The Best Investment I Ever Made
For those of you who don’t know, I’m a graduate student.
I’ve pushed through undergrad and here I am, lining myself up to be a lifetime college student. To be honest, when you go to grad school you need to be prepared to either get extremely sick of your subject (because you focus on it so intensely for so long) or to fall madly in love with it (because there are rewards to becoming an expert). Personally, it’s like a rollercoaster between these two extremes.
On the roller coaster’s decent towards loathing, I spend my time recovering by making money on the web, which is the topic of this post.
Back in April of 2006 I bought my first blog for $600. Now this wasn’t my first experience with web revenue. In fact, I’d been making about $350/month off adSense, $100 from text link ads and $45/month of Amazon affiliate income on non-blog related sites.
All that passive income, as I like to call it, was extremely seductive. The lure of free money was just too strong. So I started researching how to get more of it, and ended up at SitePoint. Well, a lot of the stuff that passes through SitePoint is junk, but there are the occassional gems. So I found a site that I liked for $600 and decided to take the plunge.
Oh crap! Now I had this blog that needed updating and wasn’t generating the revenue that I had expected.
And then bang. The site hit PR6. I submitted it to Text Link Ads. And now I’m making over $350/month off that one site. Subtract the $75 I pay someone else to write the content, and badabangbadabing….you’re looking at the best investment I’ve ever made.
$275 a month and increasing. So far, I’ve profited over $500 in a little over five months. In other words, I’ve already paid for the investment and then made $500+ on top of that. You can’t do that in the stock market. In fact, if you double your investment in under 7 years you’re doing well in traditional investment vehicles. I’ve almost doubled my investment in 5 months.
The key to success is knowing what you want, knowing how much you want to pay, and then being as patient as possible, week after week after week as you monitor the sites at SitePoint. But only buy a site that is for real…not one that’s been generated for the sake of a flip. Make sure it’s been around for a while and that it’s got a nice stock of deep links from a variety of other respectable sites. Most important of all: know how you’re going to monetize the site.
If you play your cards right, you can find blogs and websites that are not only underpriced but are also undermonetized, providing a huge opportunity on the upside.
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