How I Created a Successful Online Business and Sold it Off for $200,000 Dollars

I recently experienced great success with my online business, selling off my flagship website for $200,000 dollars. See below my victorious money shot that I snapped of my online banking balance.

So I imagine that you would like to know what the secret formula is in order to duplicate my success.

I will tell you what it is.

And, I will show you what it is.

Those are two different things and so any smart internet marketer will realize that they have to look at two separate sources of information:

1) What the “guru” is telling them to do to make money.

2) What the “guru” is actually doing to make money himself.

My goal with this article (and with this website) is to bring those two things into perfect alignment. I am going to tell you what to do in order to make money online, but I am also going to be showing you what to do.

So by all means, read this very thorough guide that explains my business building process. Watch this website, how it evolves, and what I do with it. This will teach you how to make money online. Likewise, it will demonstrate why you may not be making any money online yet as well.

Building a $200,000 dollar website

Let me break this down into what I actually did to produce my successful business:

* Started a branded website in a lucrative topic.
* Lost focus, pursued other website ideas, then refocused on a single website.
* Built both low and high quality links.
* Formed a keyword list and started pumping out content.
* Created many forms of content: infographics, videos, eBooks.
* Formed original ideas about the topic that offered insight and help to the searcher.
* Built a list of RSS and email subscribers.
* Created ultra high quality content: resource posts, case studies, and interviews.
* Encouraged comments and participated in discussions.
* Added a user forum that built a community around my brand and ideas.
* Let the site age for 4+ years and took a long term view of success.
* Monetized the website and enjoyed a solid income and then sold it off for a massive windfall.

Started a branded website in a lucrative topic

My first online experience was a complete failure and one of the reasons for that was that I started a new domain that was essentially:

product-I-am-trying-to-sell.com

This was awful and as you can imagine my results were terrible.

Later on I got a piece of advice online and that was to come up with a catchy brand name for my domain. In doing so my URL did not have my main keyword in it at all. You will also note that the website that you are currently reading is not a keyword focused URL. “Make money with no work” is not something that gets typed into Google very often, and even when it happens, Google discards half the words anyway.

So rather than “make-money-on-the-web.com” you would come up with something more brand-worthy like “internetProfiteer.com” or “marketingMagician.com” or something like that. Go for branding rather than keyword-stuffed generic domains.

Do not start a website about knitting. Why not? There is no money in it. If you look at the Adwords data and how many advertisers there are for knitting keywords, you will see that there is no money to be made in that niche. Even if you are a genuine expert, it would be tough to turn a knitting website into a full time income stream. You might be able to find a product angle by selling and reviewing sewing machines, but it is still not a very profitable niche.

Other niches have much more profit potential because the topic is associated with products or services that generate lucrative sales. For example, if you ranked high for “payday loans” then you would be quite well off (hint: the competition is too high, don’t even try it!). But hopefully you get the idea. Some topics have more profit potential than others and you need to consider this when you start your website.

Do a simple Google search for your topic keywords and see how many ads come up next to the search results. I would not start a website unless you see “full ads” from Google. If you want to see full ads do a search for “credit cards.” If you want to see minimal ads then do a Google search for “doily.” Notice how there are ZERO ads showing on the “doily” search and there are oodles and oodles of ads for the “credit card” search. This is the quickest and easiest way to gauge the profit potential of your topic.

Keep in mind what the numbers look like for a typical purchase within your niche. Are people spending a few dollars typically? Or are they spending 50 dollars? Several hundred?

Are people making a one time purchase, or is there potential for a recurring fee of some sort? (Like with paid membership websites, cellular services, etc.)

Are people in your niche just casually looking, or are they desperate for a solution to their problem? (Weight loss, acne products, debt relief, etc.)

Finally, you might consider the idea of competition. I already advised you to stay away from “payday loans” and if you tried to go after “credit cards” then you are just plain nuts. I don’t care how many articles you write or how much good information you claim to have about such things, you are just not going to rank for such terms without a massive link building campaign that would cost hundreds of dollars per day.

The ideal setup is low competition but with massive profit potential. Obviously the market is efficient so this is going to be extremely rare. What you can do instead is to avoid the ultra competitive stuff while making sure there are plenty of ads when you search Google for you topic.

Avoid these topics as a general rule:

* Making money online
* Sex or porn
* Forex
* Poker, gambling
* Credit, loans, insurance
* Web hosting
* Weight loss
* Acne
* Cosmetic surgery

Summary: Go with a branded domain, and make sure your topic has real profit potential without being ultra competitive.

So now then, after I had chosen my profitable topic and bought a branded domain name, what did I do next?

I promptly:

Lost focus, pursued other website ideas, then refocused on a single website

This happens to just about everybody in internet marketing.

It’s known as “shiny object syndrome.” You jump from one money making idea to the next without really giving anything a chance.

I fell victim to this myself, and have started about 15 websites or so over the last 4 years that went nowhere.

Each one had a unique purpose, and was supposedly going to make more money than my original efforts. None of it really panned out, because I did not give any of it my full attention.

When my original website started to show signs of life, I returned to it and refocused my efforts on it.

I want to save you all that hassle by telling you how to do it right the first time.

Pick a topic, buy a branded URL, and never look back. Do not get distracted. You will be tempted. You will read about how someone started this new website with a unique business model and they suddenly made thousands of dollars overnight. Meanwhile, your future “authority site” is not making a single penny and you feel stupid for plodding along.

Do not feel stupid. Keep plodding along. I had many, many days and even months where I did not make any money with my flagship website, but I kept plodding along, and eventually sold it for big money.

One website.

Just one. Do not get distracted. People will tell you to diversify, that you are stupid for putting all of your eggs in one basket. Tell them to jump in a lake. Diversification weakens your efforts by spreading it too thin. Focus all of your efforts and concentrate them on a single website.

So what if you have ten websites and they all make a dollar or two each day? Whoopy dink, you are diversified! I had one website and it was making between $60 and $110 per day. That is the power of real concentration.

There is one more major reason that you want to focus on one website:

Link juice.

How many websites do you want to build links for?

I can promise you that one is enough. One website is plenty when it comes to link building.

Why? Because building links is hard work. It is horribly difficult. If you have to do it for more than one website, then you are spreading yourself way too thin. Link building for two sites instead of one is a major setback.

Summary: Build just one website and never get distracted by starting side projects. Put all of your effort into one site and ignore the herd mentality that will harp on you about diversification. The herd does not sell websites for $200,000 and they believe they are smart by being diversified. I ignored this “warning” and the power of focus and concentration allowed me to create something remarkable.

Built all sorts of links, both low and high quality

As mentioned above, building links is difficult. That is why I advocate the one-website approach to internet marketing. You only want to build links to your site once. Having to do it over and over again, or on ten separate domains, would be an absolute nightmare.

The search engines look at the backlink profile of your website when they are deciding how much they want to trust it, and ultimately, how much traffic they are going to send to you on a daily basis. Not only do you want to have lots of links, you want a few really good links as well.

The best links that you can get are from the websites that show up in the top slots of Google’s results when you search for your main keyword. You can not get a stronger link than from one of these websites.

There are ways to go about trying to get such links, and they focus on doing two things:

1) Building relationships with people.
2) Creating amazingly good content.

I recommend that you do both of these things. Build a relationship with the top sites in your niche, without necessarily asking for a link right off the bat (in fact, don’t).

Then focus on making incredibly good and remarkable content. Put it on your own site. Then make some more, offering it to other site owners as a guest post. Again, do not be too forward or greedy and ask for the link outright. Instead, focus on building the relationship.

By doing this you will get strong links. Do it successfully just a handful of times and you may be done with your link building forever.

You have to do this. You have to get some good, hard-to-get links in order to be successful in this business.

Once you have done this, then the cheaper, more “manufactured” links will have a greater effect on your rankings. This is because lessor links will now be legitimized in the eyes of the search engines by the stronger links that you have.

It may sound daunting to build all of these links, but do not sweat it. If you use the one-website approach then you only have to do it once, and you have plenty of time. Get whatever links you can and put in the effort to get a few really high quality links from related websites.

Summary: Beg, buy, steal, borrow, and plead your way to a strong backlink profile. Build one website and you only have to deal with link building once. Once you have some decent links then adding new content to your site really boosts your revenue. Focus on creating amazingly good content, both on-site as well as for guest posting. Creating ultra premium content is the biggest key to getting good links. If all you ever build is junk links (manufactured) then you will not have a sustainable business.

Formed a keyword list and started pumping out content

At some point in my internet marketing career I realized that search engines were driving the majority of my traffic. I also realized at that point that this was the only traffic that made me any money. I decided right then and there that my goal with my website was to build as much search engine traffic as possible.

For a long time I chased “head” keywords. For example, I though I would make big money if I was able to rank for “credit card” or something similar in my own topic. But it turned out that this was extremely difficult to do, and I was making decent money from long tail variations that I had not even planned on ranking for. For example, “high risk low apr credit card.”

I spent a lot of time and energy and link building trying to rank for a “big head” keyword on my website. After maybe a year of this I realized that it was not worth the effort. I was much better off just coming up with a variety of long tail articles around my topic and publishing lots of new content.

I found that the best way to do this was to get organized with a list of keywords. A big list.

There are a number of different tools out there that can help you to create such a list but most people will be just fine if they use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to get started. It will return a list of keywords, like this:

unsecured credit loan
get loans with bad credit
repair bad credit

What you would then do is to create an amazingly good article around each keyword, and then give it a title, like this:

The Advantages of Getting an Unsecured Credit Loan
How to Get Loans with Bad Credit Even if You Have a Poor Financial History
5 Steps You can Take to Repair Bad Credit in a Down Economy

Notice how each title contains the keyword, but it also goes a step further by incorporating additional long tail keyword variations.

The whole key is to go for both quantity AND volume. You want to create 100 articles, then you want to create 1,000. But while you are doing this, you want to make sure that each article is useful and can stand alone as a piece of worthy content.

Summary: If you just write random articles without targeting keywords then you are just blogging and are likely not building residual income. Targeting keywords with each article that you create is the key to getting long tail search engine traffic. This is how you will make your money. Create a big list of keywords about your topic, then write amazingly useful articles to go with each keyword.

Created many forms of content: infographics, videos, eBooks

At some point when I was creating my flagship website, I decided that I should create an eBook. Should I try to sell the eBook, or just give it away for free?

I opted to give it away for free, and encourage people to share it with others. This was a form of marketing. Eventually, over the years, I had written about 10 free eBooks and I gave them all away for free in the sidebar of my website.

The idea behind this was twofold:

1) Get people to share the eBooks with each other, since they linked back to my site.

2) Amaze people with so much free value that they naturally link to my website and share it with others.

This idea started with the free eBook, but I eventually experimented with additional forms of content. For example, I started making videos that explained my concepts and ideas. I also created custom made infographics. All valuable forms of content that might entice people to share with each other or possibly link to it.

If you follow my approach and just make one website, then you have no excuse not to experiment and create various forms of content. Writing quality articles is going to be your bread and butter, but eventually you will want to shake things up and try other things. For example, interview someone on video and embed the video in a post. Ten years ago this was difficult to do; today you could do it on a whim in less than 2 hours and have it live on your website.

Thus there is no excuse NOT to have multiple forms of content on your website. If the search engines crawl your site and all they see is text, text, and more text, they might not look as kindly on you as other sites in your niche that have lots of ebooks, videos, and pictures to accompany the text.

Summary: Diversify your content. Make a few videos, get some charts or graphs, and create a free eBook. You can repackage old posts into a free eBook, but make sure you add enough new stuff to make it worthwhile. Take the time to create a resource that is actually worth sharing. Add value for your visitors by delivering more than just articles of text.

Formed original ideas about the topic that offered insight and help to the searcher

There was a time when you could start a website about pretty much any topic and just put up “me too” content, build some links, and get traffic, thus making you money.

What is “me-too content?”

Let’s say that you do not know a thing about unsecured credit loans. So you go to Google and do a search for the term, then you read an article or two. After that, you write a new article about it based on what you just read.

That is “me-too” content.

If you attempt to outsource your content for the lowest price, the content that is written will undoubtedly be of this nature. You will not have experts writing for you about specific topics. Instead, they will have to briefly research it, then put the ideas into their own words ADDING NOTHING OF VALUE.

What is the alternative to this?

The alternative is what you have to do if you want to be successful online. You have to add value to the traditional wisdom that already exists about your topic online.

For example, say that you are an investment banker and you have been dealing with various types of loans and credit devices for the last 20 years of your career. You have strong opinions, you know what works and what gets others into trouble, and you have expert knowledge about your topic.

Because of your experience, writing about credit and loans and debt problems will bring real value to the table.

The Internet is filled with spam and is not starved for content. Type in “bad credit” and see how many results you get. Most of it is “me too” content.

To make a real business online, then you need to rise above all of that web spam by providing articles with genuine value. Your ideas have to be original. You have to bring a fresh perspective to the web, otherwise, who will really care?

If your plan is to pay someone 6 dollars per article to create your website, then don’t bother. It’s not worth it. That type of content is going bye-bye. Nobody cares about it, and nobody wants it, and the search engines are not going to rank it well in the future (if they have not dropped most of it already).

Take this article for example. Look at how the personal experience adds real value. It is better than most paid eBooks. It is NOT me-too content. It could not have been outsourced at 1.5 cents per word. The people who write at that price do not have the same expertise that I do.

You have your own expertise in various topics. If any of those are lucrative, then that is what you should be publishing online.

Summary: Don’t put rehashed content and ideas on your website. Publish your original ideas that add value for your site. Only write about lucrative topics within your expertise.

Built a list of RSS and email subscribers

This was not originally essential to my business goals, but it has been an important part of my site’s evolution.

The “A-list blogging” crowd always encourages people to focus on gaining readers, subscribers, and building trust. I focused more on gaining search engine traffic instead of readers, though you could pursue both at the same time.

Any powerful authority blog is going to have a strong number of fans. These subscribers and readers are your fans.

One of the metrics that the search engines undoubtedly consider is returning visitors. Your readers, email subscribers, and RSS readers are all returning visitors. They help to establish the value of your website because it shows the search engines that people care enough to come back.

There are other ways that you can leverage an existing fan base of readers, such as by building links, pitching affiliate products to them, and so on. You will have a growing reader base if you are building a valuable resource website. If you do not have a growing readership then you are probably not on the right track.

A certain percentage of your monthly traffic should want to sign up to see more of what you have in store for them. If this is not happening then you should reread this article and start raising the quality bar. Add value and your readers will stick around longer and come back more often.

Summary: Your website will have a growing fan base when done right. Give your readers a way to subscribe for future updates.

Created ultra high quality content: resource posts, case studies, interviews

I continued to work on my flagship website for a few years before selling it. During that time, I was constantly pushing myself to create higher quality content.

“Me-too content” is not enough. It is a rehash of what is already found on the Internet. Have high quality content and amaze your visitors with stuff that makes them share, bookmark, and link to your website.

The one-site approach is ideal. Start experimenting. Find someone whose expertise is greater than your own, and ask them for a 20 minute interview. Videotape it and put it on your website.

Do this again. Do it many times, with many different experts and people of different opinions.

Do a case study. Do a real-world experiment that will benefit your readers as they watch it unfold and see the results.

This is the kind of stuff that can get real links. Most bloggers will not do it because they are lazy.

It is actually pretty easy to do. Grab any recording device and shoot a quick video. It does not have to be studio quality. If you ask the right questions from the right person, the content will sell itself and be hugely valuable and helpful to your audience.

Most websites have a sidebar where additional posts or articles are listed. My goal was to delete all of the junk in my sidebar, and then link to only the absolute best articles that my site had to offer. I set a new standard of quality and then said to myself:

“OK, I don’t care how long it takes, but all I am going to do for the next few months is to create one article at a time. Each article I produce will be insanely useful, it will feature video, graphics, lengthy amounts of text, and it will be incredibly helpful to my audience. Then I will link to each one of these ultra premium articles in my sidebar. When people land on my website, if they click on anything at all, they are going to see my very best content. This is my new long term link building strategy, based on having ultra premium content on my site.”

So I set out to do that. I effectively “raised the bar” and made a new standard of quality for my sidebar links. Only the best, most link-worthy content was allowed to populate my sidebar.

Summary: Create amazingly useful link-worthy content, then show it off to every person who visits your website.

Encouraged commenting and participated in discussions

This is another A-list blogger tactic, but it’s important for building real authority.

I am not sure if this is a chicken-or-egg problem, but this is what I have noticed:

My articles that ranked extremely well in Google had what I call a “comment storm” on them.

A “comment storm” is when people are using the post like a discussion board, and some of the articles can grow to over a thousand comments.

This seemed to push the post up in the rankings. Being higher in the rankings also encouraged even more comments. (This is what I mean by a chicken or egg type thing!)

Therefore, anyone who is trying to build an authority website should encourage and participate in comment discussions. The search engines love to see growing content, and they seem to (in my experience) boost that content in the SERPS.

Once you see an article or two on your site that has a strong comment storm going, it is time to build a forum (which adds much the same benefits).

Summary: Encourage audience participation. Respond to all reader comments on your site, and encourage them to join in the discussion.

Added a user forum that built a community around my brand and ideas

After you have steady discussions on a post of your website, consider adding a discussion forum as well. I recommend using vBulletin software to do this. It costs a bit of money but it is worth it if you are serious about building a real business.

Do not add the forum unless you have discussions happening naturally on at least one or more articles of your website. If you do, then you will likely get discouraged because it will be like a ghost town. I would not add a forum with less than a hundred or so unique visits per day to your site, and even then, I would wait until you see a community forming in a comment thread.

Adding a successful forum to your site is all part of site stickiness and good user metrics. Returning visits will skyrocket and your site content will grow every day. The search engines love to see both of these things and so it will help to legitimize your site a great deal.

From a business perspective, adding a forum actually looks like a liability. It costs money, it requires another database, possibly more hosting power, and higher costs. In addition, forum traffic is difficult or even impossible to monetize in most cases. The indirect benefits from having a solid community growing around your ideas is worth much more in the long run than any initial costs.

If you can start a forum and have it grow on its own, then it is probably a wise decision to do so. If you add a forum to your site and it doesn’t take off, then you simply added it too soon. Wait until you have more daily traffic before you try again.

Summary: Adding a discussion forum is one of the best ways to build a community around your ideas and grow your fan base.

Let the site age for 4+ years and took a long term view of success

I would advise anyone who is attempting to build an authority website to be extremely patient with it, and not expect major results for at least the first two years. I would not expect a full time income for at least four years.

Those are just general guidelines, based on my own (limited) experience. I also know that most people who start out in internet marketing get discouraged and quit because they are not seeing a fast enough return on their efforts.

The search engines have to battle a mountain of spam every day. Something like 100 million blogs are started every month. Google has to sift through all of that junk so they end up putting all of it on a probationary period. They are essentially saying: “OK, we will come back to this mess in a year or so and see how it all looks.” The good stuff is pretty easy to spot after a year. The spam is just static, has not grown, and no one is caring for it at all.

That is just the nature of the web: it takes time to build a successful online business. My advice is to give it four years. If you apply my advice carefully, then you will see some amazing results if you stick it out for that long. Of course, anyone who is making a modest effort will see results long before four years is up, but I would still encourage you to make a mental note of that timeline.

For example, this website is slated for maturity in about 3 years. It is already a year old but I am not expecting big things out of it for at least a few years. I am realistic about it and I know that it is going to take time for people to find my content, to share it, to link to it, and so on.

I am not in a big rush because I know that the quality of the material will carry the site forward some day. Because I focus on value and genuinely help the reader, I know that the site will do well in the long run. I know that my ideas will spread eventually because I give information away freely, even though some of it is even higher quality than what the “gurus” charge money for.

I have built one flagship website and carried it through to completion (a successful sale). So I know what is involved and I know it all takes time. My plan is to add super high quality content and let the web sort it out over the long haul.

Summary: Site age is important. Take a long term view of making money and do not get discouraged if you are not seeing rising profits in the first year or two.

Monetize the website and enjoy a solid income or sell it off for a massive windfall

Once you have your authority website up and running, let it age for a few years while you add quality content to it. It will earn money through advertising or affiliate product sales. Once you have income trickling in then you can adjust, learn from this, and redouble your efforts. If you have 200 articles and you are making $350 per month in AdSense, why not come up with a plan to triple your articles? Then your monthly income will shoot up to around $1,050.

This is the kind of math that gets me excited, because it represents real freedom. If you followed the ideas on this website, then you will have a sustainable online business that is not so subject to the whims of the search engines. Even though your income may depend heavily on search engine traffic, your site will be so useful, sociable, and rock solid in quality that any search engine would be foolish not to send you traffic. Build a community around your ideas, create a massive user forum, encourage discussion and participation among your readers, and give away free eBooks.

That is also why you add a variety of content types and create real world case studies. If you want a sustainable income then you have to do more than just put up a wall of text that you paid six bucks for from some outsourcing outfit.

Summary: Create an online income by building a massive authority website over a long period of time. Keep adding value to it and the money will take care of itself. My website was not even for sale when it suddenly sold for $200,000 dollars…I just kept adding value to it so that it would thrive and grow.

If you find this website at all helpful my only request is that you share it with others. Send them to:

http://www.makemoneywithnowork.com/

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