How come?

[StuartDykes]

Chris, how come everything you do seems to turn to gold? Im aware you must have had several misses in the past, but in all the links to your sites at the bottom of your posts, all the sites seem well designed and planned out, all your forums are buzzing. Would you put this down to experience, hard work or what?
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mercedes info (http://www.mercedes-wiki.com/)

[Chris]

Heh. buzzing forums, not so much.

I like to think I'm smart and a genius of course, but honestly, not everything has fully worked out. I have had multiple big successes. (5 figure month earners). My literature site, my coupon site, my sword business. But... my coupon site only really had 11 months of those earnings before Google killed it, so that is a failure of sorts. Other sites never took off (probably because of lack of work on them) and earn only small amounts (still profitable just because expenses are nil). Then a few sites were spectacular failures, meaning I invested money into their launch, or promotion, and got almost no ROI.

Over the past year to 18 months my focus has been on redoing existing sites with new designs/overhauls/features, so that is likely why many of them look good. Not all of them are done, I still have sites I made in a weekend that haven't been worked on since that weekend.

My approach has always been very much like planting seeds and see what grows. Experiment with a bunch of small simple sites, see what works, and then once it starts working expand on it. Well, I know I haven't done things like that much lately, but that is how I started. I didn't know what would work, it is only through experience that I now do.

I also have the luxury of being successful already, so my new sites do not need to be successful. I can have a site such as this site, or my gardening sites, that don't make much money, and thats fine, they are long term projects for me.

I can also more easily afford to spend say $200 on a logo for a new site, even if that site isn't going to make much money. Someone starting out might balk at $200 for a logo, $160 for vbulletin, $400 for a little coding, just to start a little content site, I don't. (I consider that pretty cheap).

It probably also helps that I'm quite the renaissance man. I'm very intellectually curious about things, and I have a varied range of personal interests. I'm sure most people aren't quite so interested in such a variety of topics as I am, and my personal interest helps me in creating and managing these sites.

Even some sites which I started and I had no interest in it, I end up developing interest through running/building the site.

But thanks for the compliment.

[supa3sixty]

Id put it down to experience myself ive been in the biz for a while and im still learning :)

[Blue Cat Buxton]

I like the seed analogy, planting and see what grows.

The thing with this business is that is can be cheap and quick to set up a site, once you are started and have hosting etc, a new site can cost as little as a domain and your time, and you are investing the latter for a future pay off.