half done and will interlink these sites. With my own CMS, my ability to create additional sites is pretty easy. Just rinse, repeat. For the site I created I already have 39 pages indexed in Google, and have purchased an SEO package from a vendor here. Should take 2-3 weeks to see initial results.
SEO
Due to the lack of time I have, I needed to focus on my time on either creating sites or SEO. That said, I've decided to outsource my SEO to a reputable vendor here on BHW. I believe a focus on creating high quality sites will in the long run generate a greater return then outsourcing site creation, which can be a headache.
Frequency of updates
I plan on giving a weekly update plus additional updates as things happen. This is not a daily thread as those die quick. I want to focus my time on building sites, not writing updates. I'm more than willing to answer any questions that I can, but will not be able to answer some questions (things like what niche I'm in, etc).
That's it for now. Thanks BHW as I've learned a tremendous amount of info from this site in the years that I have been a member.
Wish me good luck!
Decided to post a journey thread to help keep me motivated and focused on my goal. I didn't want to start the thread until I had an idea, a goal, and a plan of action. Now that I have it, I'm ready to start this thread.
My Background
I have been in Internet marketing since 2000 working for either myself or for large corporations as an engineer or as a consultant focused on web development, SEO, and SEM. I consider myself a pretty decent programmer focused on the LAMP stack for web dev. My greatest personal success in internet marketing (solo, not working for a company) was a site I created in 2005 that at it's height was bringing in $750 a day from Adsense. After college I sold the site and took a job with a large company. Ever sense I've dabbled in IM on a personal level, but never fully committed to getting back to generating all of my income online. Now with a series of transitions in my life taking place (just married, health is hurt from corporate stress, desire to have a kid in the next couple years and want to be a present father), it felt like it was time.
My goal
My goal is to replace my corporate income and get to a point where I can pay my bills with IM. To hit this I need to make at a minimum $6,000 a month or roughly $200 a day. I currently generate $0 of income online.
What I'm Doing
I've decided to focus on creating comparison sites that are monetized by affiliate programs. Each website I build will focus on a product category that I can get into at least 5 different affiliate programs per website. These sites will contrast and compare prices between products. Pricing data is automatically scrapped each day. My goal is to have at least 500 individual products listed on each site. This will help chase after lots of long tails, while also building authority sites. Each site will have sister sites that carry related but the same products. And example in a niche I am not in would be building a site that focuses on car mufflers, that has a sister site that focuses on rims, and another sister site that focuses on wind shield wipers.
What I've done so far
I started last weekend by buying a recently expired PR3 domain name in a category I plan on focusing on. I then spent about 36 hours over 3 days building my own CMS and price scrapers. I signed up for four affiliate programs, creating a 160+ page site to start. This site will be expanded over the coming days to hit my goal of 500 pages per site. I already have a sister site half done and will interlink these sites. With my own CMS, my ability to create additional sites is pretty easy. Just rinse, repeat. For the site I created I already have 39 pages indexed in Google, and have purchased an SEO package from a vendor here. Should take 2-3 weeks to see initial results.
SEO
Due to the lack of time I have, I needed to focus on my time on either creating sites or SEO. That said, I've decided to outsource my SEO to a reputable vendor here on BHW. I believe a focus on creating high quality sites will in the long run generate a greater return then outsourcing site creation, which can be a headache.
Frequency of updates
I plan on giving a weekly update plus additional updates as things happen. This is not a daily thread as those die quick. I want to focus my time on building sites, not writing updates. I'm more than willing to answer any questions that I can, but will not be able to answer some questions (things like what niche I'm in, etc).
That's it for now. Thanks BHW as I've learned a tremendous amount of info from this site in the years that I have been a member.
Wish me good luck!