Like everybody else, I read The Four Hour Work Week when it came out, because I had a 40 hour per week day job and I wanted my freedom back.
To be honest, what I have now is more like a zero hour work week, or at least it could be if I choose to make it that way. This is because I sold my successful authority website for $200,000 and I also tend towards practicing extreme frugality. The combination of those two things allow me to live off of investment income if I am willing to seriously curb my spending habits (which are minimal to begin with).
However, I’d like to point out that before achieving this massive level of success that allowed me to approach a zero hour work week, I did have a website that was earning relatively passive income that allowed me to quit my day job. Even so, I did continue to work on the website quite a bit until I sold it off.
Managing comments, putting up the occasional post, and responding to reader inquiries really did amount to about 4 hours per week. Because that website was earning me about $2,000 per month, this was enough for me to quit my day job and live entirely off of my web earnings.
My journey towards a four hour work week did not make a lot of sense when you look at it in retrospect. I built my success with the website while I was working a full time day job, and then when I finally was able to quit my day job, I really let up quite a bit and stopped creating so much new content. Shortly thereafter I got a large offer and sold the website.
So what exactly did I do to achieve this freedom from my day job? Let’s take a closer look:
* Focused my internet marketing activities until I was only working on one website exclusively.
* Pushed hard to promote the website with a variety of link bait and guest posts.
* Added a forum in order to build a community around the website.
* Systematically targeted keywords with new articles and then promoted them with decent backlinks.
* Created several resource articles that were 3,000 to 6,000 words in length.
* Experimented with various content formats to enrich user experience.
* Networked with webmasters in similar niches to seek out promotional opportunities.
* Produced content with a level of quality that others in the niche were charging for behind pay walls.
* Published over one million words with over 1,500 articles.
Focused my internet marketing activities until I was only working on one website exclusively
In the early days of my internet marketing career, I was thrashing about quite a bit, trying to do anything I could to crack the code to making money online.
Every new idea I read about was part of this “shiny object syndrome.” For example, why not make a bunch of small websites that each target a potentially lucrative keyword?
And to top it all off, everyone and their traditional wisdom was preaching on about diversification.
This is an idea that has to be smashed.
It sounds so smart and easy to preach on about diversification. I mean, how stupid could a person be to put all of their eggs in one basket, only to wake up one day and have all of their earnings go up in smoke? Google can change the game on a whim, and if you only have one website, you might get left out in the cold after one of their algorithm updates, right?
Wrong. Diversification is a bad idea, in my opinion. The reason is because it doesn’t work.
Do you have a team of writers that produce 50,000 words per day of original content for you? No? Then why do you think you can create 5 or more successful websites?
The landscape is increasingly more competitive. If you want to succeed you need concentration, not diversification.
If you want to spread yourself too thin and basically go nowhere and not make any real money, then by all means, diversify.
I think this is a terrible idea and every time I tried to implement it, nothing worked. Nothing grew. It all went stagnant.
Instead, follow my advice here, and make ONE website. And make it amazingly good.
My flagship website had over one million words of original content and was darn high quality. I did not have any problems sleeping at night because Google just kept throwing more and more traffic at me over time.
Focus on one website. Just one. Ultra high quality. Slow and steady wins the race.
If you have 5 websites and you are trying to grow them all at the same time you will be very discouraged with the agonizingly slow rate of growth.
Put all of your effort into one website, and you will see momentum and growth that actually gets your excited to produce more and more.
Pushed hard to promote the website with a variety of link bait and guest posts
Link building is important of course, but you can ignore it if you are willing to wait about 2 to 4 years for things to take off.
Most people are not willing to wait that long, and so they are going to want to build some links as well. I struggled with the problem of link juice for a long time, and quite frankly, it never gets any easier. You simply have to claw your way to the top of the mountain using whatever means you can. For me, this meant:
1) Limiting my promotional efforts to one website. That way, every link created is worthwhile, because you never give up on your website. (When you have multiple websites, typically some fall by the wayside eventually, thus built links are wasted).
2) Attempting to network with others in my niche and guest post on their sites. For me, I did this about 5 times, and these 5 links were enough to carry my site up quite high in the search results for many keywords. This is how to build authority for your domain. Get real links. Yes, it is tough to pitch yourself to other bloggers. Yes, you will get rejected a lot. But you still have to do it.
3) Created custom infographics and other unique content as a way to draw in real organic links.
4) Used some “manufactured” link building tools, but only those of the absolute highest quality I could find. Basically you are trading a piece of original content for a link with such systems. Most are very low quality. My site recommendations all lead to the highest quality network like this that I could find.
My theory is that you need two types of links for your website: one are high quality guest post links from relevant sites, these are for domain authority and building trust with Google.
The other type of links are lower quality and not from relevant sites, but those can have more specific anchor text (not branded) and help your individual posts to move up in the rankings.
If you don’t have any high quality authority links then the cheaper type of link will not help much.
People always ask when? How much? Etc.
My answer to the link building timeline is to start building manufactured and cheap links slowly and right away. Keep doing them and slowly increase them as your site revenue increases. I outsource this type of linkbuilding through services such as thecontentauthority.com
I would also urge people to get at least one or two high quality links as soon as possible. They will help Google to start trusting your site.
Added a forum in order to build a community around the website
Adding a nice forum using vBulletin software seemed like a liability at first. The software cost about 150 bucks (if I remember right) and it required better hosting in order to deal with the extra database and all of the mySql connections or whatever. Plus, the forum could not be monetized because they tend to convert horribly and it is just not worth it to bother your core users with ads on a discussion forum.
So why add the forum at all?
The reasons:
1) Increase site stickiness. Google sees the same people coming back to the site over and over again and so this is a validation metric for them. It shows trust and viability of the site.
2) Increase site content for free. The users on my forum were posting anywhere from about a thousand to ten thousand words of new, original content each day. Google sees this content and eats it right up. Remember that Google is a content eating machine, it loves big websites and it loves growing websites.
3) Build a fan base and loyal user community around your ideas. Having fans who are involved with the site is a great way to increase word of mouth advertising and build natural links. People tell others about a forum that they find useful.
After I saw people start to form little discussion groups on their own in my comment threads on the blog itself, I decided to add the forum. This was excellent timing and the forum took off right away.
Add a forum too soon and you will probably be disappointed from a lack of traffic. Wait until the time is ripe, when you see a community slowly taking shape.
Systematically targeted keywords with new articles and then promoted them with backlinks
At one point my website started to show signs of life, and I eventually grew it to about $300 dollars per month in income. Getting to this point took considerable time and a decent amount of effort.
I wanted to get to “the next level” with my website. What was I to do?
Someone told me what the answer was. I was to take a list of keywords about my website topic, make sure I was not already ranking for those words, and then create new articles for each of those keywords. Then, I was to point new backlinks at each new article.
And, they suggested that I do this quickly, all at once, so that I could see the results happen for myself.
I took this suggestion and came up with a list of 40 new keywords. My goal was to write 40 articles as quickly as possible, and then build links to them.
I ended up writing the articles much quicker than I would have imagined. I think I did it in less than 2 weeks actually. Then I started building links to the articles, pointing one link at each new URL on my website.
The results were astonishing. Within a month of completing this exercise my revenue had doubled to $600/month.
It was then that I saw how important it was to:
1) Target keywords with each article.
2) Publish high volumes of articles.
3) Point links at new content to help it rank quickly.
From this exercise flows the entire philosophy of an authority website: get a keyword list, then start creating high quality articles, every single day. Shoot for high volume too. Publishing 3 quality articles per day on-site will get you to your income goal much quicker than writing, say, 2 or 3 articles per week. Volume matters. A lot.
Created several resource articles that were 3,000 to 6,000 words in length
Don’t just crank out 400 word articles. If you do that a thousand times you will probably rank well until Google figures out you are basically a content farm and that you are just gunning for maximum long tail traffic.
Instead, keep mixing it up, and make sure you pump out some lengthy stuff every once in a while. I found the sweet spot for my flagship site to be about 2,000 words or so for a mega-post. Of course, most of my articles were actually between 400 and 1,000 words in length, but I had about 50 articles or so that were 1,000 plus. Several of those were over 3,000 words, and many were over 5,000 words in length.
Also, all of my really long posts were also bundled as an eBook that visitors could download for free. I tired charging for eBooks here and there but it never panned out. I found the best route in the end was to put them up free as a form of link bait.
In my opinion, you should have at least 10 to 20 “pillar articles” in your sidebar that are all incredibly high quality content. The kicker is that they have to have some original ideas to them and also be insanely useful to your site visitors. If you can build this list of “linkbait worthy articles” up over time then it will be critical for the success of your website.
A lot of bloggers fall into “shiny object syndrome” and fill up their sidebars with a bunch of junk. The stuff just accumulates over time and we don’t even realize how clutter things can become. At some point, delete your entire sidebar, and simply replace the whole thing with a list of your best resource articles. Each should be link-worthy content. If you do not have this, you need to create it….one article at a time.
Experimented with various content formats to enrich user experience
Have you ever been to a website that had nothing but text? Walls and walls of text, with nothing to click on, no pictures, no videos, no eBooks to download, nothing but text?
It’s boring. It’s not very memorable, nor is it very interactive. In order to create a better user experience, my opinion is that you should experiment with different types of content.
If you use the one-website approach then you have no excuse not to experiment with new forms of content delivery. You have the time and you just have one topic.
So, make a video. You do not need professional equipment to do this. Even a cell phone will get your message across.
Or make an infographic. How? Go look at some other infographics, then apply the ideas to your niche. Draw it on an index card and take a photo of it if you have to. Visual information is interesting. Pair it up with some text and you can’t go wrong. Your visitors will be delighted by the visual variety, even if it is not perfect.
Do something unique, something different. You can worry about perfect later. Step outside of your box and have your friend interview you on video about your topic, then post it.
Look at a website like Tim Ferriss has (the originator of the 4 hour work week).
He has videos on the site. Lots of them. And he has pictures on the site. Lots of those too. He puts personality into the site and has posts that are over 5,000 words in length, and also posts that have no text at all and are just a video. There is also a forum. In short, it is a REAL website. He is not just gaming the search engines to try and get traffic, but he actually cares about his readers and the message that he gets out to them.
Part of making a “real” website means exploring various content models. Sure, you want to focus on text for 90 percent of your stuff. But make sure you mix it up too.
Networked with webmasters in similar niches to seek out promotional opportunities
My flagship site was in a very narrow niche when it came to building links for it. So I ended up branching out to an adjacent niche in order to get guest posting links.
The way that I did this was to slowly build a relationship with the website owner before pitching the idea of a guest post.
This was accomplished most easily through leaving huge, value-added comments on their website.
I would watch for a new post from them, and then be the first to leave a really meaningful and helpful comment. I would do this more than once until they noticed me and started a conversation with me. I was not posting fluff for comments, but actually decent ideas that led to a full conversation. This is how I built up relationships that led to guest posts for my website.
Getting “real” link juice from these quality guest posts is what gave my flagship site the trust that it needed to rank well with Google.
Produced content with a level of quality that others in the niche were charging for behind pay walls
At one point I had made friends with a webmaster in my niche, and he let me get a full peek at his entire business model. He had a pay wall on his website and behind that pay wall he had a “full course” of ultra premium content.
His content was not cheap. He charged several hundred dollars for it, and so I studied it with great interest.
When I was done viewing all of the content, I said to myself:
“I could do better than that.”
The truth was that my fellow webmaster was not making a lot of sales, and I saw an opportunity. I would use my own ideas, put my own content together, and put out an equivalent course that was at least twice as useful and helpful to people.
So I did exactly that over the next few months. I created over 10 free eBooks that deeply explored my topic, and I made several videos as well.
And here is the kicker: I gave it all away for free.
Why would I do that, when I could have clearly charged at least a small fee for the content?
Links. I wanted the link juice. Create amazingly good content, and give it away for free.
Scope out what level of content your competitors are charging money for, and then beat it for free. This is the best way to gain long term, organic links.
Published over one million words with over 1,500 articles
If I could go back in time and tell my younger self who was just starting out in internet marketing one thing, it would be this:
“Publish at least 3 articles on your website every single day.”
My articles tend to run about 1,000 words or so (average) so that would equal out to one million words per year in new content.
Do you know what one million words of quality content is actually worth online? It’s worth quite a bit. If you can find the discipline to pump out 3 quality articles every single day, then your website can be hugely successful.
My internet marketing career did not proceed nearly that smoothly. I would go for months at a time without publishing a thing. Then I had days where I cranked out 25 articles without leaving the computer chair for 10 hours straight. This is madness. Writing 3 articles per day would have been so much easier, if only I had known.
If you want to make big money with an authority website, my greatest advice to you is this:
Publish multiple articles daily.
That’s it. That is the whole secret. If you can do that, and sustain it for years, you will create a full time income for yourself, and eventually achieve “the four hour work week.”
Me, I had my four hour week locked down with income from my flagship website. Then I sold it for a big chunk and mastered the zero hour work week as well.
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