How I started To Make Money Online
Derek Cladek on July 14th, 2009
This post will give you a little background information on how I started to make money online. I started back in the day when “Paid To Surfs” where king of the Internet. Those all failed during the Dot Com Bust back in 2000. Some lone survivors changed their programs to incentivized paid programs, much like affiliate marketing today.
Fast forward to December 2006, I created an Adsense site in the niche of tattoos. The site was horribly designed and basically thrown together. I don’t have the programming, website building skills needed to create a great website. So I hired a guy on Elance to create a template for me. The site actually has 2 different designs an old design and a new design as I kept on creating pages to the site but used the new design.
- November 2006 I had 27 visitors, but ended the year 2006 the site had 561 unique visitors to my newly formed tattoo site which created $14.75! (Grand Total For The Year 2006 = $14.75)
- By the end of 2007 I had 331,856 unique visitors to the site which created $2,534.67 of income! (Grand Total For The Year 2007 = $4943.80)
- By the end of 2008 I had 618,781 unique visitors which created $4,630.25 of income! (Grand Total For The Year 2008 = $7668.54)
- So far this year the site has had 401,901 unique visitors and created $2,405.92 of income all from Adsense! (Total Up To July 14th 2009 = $4159.78)
The site also sells a few Clickbank items and did $3038.29 in 2008 and so far in 2009 has done $1,753.86 from commissions. (2007 it made $2,409.13 from commissions).
I tell you all of this to show that making money online is possible even if you have no skills like me! I did not know how to make a website. I basically bought the articles for the site and put it all together myself. I did have a little knowledge of how HTML works but nothing too extensive. I do know something about ranking well on the search engines and if you can get traffic you can make money! Its really as easy as that.
What if you had a website that brought in 500,000 unique visitors a year, or even a few hundred a year? You could put a few ads, Adsense, Kontera, Affiliate products or programs, create an email list, Clickbank or sell ad space on the site. With a large amount of traffic you are almost guaranteed to make money. The tattoo site was never supposed to be a huge earner for me and it really isn’t. I basically use that site to pay for my 2006 Lexus LS 430 and it pays each payment for me. My online stores make loads more money than that site and I know if you were to get into affiliate marketing you could make TONs more than me, just like Jonathan Volk (who is my new hero! Seriously though, he’s a highly successful Affiliate marketer and someone I look up to).
It All Started In 2006!
My first month of making money started with the first 27 visitors to that tattoo site that I created. I remember making $0.09 my first day and how excited I was, because I created something that WORKED! It was just a matter of making it bigger and better, because if it worked, why would it stop if I made the site bigger.
Now today its pushing $20/day and over 4,000 visitors/day. That’s only because I spend the past month making changes to the site and getting it to rank better in Google, and now its paying off, just check out my screen shot below.
Really anyone can do this stuff, whether you make 1 Adsense site and go from there or create a Yahoo Store. It just takes time and effort. Start learning today and tomorrow you will see the rewards. I will post more about the ‘how to’s‘ to creating a successful site that will make you money day in and day out without doing anything more to the site. The tattoo site that I created runs itself with zero effort on my part. I only put time into it when I want it to do better.
Also you have to be careful on what niche you pick because really, there isn’t too much money in the tattoo market online. There are not many products to be sold online for tattoos since its mostly an offline business. I will go over more on how to pick ‘more’ successful niches and what to look for in the future.
The large jump in traffic is because I made changes to the site to help it rank for some keywords that get loads of traffic daily. The site hit the first page for one of those keywords and you can see the results. It also caused a jump of about $8 extra in Adsense income daily. If you look at the ‘Hits’ column you will see the jump. This shows how many times its been ‘seen’ in the search engines, not necessarily bringing traffic to the site. It takes about 14 Hits for the site to get 1 visit.
