5 Bucks a Day

When I first set up Earn1KaDay.com which is a membership site which helps Internet marketers increase their income, the first business model I concentrated on was what I call Mini Money Sites.

With the MMS approach, we build small clusters of pages for a specific small niche using special software and a framework which the members have access to, and typically set up a site to drive traffic to eBay using affiliate links.

There’s more to it than that, but it’s an easy thing to do once you have the tools and go through the videos inside the site.

When I was getting ready to shoot the videos, I asked the members for a suggested niche, and I suggested 8 or 10 possibilities. The one that was voted on was a guitars site.

As part of shooting the videos, I actually did all the steps that I teach, and even though the site didn’t do all that well in the beginning I’ve been tweaking it a little here and there to see if I could get it to make some money.

Normally on a site like this if it loses money in the beginning I just ditch it, but I had some pride invested in this one because it was so public, so I kept it running.

The software we provide uses cookie cutter methods to build the site, but I tell my students to do things like replace generic parts with unique articles, maybe add a blog to drive traffic, that kind of thing, to make it a real site. Nothing that will take a lot of time, and in fact I suggest they spend very little time on a site like this until it proves to be a “winner”.

One thing I did with the sample guitars site was have some articles written and plugged them in. Time to do this for me was maybe half an hour since I had them written for me, at a cost of around $100.

Last night I took a closer look at the profits from this site, and so far in August, through the 18th, I had a profit of $46.00. Not a lot, but so far I’ve gotten most of my traffic by paying for it with AdWords. So, for an investment of $59, I made a profit of $46, even Warren Buffett would be impressed.

What I could do now is start doing things to get free traffic. I could use some of the articles I bought and submit them to article directories. I could, like I mentioned above, set up a blog and write some content that way, and using the standard built in pinging ability of WordPress, get some traffic that way. I could put up a lens or two on Squidoo about the topic.

All these things would take time, but would have long term positive effects for my site.

The other thing I could do soon, if the income continues, is sell the site. Actually it’s a bit early to do that, because the income has been increasing. In July I only made $30, so far in August I’ve made $46 in 18 days, so maybe we’ll double July’s profits. Ideally I’d like to get the profits up to around $150 for the month.

At that point I would have a decision to make. Should I invest more time to keep the profits increasing? Or should I sell the site?

Selling sites, or “site flipping” is another business model we talk about at Earn1KaDay.com Typically an income producing site will sell for 6 to 10 times monthly income, but if the income is increasing at a good clip, you’ll get on the high end or more for it.

So, if income goes from $30 to $60 to $100 to $150 to $200 over the period of 5 months, you have a pretty attractive site to offer. That kind of history could easily get you $2000 to $2500 cash.

Would you sell a site with increasing income like that? Many would. It took me a couple hours to build the site. And an hour or so to add the articles that I bought, I did have the $100 investment in the articles. And to get it from where it is now to where it’s earning $200 a month might take a few more hours of submitting articles to directories, and maybe a few more hours to set up a blog and write some posts.

But that’s all it would take. Let’s say at the most I would spend 20 hours in developing and tweaking the site. With that, an investment of $100 turns into maybe $2000.

If you can build 2 or 3 sites like this a week, you can start building a nice asset base. I mentioned yesterday that one of our members built 20 of these sites in a week. That was just the initial building, he would need to spend more time tweaking them if his goal was to resell, but that shows what can be done.

If you know how, and if you have the tools, and if you have the motivation.

It is so easy to make money through Internet marketing, it can make your head spin.

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