Here is exactly how I did it:
I built a website while I was still working at my dreaded day job, and slowly increased my online income to a point where I figured I could make the leap to total freedom.
Now for the details:
* Building your authority website with a realistic timeline.
* How to focus on income growth.
* Measuring fluctuations and watching seasonal spikes for your topic.
* Finding supplemental income streams within your niche.
* Using frugality to move you closer to your goal.
* Taking the plunge and actually quitting your job.
* Full time internet marketing post-day job.
Building your authority website with a realistic timeline
You want to create a website that earns $1,000 per month or more and is eventually sold for $200,000 dollars? Great. That is no problem at all. Just understand one thing:
It ain’t gonna happen overnight.
If you flit around the internet marketing world you will probably hear stories of people who “made it big” in a very short period of time. If only you knew there secrets…..etc.
The fact is that striking it rich online is like catching lightning in a bottle. Unless you have extensive marketing or technical skills, it is not likely that you are going to hit the jackpot with your new website.
And that is OK.
There is nothing wrong with a 4 year timeline to sell a website for $200,000. What else are you going to do with the time? Watch television?
What typically happens is that people start building out a website and they get discouraged when income does not start pouring in right away.
This is also a trend that gets more challenging over time, as web spam increases and the search engines get more and more suspect of new websites that are trying to rank. The easiest solution for Google is to simply put new websites on probation for a longer period of time before they allow them to rank based on other signals of quality (such as incoming links). So even if your site is legitimate content and deserves to rank well, the search engines are increasingly force you to be a bit more patient.
This is OK as well. Just accept it and keep putting up ultra high quality content. You are not going to start a website and then suddenly have buckets of money pouring down on you within a few months.
Keep a realistic timeline and realize that most businesses are not an overnight success. Internet marketing is no different, even though there are exceptions out there that will probably haunt you.
I would not even necessarily try to monetize the site during the first year in exchange for more “link-ability.” The idea is that people are more likely to share and link organically to a site that is ad-free and not promotional in nature.
I was making a decent part time income after 2 years of work, and a full time income after 3 years. After four years I sold the site off for $200,000. I would not expect to make money much faster than that unless you are working on it 40 hours per week plus. I was probably averaging about two to three articles per day over the long haul.
Bottom line: project at least 2 to 3 years to make good income from a new authority website.
How to focus on income growth
There are so many distractions when it comes to internet marketing. Should you try to get more readers? Write more articles for your website? Create linkbait? Build cheap links? Write guest posts for other websites? Research new methods of monetization (when you don’t even have 100 uniques per day, etc.).
At some point you have to ask yourself what your income goal is and how you are going to achieve it. For most business models online that is going to mean “increase search engine traffic.”
My own experience was that my income slowly rose as my daily search engine increased. Suddenly I got distracted with lots of ideas. Here I was, I had a legitimate stream of search engine traffic! What if I could be making MORE money from that traffic? I might be leaving money on the table, after all!
So I proceeded to experiment. I wrote and tried to sell an eBook. I tried some affiliate sales. The truth was that AdSense actually worked very well for my particular niche. But all of this searching I was doing was actually a massive distraction from that which could actually increase my income: increasing my search engine traffic.
Notice that search engine traffic shows up on a daily basis. This is a powerful multiplier and you can take advantage of that. If your website makes 30 dollars for every 1,000 impressions, then one way to make more money is to simply increase your daily impressions. Get more search engine traffic.
I can remember when I was averaging 100 visits per day to my website. I was impressed with this number. When I sold the website for $200,000 dollars, I was averaging about 2,500 visits per day.
The reason that I was able to do so well with this site was because I focused almost exclusively on increasing search engine traffic.
My success came from the fact that at one point, I said to myself: “OK, I am going to focus on only 2 things from now on:
1) Publishing keyword targeted articles on my flagship website, AND
2) Getting links to that website.
As usual, I recommend 3 on-site articles per day. If you want to avoid burning out I would advise that you outsource most or all of your link building. Keep in mind too that you only have to build a strong backlink profile once. After that, it is all about publishing quality content over and over again. Pretty simple really, but tough to do in the real world. Most people do not have the discipline to crank out 3 quality articles day in and day out for several months continuous.
Measuring fluctuations and watching seasonal spikes for your topic
Before you can actually take the plunge and quit your day job, you are going to need to know how much income is actually coming in each month and how much your expenses are.
Obviously, if your website topic is seasonal and the earnings dip significantly at times, you will want to account for that before you go quitting your day job.
Many people advise that if your monthly expenses are $1,000 dollars, do not quit your day job until your online income is one and half times your monthly expenses, or $1,500. If you also figure that taxes are going to come out of that money, you might even decide to double the figure just to be on the safe side.
What you are really doing is to take into account the fluctuations that are bound to occur with online earnings.
Also, you may want to wait several months or even a year or two until you have established a steady history of regular monthly income. In other words, don’t quit your day job the first month that your online income crosses your expense threshold. You want to make sure that the online income is going to be maintained and slowly growing over the long run before you take the plunge.
Finding supplemental income streams within your niche
As I built my flagship website over the years, I found various people who worked within the same niche online. Some were other website owners, some were writers about the topic, and some where SEO and publishers of the topic. At one point one of them noticed my articles and offered to pay me to write for his clients.
The money was quite good and my earnings were a bit down at the time so I took him up on the offer. Because of my relatively fast publishing speed, I was able to make between $30 and $50 dollars per hour writing articles for him.
At one point I stopped writing freelance as my own passive earnings were picking back up, and so I refocused my efforts on my own website.
And now the cycle has started again: after selling off my flagship site for a large sum, I am now back to writing freelance articles for very good money, while building up another web property of my own on the side.
Keep your eyes open for different ways to produce online income. Passive income is great, but sometimes freelance work is invaluable in a pinch. If you are serious about quitting your day job, then it would be wise to find a few alternate ways to bring in extra cash.
Using frugality to move you closer to your goal
I am fond of saying “frugality is one half of your ticket to freedom.” The other half, of course, is passive earnings online.
There are a lot of advantages to aggressively pursuing frugality:
* Less stress in your life if you can live on $1,000/month or less than if your household budget is several thousand per month. Less mental overhead. Easier to manage setbacks, disasters, unexpected events, etc. No “crisis” is too big to handle because your operating expenses are so low.
* Every dollar you save is one full extra dollar in your pocket, BUT every dollar you earn is NOT a full dollar in your pocket. Taxes will bring it down closer to 75 cents or so, depending. So dollars that you save yourself from spending go much further than dollars that you earn as new income.
* Flexibility. If you operate on minimal expenses, have less stuff, etc. then you are more flexible in terms of mobility, investing in new opportunities, and so on. For example, say that you earn mostly passive income online, do a bit of freelance work here and there, and also have investment income, then you can be extremely flexible in most areas of your life. You could easily take on a new job, because your time is largely freed up. You could relocate much easier than most people. Having less stuff, lower expense, and no formal job means that you can be quick to take on opportunities that most folks cannot even consider.
If you are serious about quitting your day job then you should become equally serious at practicing frugality.
Most people believe that being frugal means practicing a bunch of tips such as “buying generics instead of name brand groceries” and things like that. My experience has been that these sorts of tips sort of miss the point.
Instead, if you want to be super frugal and really cut your expenses, there are 3 major categories that you can use to very quickly cut your expenses in half or even more (hat tip to Jacob for this information, which is absolutely golden):
* Car – ditch your car. Completely. Tough, I know.
* Housing – get a roommate. Shoot for $300 or $400 per month in rent or less. Share other expenses with someone.
* Food – Buy bulk food such as beans; stuff that is close to being free in bulk. Shoot for a food budget of less than $5 per day. That will probably mean almost never eating out.
Now those 3 things are by no means easy to do, and some people will object that they are entirely impossible. But if you can do some or all of those things, then the rest of “frugality” will take care of itself.
Now, to be fair, I do not actually do any of those things yet, though I am still quite frugal. I live alone, drive a car, and pay all my own bills. Yet, my monthly expenses run right around $1,000/month.
However, I am confident that if my monthly cash flow drops, I will acquire a roommate, ditch the vehicle, and redouble my online efforts before I go back to an hourly wage at a day job.
Nevertheless, this level of frugality that I am at ($1,300/month) looks like it will remain “frugal enough” for my current income streams that I have.
The point here is that you need to take a look at your monthly income from your businesses, and make sure that your living expenses can crawl underneath that. If they can’t, consider taking taking drastic action when it comes to frugality.
Taking the plunge and actually quitting your job
So that’s it. When your online income exceeds your expenses, at some point you make the judgment call and you take the plunge. No one ever knows 100% that it will work out perfectly. But people do it. People take a leap of faith all the time and quit their jobs.
If your online earnings are high enough, and consistent enough, then what is holding you back?
Just do it. Quit. Then, redouble your efforts with your online ventures. Never look back, and work like a maniac. Don’t allow yourself to put your feet up and rest until you are well entrenched as a successful entrepreneur.
Full time internet marketing post-day job
So I quit my job 100 days ago or so and my life could not be better! I was hoping to maintain passive earnings of around $1,500 to $2,000 from my flagship website, but life threw me a curve ball: someone bought the site out for $200,000 dollars. That will produce some nice investment interest to live on, but it also puts me back into a different mindset: now I want to build something again.
I want to create another successful business. I want to build another income stream. So this website here is set to become much larger and packed with many more quality articles such as this one.
I also make good money doing freelance work at this point, but I also try to balance that with growth oriented projects that will produce passive income some day.
If you are on the fence about taking this particular path, I could not be more excited for you. Please shoot me an email and let me know what your plans are and how your online projects are doing. I would love to offer some insight or advice if I could, kick some ideas back and forth, etc.
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