Success Stories

I want to build a success stories section of this site, and would like atleast 5 to start out with, but 3 or 4 would be enough. Obviously you can have signature links in your success story. So I'd like to ask some of you to post your success stories here and then when there is enough I'll turn them into articles for a new section on the site. I'll go first.

I first started publishing personal websites way back in 1993 while in highschool. They were a typical teenager's homepage type sites, with no commercial potential whatsoever. They did however introduce me to the technical aspects of publishing websites and that experience would be invaluable in my future endeavors.

In 1998 I made my first for-profit website. I knew absolutely nothing about publishing for profit, only that many people were earning $20 CPM from companies like Burst!Media for banner ads on their websites. My site was absolutely stupid, it was a midi jukebox site, and it was destined to fail from the beginning. I didn't know it at the time but I was trying to promote it through viral marketing. The goal was for people to put my code on their site to provide background music. I cannot believe I once encouraged background music on a site but in any case the site never earned more than a few bucks and eventually I just shut it down.

When I went to college I majored in genetics and was lucky enough to get a job at a genetic engineering lab on campus. The lab had a genetic database of a plant, Arabidopsis Thaliana, and needed that database put online. I got the amazing opportunity to perform real scientific research in exchange for building their website for them. I was also at the time doing web development for a few local companies. With the two jobs at the same time it was easy to decide which one I preferred, and obviously I chose web development. I would eventually drop out of college to pursue building my own business, a decision I do not regret.

In 1999 I made my second site, a site about Shakespeare called Everything Shakespeare. It did well, I remember when I first got 500 page views in a single day. However I soon reached a traffic ceiling, no matter what I did nothing seemed to help the site get more traffic. I soon came to the conclusion that to increase traffic I should make more sites. So I made a site about Homer's Odyssey. Ones on Charles Dickens, Moby Dick, The Aeneid, Jules Verne, and others soon followed. Each site had a similar navigation structure but a different design and they were not connected to each other.
Then in January of 2000 I relaunched the sites as sections of one site, The Literature Network I called it.

I continued working on this site and adding content. I thought that if I was receiving 10 or 100 page views per page of content then if I simply added more content I'd be getting 10 or 100 additional page views per page of content I added. The first month it launched it got 30,000 page views, then 60k, then 90k, then 120k, then the growth slowed down a little. All in all the site has pretty much doubled in traffic and ad revenue each year it has been open. This year I am expecting 15 million page views per month.

Still, this was in bubble-bursting time and ad rates were in the toilet. I was only earning a few hundred dollars a month from my site.

In May of 2001 I built my second site, Wilderness Survival, and it rapidly became very popular. I had cut my teeth so to speak on promoting my literature site and so with my survival site I managed to get to the top of the search engines in only a matter of months. In August of that year the site was mentioned in US News & World Report, traffic really took off and I also got some nice targetted campaigns from Burst!Media for the site. By that October I was earning $800 a month, 12 months later that number would have increased 10 fold.

In January of 2002 I got a targetted campaign from Burst for my Literature site, this instantly brought me up to $2,000 a month in revenue, and from that point on revenue steadily increased.

Towards the end of the summer of 2002 I had noticed that while I had many links to Amazon.com to "buy the book" from my literature site my Amazon affiliate revenue was relatively low. At that time Amazon frequenly offered $5 off coupons and other such deals and I thought that if my visitors knew about the coupons they'd be more apt to buy, so I made a coupon page on my literature site. It worked extremely well, mostly because I got to a #1 listing for "Amazon Coupon" in Google with that page. After seeing the revenue it brought it I was inspired to make a whole coupon site, and I did. I started small though, with only 4 main merchants, though I would eventually add nearly 50. That fall I was selected for a private program through one of the affiliate programs. This program basically meant my revenue was going to increase drastically. So that October I made in excess of $8,000, and it only grew from there. From October of 2002 through November of 2003 I was #1 on Google for every coupon related search I targetted. Then Google infamous "Florida" update occured and I lost most of my rankings. I'm still working on getting them back.

In the meantime I had made more content sites, and then in May of 2003 my first ecommerce site. When my coupon site failed my ecommerce site filled in the gap, grossing $130k in December of 2003.

I now have nearly 100 websites, most of which are fully automated, My income continues to grow each year. I've diversified enough that if a site does take a hit the growth of other sites makes up for it. I plan to launch another ecommerce site soon, and also two more content sites, and then I plan to focus on only improving my current sites, rather than making more.

Interesting indeedy. Could be a little more inspiring if you included your age along the time line, eg at 26 now I was earning $XXX

Well done though

I believe Chris is in his mid-to-late 20s now, but I'm sure he'll correct me if I'm wrong :)

It's a great story, and definitely shows it takes hard work and shrewd thinking.

Chris, if you don't mind me asking, what growth did you see from Dec 2003 to Dec 2004?

Mostly ad network growth, also my ecommerce site was launched in may 2003 and didn't get good rankings until late september so 2004 ecommerce revenue was about 3x higher than 2003, but that wasn't growth, rather it was just the result of the site being operating with good rankings for 12 months instead of 4.

how old are you chris? because I agree with piniyini age's would enrich your article furthermore

Chris, I do not know how much response you will get to this topic. I do not know how many 'successful' website publishers there are in here. 'successful' is a hard word to use, since what do you qualify as successful? I make about $1400 per month, and I do not think that I am successful. Even if I made double, my view wouldn't change...

The amount doesn't matter as much, I do think though that you'd need to be a fully engaged website publisher (meaning, this isn't a weekend hobby, this is your main source of income and what you consider to be your job).

In anycase there are quite a few people who fit that bill I know, it just depends on if they're shy or not.

Someone in a sitepoint thread said he was 36 :p

Someone said I was 36?

you're 36?

http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/show...6&postcount=21

Well, if we do some math, you will notice that he said he was in highschool in 1993. This means that he was no older than 18 or maybe 19 twelve years ago since I am assuming he wasn't held back 4 years or anything like that. So, 18+12=30, my guess is he is around 30 maybe even less since most people start high school when they are 15 or so. My guess is MarkB is right, and everybody is putting too much thought into Chris' age. Oh and to stay on topic, I would like a success stories section, I get a lot of encouragement from reading success stories.

5 figures a month and not even 18? Not bad at all. I am 14 now, guess it's time to start playing AlienAA ;).

And Kate: good age to be.

My story's that of a poor freeloader that's too damn lazy to learn PHP or do much of anything to cause some good profit; so, since it's not quite a success story, I don't think I'll say it. But hey: if I do break into earning some good money, I'll definitely write in with my story, Chris.

Andy, is that US or AU$? If it's US, you must be laughing! :) (Although the exchange rate isn't as good as it once was, is it?)