Good Idea?

[mini]

Hi Guys,

Just wanting to do some brain storming?

- Say you're successful, (~$20k+ month)
- Earnings are from adsense, affilate programs, and a hosting business
- have 20+ sites ie. pretty diversified

(btw this is not me, just hypothetical)

What is stopping you from really upping the ante? I mean get an office and hire 3-5 workers and publish sites like mad.

Is this a good 3 year plan to making $1 million?

What can go wrong?

[Todd W]

If it were me I might hire a couple people tomake some very nice sites and use some of the other money to invest in real estate. Something away from the web that will over time continue to increase in value. You can basically buy your retirement.

[Chris]

Its not that easy.

Who are you going to hire? If your employees are smart they'll learn how to emulate you and start their own business. If they're not smart... well then you have dumb employees, and that certainly isn't good.

Lets say you paid each person of your 4 employees $24k a year, which is low. Thats already $100k out of your pocket, not including your tax and benefit obligations. If you're only making $20k per month in profit then you just halved your profit.

Also, you won't exact gain as much workpower as you might think, since you'll have to train the employees, manage them, and more or less tell them exactly what to do.

[James]

Personally, I'd likely outsource coding and layout creation, then I'd hire people online to write, like I believe Chromate was (I dunno if he started again) doing. Once a site is capable of making good enough money to justify it I'd likely hire a writer permanently, unless it's more expensive.

Like it's been said time and again: the richest get there by making other people do the labour.

[Todd W]

Like James said I would hire writers and use their content to grow the sites popularity and income. Sometimes you don't even have to hire writers they will do some articles for free to get their name out there.

[Cutter]

If you are just pumping out Adsense sites and getting all your traffic from search engines, there is a good chance your employees will be able to leave and just copy you. If you have a portfolio of well developed sites with multiple traffic streams there is nothing they can do.

The truth is, anyone with half a brain can look at a website and copy the idea. Building a community around it, getting links, getting traffic, that takes time. Just because you can create a website design, use Photoshop, and write content doesn't mean you can create the next Sitepoint.

Personally, I'm actually beginning to steer away from the idea of being well diversified in the variety of sites I have and instead focusing on building solid sites with well diversified traffic streams.

Look, you don't even need any employees to bring in $1 million plus a year in this biz. They are nice to have to do the repetative stuff, but they hardly are a requirement.

[mini]

Hi Guys,

THanks for the replies. I understand that its not that easy. But all I really need are content writers, good ones. I alrady have ones that I currently use, basically I will hire them full time. So 2 writeres and a designer/graphic/admin person.

Id still be putting everything together, and doing the marketing myself. So no 1 person will build the entire site.

Im thinking

- 2-3 sites per week, so approx 100 sites a year.
- Each site will earn average $5 a day

Do these figures look do able?

[Cutter]

How many $5 a day sites have you been able to make so far?

[Todd W]

Sounds good on paper but in the real world you will see differently.
You might be able to crank out a few.

[mini]

Thats what I want to know I guess. In the real word, what can go wrong?

ToddW, how would I see tings differently in the real world?

Thanks guys

[Todd W]

Thats what I want to know I guess. In the real word, what can go wrong?

ToddW, how would I see tings differently in the real world?

Thanks guys

Do you know enough different topics to write about that could earn $5 a day after simply spending 2-3.5 days on each site?

Do you have enough PR to spread it around 2-3 new sites a week to make them get popular?

Do you have enough motivation to make mediocre sites?

Do you have the know-how to do all aspects of your website?
(Host, Design, Program, Content Write, Promote)

Do you know for sure you can make a site in 2-3 days? It always seems like you can in the start, and you may be able to at the start.

[James]

Was it Mark that was doing the Site-A-Day thing? Or who?
But regardless, they seemed to stop thinking it was as easy as it sounded at the start pretty quickly.

[moonshield]

Isn't Mark still doing it?

[Cutter]

I'm assuming you have never made any $5 a day sites then. If you are going to jump into it all at once, then you need to be prepared to lose money for a while until you figure out what works and what doesn't. If you can lose the money, go for it, because once you learn what you need to do, you'll earn it back. Making money from Adsense is not rocket science.

[mini]

I think the thing I worry most more than anything else is workers getting bored. We have a couple of PR 7 sites, handful of PR 6 and a tonne of PR 5s. So getting pages indexed and ranked well isn;t a problem.

ToddW, I understand what you mean. Making the first 50 or so $5 a day sites may be easy, but what then after that? downward spiral? I guess thats one thing I have to look out for.

However I do think I am a great motivator and I do have a great team behind this project. It may just work! Love to hear of any more comments from people

[chromate]

I think you're pushing the boat out too far. You'll probably end up with 100 mini sites that'll be too weak to generate your $5 a day consistently. You would be better off going for say 30 sites, that will be more likely to stand the test of time, making $10 a day. After that, you can ramp up your production exponentially.

I think what I'm saying is, start small and grow fast rather than starting too big and falling at the first hurdle.

[Cutter]

I think a more realistic initial "goal" is to create 100 sites that make $1 a day, then out of that focus on the 10 sites that make the most (you'll probably get a couple that make $10 a day or more.) You'll have to watch your SE traffic. MSN is known to give well-optimized brand new sites good rankings -- but there is no guarantee those rankings will last. If a site is making $100 a day from two keywords on MSN, don't expect it to continue the next month, the next week, or even the next day.