My story - How I'm making money online and where I want to be

Ok so forgive me if I have posted this in the wrong section, but I just wanted to share with people my story and my future goals in order to get advice and motivation and hopefully to motivate others in the process!

I'm 21 years old, living in the UK and working hard on turning a hobby in web design into an internet marketing business and being able to leave my part time job in a department store ().

So the short story is i've been doing freelance web design for a while now whilst also keeping down a boring shop job to help cover all my bills, about 6 months ago I started what I now know to be called a niche tech site, just as a bit of an experiment to see if I could make a bit of extra cash on the side. 3 months down the line the site is getting some serious traffic (140,000 UV/month) and I was making around £1000 ($1550) a month from this website with my peak month making £1200 ($1850) just from the one website. I had sold a couple of websites in my time a few years ago so knew about sitepoint etc, but recently stumbled upon Flippa... I saw the prices some websites were selling for and just as an experiment I listed my site.. a few days later I got (what I thought at the time) was an amazing offer and decided to sell up. Perhaps in hind-sight this wasn't the best move however i'm not going to dwell on that, i'm now concentrating on building up a network of websites to bring in enough revenue to quit my shop job and pursue a career in internet marketing.

Soon after selling my niche tech site I set up a couple new ones in similar fields, which are now making a bit of adsense revenue each month. But I have realised that the most powerful way of making money online seems to be having a large quantity of websites each of which make a fair bit of adsense earnings, now I want you guys to realise i'm not promoting ANY products or any links to personal websites this is purely to share with you my findings and hopefully to learn from you guys and get a bit of motivation!

So here we have my first monthly earnings report:

September 2011
Niche tech site 1 (2 months old) - £185/$288
Niche tech site 2 (2 months old) - £27/$42
Micro niche site 1 (1 week old) - £3.50/$5.42
Micro niche site 2 (1 week old) - £0
Micro niche site 3 (1 week old) - £0
Niche tech site (new) (1 week old) -£0

My goal
In 6 months time I want to be able to quit my shop job and live solely off of my websites earnings, my financial aim is to hit £1500 monthly income.

I'm no expert when it comes to SEO and internet marketing, I have done a lot of reading and tried to learn as much as possible from others so far. For most of these sites i've outsourced link building to various different service provides but I know quite a lot about on page SEO in the future I may post details of what services i've used for each site and how well it's going

That's all for the minute, if anyone has anything to help a fairly novice internet marketer like myself it would be greatly appreciated. Hopefully we can all learn a bit from this.

 

How are you making money from your websites? Affiliate deals, advertising, selling products? Without details your story doesn't mean much.

 

Happy for you. I hope I can be the same as you also.

 

I make my money solely through Adsense, no affiliate deals yet... i'm looking this as another means of income though.

 

Good luck with your new venture but it would be wise to diverse and have some additional forms of revenue and not totally rely on adsense as we are all aware they can close accounts at any time and if this ever was to happen you would be without any form of revenue and back to square one.Although it may never happen but its worth addressing the situation just incase.

 

Essentially I want to have a few main sites which are more legit and not just micro niches, which should be safe from being banned (although I realise you can never be sure) that I know will make enough to pay the bills and then build up many smaller sites to provide additional income that I could live with out if they did get banned or something happened.. and just continue to build on them.

 

You have done a great job and maybe you should not have sold your site, but since you were able to build to that type of traffic you were doing very well. You might want to experiment with having a site with Adsense on it, but also monetizing with something in the sidebar, like a product from ShareAsale, Commission Juction, Amazon, or something like that, to see which pulls the best, or even leave adsense off all together. You don't want all your income coming from one source for sure. Many people make money by building a site up for a few months and flipping them every time. It's really up to you and what you enjoy. Good luck!

 

Good for you. You can be wherever you want financially in 6 months it just depends on how much you can learn and adjust to IM

 

Thanks for your post. It is always really nice to read people who are making a success from working online. If you are really good at web design you should also maybe offer to create websites for local shops for free and then charge them for hosting (by getting a hosting reseller account).

Keep up the good work.

 

140 000 UV/month for 3 month old site is good. What is source of traffic?

 

Literally all my traffic came from google - I managed to hit on some really popular keywords that just started trending so there wasn't much trouble getting to the top of google (competition wise). I know I would be very lucky so have the same success again though as like I said before i'm not an expert I was literally just testing and trying techniques I read about... so this time i'm trying to make several sites that I know probably won't bring in as many hits on their own but put together will add up. Anybody got any top tips for small end sites using adsense for revenue? As in best ways to rank in google etc?

 

Thanks for the support! I'm hoping to bring in enough money from my network of sites to allow me to start doing more web design jobs, which is my main passion.

 

Hi friends nice information.

 

it was nice story. please share how are you making money with adsense or affiliate marketing if possible.

 

Thanks for sharing your success story.I think you are making a good amount of money within A short period.So give more time and make more money.Besides Google Adsense you can work with other networks like affiliate marketing and CPA networks to bring diversification in your income sources.

 

Great job.. Before you quit your job, focus on building cash streams and business assets that continue to make recurring money for you month after month.

Good luck,

 

Your story is very inspiring. Thank you for sharing it with us. I think your goal is feasible but I would suggest that you study SEO and internet marketing as well. It's nice to learn how these things go and not have to rely to other people to do it for you. You can also save yourself money, or invest your money on something more profitable, than on someone to do SEO for you. We have free lessons on SEO and Marketing that might help.

All the best to your and your sites!

 

Hello nariley, I hope to have a burning desire like you to make money online... I'm new in IM and I want to focus on it like you, I used to work offline as a graphic artist of a local printing press in our area. At your age of 21 for sure you will soar high and hit your goals. Just keep moving forward.

Thank you for sharing your inspiring story.

 

Its nice to read about someone making it online. We culd all use a good story like this

 

Can you tell us what SEO services you use? Which one is best and give best results?