One of the most overlooked aspects of becoming successful is building your list of loyal customers. Having a list of good buyers and cultivating those relationships is crucial because it creates a recurring revenue stream. Recurring revenue is crucial, as one-off site sales may be inconsistent until you have a large and high quality client base.
Think of it this way - if a site gets built up to making $5 per day in advertising, affiliate or even ecommerce revenue that is a $150 paycheque per month. Now since we are planning long term and by this point you are experienced in website building we can aim for one of these sites per 6-8 weeks.
Starting off is the toughest part but I guarantee you the rewards are tremendous.After the first few hurdles you’ve got a few sites making a modest income the path to success really accelerates. Soon instead of $5/day we are talking about $20/day sites and instead of one per 6-8 weeks it can get down to one site per 2-4 weeks.
Website flipping provides for some amazing income and good cash flow but I am telling you successful website ownership is the ultimate reward. Personally, I spend about 90% of my time on recurring revenue sources and probably less than 10% on “one time” sales. At this point I am in excess of $1,000 per DAY. I must be honest with you - to get to this point took a lot of work and quite some time. Getting over $100/day took the longest, after that I realized growth at a continually faster pace. Of course, the ability to start this in the first place came from one-time sales (selling sites and such.) The non-recurring sources of income allowed me to start building up my month-to-month, day-to-day revenue.
So aside from actually selling your site to someone else how do you generate money? Here are some of the most popular ways.
Google Adsense is by far the most popular way to earn money from advertisements on your site. Personally, for ads, I think it is the best program. Adsense shows both text and image ads which pay you for every click they receive on your site.
Very similar to Adsense is Yahoo’s Publisher Network (YPN.) This program is US only while in Beta (has been for years) and does not target the ads as well as Adsense. For high paying topics like travel, weight loss, legal, insurance, etc YPN can outperform Adsense. I do not qualify for this myself (not American.)
Affiliate links can work very well for highly targeted websites where you know there is a good chance your visitors are going to want to buy the products you suggest. Popular affiliate networks and programs are CJ.com (thousands of different merchants,) eBay and Amazon. They usually pay you a percent of each sale or sometimes a flat fee per action ($x per new user sent to eBay.) Azoogle Ads has made me a fair amount of money as well. They have hundreds of sites to promote but do not pay a % of a sale, instead if it a flat rate for free trials or paying customers to their clients.
Banner ad networks are usually best used on very high traffic sites but where the traffic is of a lower quality. This includes video game websites, sporting websites and social network type traffic. Casale.com, CPXInteractive and ValueClick. They will pay you for every thousand times a banner is shown on your site. Often the pay is 50 cents to $5 per thousand views - which is why I recommend against this unless your traffic is huge in volume and not making money through other options.
Last but not least: you may consider selling a product or service on your site. The best way to find out if this will be a success or not is to engage your users and ask them what they would like to see on your site and if they would considering purchasing a relavent product or service from you. If there are multiple requests in the same area I would strongly consider trying out the ecommerce angle.
Remember this path is not the easiest and does not favour those who give up quickly. If you stick with it, learn from mistakes, keep and open mind and take in as much knowledge as you can from the right people you can achieve this.
Create a website, build traffic, earn money from the traffic AKA “monetize,” continue building that perpetual income. Use the cash you make from website flipping to catapult your journey into building an empire of recurring revenue websites.
Recurring Revenue for Long Term Success
