When I first started out trying to make money online I listened to a guy who told me that I would be better off trying to build a whole bunch of websites that earned $1-$2 per day. If I had 100 of these types of sites then I would earn somewhere between $100-$200 per day seven days a week. It sounded like an awesome business model and it sounded really easy. It should be easy to build a site that earns $1 or more per day, right?
So I followed that business model for a few years constantly trying to build more sites that were at least a little bit profitable. That business model sucked. I was making money with it, but not very much. Most of the sites I was building weren't earning $1 per day. They barely earned enough to cover the hosting and domain renewal costs. I tried a whole bunch of different affiliate programs including Google Adsense, Clickbank, Ebay, Amazon and Commission Junction. I wasn't able to find anything that worked well for me. I figured that if I kept at it long enough and kept persisting that one day I would reach a breakthrough.
Well that did actually happen, but it happened by accident. This whole time I was working on my internet marketing as a part time business while I kept my regular day job. During my regular day job I was spending a lot of time answering certain questions for customers all the time. A new customer would come in and ask me the same questions that other people were asking me. Each time I explained the answers to a customer it would take me anywhere from five minutes up to a half an hour depending on how quickly the person could grasp what I was trying to explain to him/her.
So, I got this idea that I could build a website that explained the answers to all of those questions that people were asking me again and again. Then I could simply tell all these customers to go to that website for the most detailed explanations of what they were asking. And I told them that after they read what was on the website, they could call me for an even more detailed explanation or any clarification of what the site said.
So the website I built was an extremely informative website that was created to answer a handful of very specific questions that people wanted the answers to. This little site of mine was a very authoritative source of information because I knew the topic as well as any expert in my field. My site was a small "Authority Site" that I build using Wordpress. It was a small "authority blog". And all of the initial traffic for the site was generated by me telling a person about the site face to face. I didn't market the site online at all. Not one bit.
After a few months I decided to throw advertising on the site just to help pay for the hosting fees. So I threw some Google Adsense ads on the site, not expecting to make very much money at all. What happened next was an extremely pleasant surprise.
The next month my Adsense earnings had jumped by almost $1000 for that month. When I went and looked into what was going on I realized that the extra money had all come from this authority site that I built. I was literally shocked! I couldn't believe that this tiny little site was making more money than all those other crappy niche sites I had combined. So I started analyzing what the heck was going on.
I discovered that one page on my little authority site was getting about 1,000 unique visitors per day. And those people were clicking on my ads. The people who visited my site could tell that I was truly an expert in that field. So they loved getting the information I was giving away for free. Those people were sharing the pages on that website by the thousands in social media. Each page literally had thousands of natural social media shares in places like Facebook, Twitter, Google bookmarks, Yahoo bookmarks, Diggs, Stumble Upons, emails from person to person and a whole bunch of social media sites I had never even heard of before.
That was when I realized my previous business model of building a whole bunch of crappy little niche sites that were supposed to earn a little bit of money each was a really bad business model. I completely changed my business model to focus on only building websites that were as useful as I could make them based on my ability to do that. And that completely changed the direction of my internet marketing and online business pursuits.
Now I make more money with each website with a lot less effort and I actually have fun doing it. Building authority blogs is easier, more fun and more profitable than I ever thought it would be.
That is a 100% honest and true story. If you want more details on it, come visit my website and I will give you my business model for free.
That is what made my internet marketing/online business successful. Before that, my online business pursuits were more like torture.
Hope that helps. (Sorry it is such a long story. I don't know how to shorten it while still explaining it in enough detail.)
