Why I Show Off Websites I Own That Make Money

The reason why I share websites that I’ve made money with is because people won’t believe what I say and keep reading my blog unless I show proof. So there’s no better way to show people they should listen to my advice than to show them specific real life examples of websites I’ve made money with. I think after showing everyone how I’ve sold well over a million dollars worth of products for Amazon, sold a website in a deal worth six figures, bought a website and with a little effort turned it into an income stream that may break $1,000 this month (more than quadrupling the monthly earnings from when I bought in in July) people have probably seen enough to know that I’m speaking from actual experience.

I share these examples because it makes for compelling content, builds credibility for me and in turn more people read my blog and participate in the stuff I’m working on (On that topic – can we get some more donations?). But now I’m straying away from the reason why I wrote this blog post in the first place so let me get back to the point:

How I Found Every Website You Own:

I have a subscription to the website WhoRush.com and with a very simple search using my blog as an example I can find the following websites that I own:

There are additional tools that allow you to search by IP address, Google Analytics ID, Google Adsense ID, Whois search etc. as well.

If you tell me a website you own and you have even one website on your server with an Adsense ID I can use that to find every other website you own that uses the same Adsense ID!

Thanks for telling me about that one website you own and are trying to sell on Flippa – now I know every single other website you own, can look through each of them to see how you’re getting traffic from Google using another tool like SEMRush.com and can copy the niches you’re in if it looks like there is enough value there for me to compete.

Now I don’t explicitly seek out people that share their websites to do the above, but there are a lot of savvy people that do. WhoRush and SEMRush are two amazing research tools (I love SEMRush the most though) The point I’m trying to get across is that you should never tell people about your websites that make money. Now some of you might be thinking – ‘Sweet now I can use these tools to go check out all the websites Chris uses to fund his lavish lifestyle’ (joking of course) – well it’s too late to do that because I’ve set up safeguards to prevent this that you can employ to protect yourself as well.

How To Prevent People From Seeing All Of Your Websites:

The only surefire way to prevent people from finding all of your websites is to have doubles of everything:

1. I have two Adsense accounts.

One Adsense account is a personal account and tied to my SSN# and another is for my LLC which is tied to my business. (completely ok for you to do)

I never tell anyone about the websites I own and run under my second Adsense account. I also don’t host any of those websites on the server that this blog is on so there isn’t anyway to find those websites that way either.

2. I have four hosting accounts.

I have two dedicated servers with HostGator and a couple shared hosting accounts for some smaller niche websites I run.

You only really need to have two hosting accounts if you want to protect yourself, but I use a dedicated server for this blog and a few other websites I’m hosting here for stability purposes. I have a second dedicated server for some larger websites I run under my second Adsense ID. In any case, the point being that you don’t want anything that links the websites in one hosting account to a website in another hosting account. So don’t use the same Google Adsense ID, Google Analytics ID etc.

3. I use domain privacy on every domain name I own.

This helps to prevent people from using the Whois tool that can search for your name, address etc. and find you that way as well.

Overall Summary:

There are tons of bloggers in this space talking about their earnings each month from niche websites (without disclosing URL’s) and in less than 5 minutes I can find out every website they own, how much money each one is probably making based on the traffic and keywords I see they rank for and just about everything else about their business. If I can find out this information then you can bet other people can too.

Now because of this added privacy I have to pay an extra few hundred dollars a month for another dedicated server just to prevent some savvy unscrupulous blog visitors that may stop by, read about some of the successes I’ve had and want to find what other things I’m running that are currently successful. So you can save yourself a lot of trouble by simply not telling anyone about your successful websites. I could go into more detail about how to protect yourself but the above tips will help you out quite a bit.

I am curious though – how many of you knew that tools like this even existed – where people can find basically every website you own very easily? Let me know in the comments below.

Disclaimer: The following was not a paid review post, but I do have a free comped subscription to WhoRush.com and SEMRush.com. I’d gladly pay for SEMRush.com and probably WhoRush.com as well (SEMRush is definitely my favorite though).

My $26,000 Mistake Of 2011:

I was riding high, had plenty of money in the bank and because of that I decided to pay off $26,000 worth of student loan debt from my wife’s masters degree back in January. Both loans were around $13,000 each and at 8.9% and 7.9% interest rates or something really high like that (interest rates for loans on post graduate programs are way higher).

Why Was This A Mistake?

I gave up liquid cash that I could have used to invest in my business for a sure thing that my wife and I would be paying roughly $300 a month less in student loan payments over the next 10 years. For years I’ve always been told that paying down debt is the right thing to do, but I believe when you’re trying to build your own business this attitude isn’t always the best. I believe I can always make more than a 8.9% return when I’m buying websites or other web based assets and for me to give up $26k so that I could have less debt was incredibly stupid.

Example 1: I buy a website for $25,000 that’s earning $1,000 – $2,000 per month (1x – 2x earnings multiple).

Even on the worst case scenario of a 2x earnings multiple a website I purchase for $25,000 making $1,000 a month without improvements to the monthly income (there always would be) I’d already be coming out ahead an extra $700 a month. Yes there is risk in any investment like websites, but with such a short payback period I believe I still come out behind by deciding to pay down debt instead of investing in my business.

What Do You Think?

I hate to woulda shoulda coulda because I believe that attitude is for losers, but I wanted to share my mistake because I believe I’ve learned a valuable lesson. Now what I’m not advocating is that you should buy that $1,997 course you’ve seen guru’s promoting because you can earn $50k per month by pushing a big red I’m an idiot button instead of paying your credit card bill. But when it comes to investing, if you know you can make something work (in my case – buying websites) then it’s probably a mistake to pay down debt with cash that could be used for investments instead.

Yes I know this blog is about making money on the internet, but what you do with your money offline can have just as big of an impact of how much you can earn offline. I really do want to hear some feedback on paying down debt vs investing so don’t be lazy and read this without commenting.

See you down in the comments.

1. Extra Stress

I have a younger brother and an older brother. My 31 year old older brother has no gray hair and my dad didn’t get gray hair until he was nearly 40. On the other hand, I’m “only” 27 and started getting gray hair as soon almost as soon as I started running my own business. Yes it could be a coincidence but I’m near certain it is from the added stresses of being self employed.

I know a lot of the stress is self enforced, because I feel like if I don’t grow my business by at least 50% year over year that I’m doing something wrong. With these type of growth goals I feel like everything I do has to be successful and because I’m trying so many things unfortunately not every project I’ve worked on has been a success.

2. Lack Of Social Interaction

I used to work in a sales job and really enjoyed the people I worked with. We’d take occasional breaks to play Foosball, go out to lunch and occasionally hang out after work. Now the only people I communicate with are over the phone or on Skype. I believe this lack of social interaction is partly why I’m pushing myself so hard to grow my business because I’d actually like to have an office with several employees that I could go to each day. I never minded the office life, I just hated having stupid leaders telling me what to do only because they’d been with the company for 10 years.

3. Paycheck Varies Every Month

This is a double edged sword, obviously my paychecks are larger than when I was working my full time day job but it’s still stressful to have huge swings in the money I’m earning. I had a massive “pay check” in November when I sold one of my websites for six figures but then of course my monthly income took a hit so although I received a huge cash influx I had to think about which other projects I needed to start working on.

4. No Set Hours

I can be lazy from time to time, and this was true both before and after I was working on my online business full time. In fact, some of my friends would argue that the only reason why I worked so hard on my business was so that when I succeeded I could work less (lol). Having a day job is easy because you know that from 9 to 5 you’re in work mode and busy earning a pay check. Now that I work for myself I don’t have any set hours. I will occasionally work 12 – 16 hours in a single day and only get up a couple times to eat food. Sometimes I will also feel compelled to work on weekends for a few hours a day. On the other hand, I don’t have anyone cracking a whip at me so I will work shorter hours on occasion because I can.

5. Most New Businesses Fail

Making it through my first year of self employment was a big confidence booster, but the fact remains that most businesses fail over the long run (see small business facts here). Businesses like mine that technically don’t have “employee’s” (I use contractors) fail at a rate three times higher than other businesses do. I feel confident that my business will be around for years unless it’s acquired, but the odds truly are stacked against you as a self employed individual.

6. Deciding What To Work On

I make money in a variety of different ways, but I’m at the stage in my business where even though I enjoy solid base hits like selling a website for six figures I also want to hit a grand slam and work on something where I can exit for several million dollars (preferably with enough to buy the Guthrie Castle before my 20 year deadline). The toughest thing for me to do is to decide what to work on to help me achieve my financial goals, set new challenges and enjoy doing it all at the same time.

7. People Saying “Get A Real Job”

The worst part about being self employed is the fact that all of my friends and family that know what I do for a living think I don’t have a real job. Because I don’t have a real job I must always be able drive people to the air port and perform other menial tasks right? Any other self employed person will agree that this is one of the most annoying aspects of being self employed.

Self Employment Is Still Better Than The Alternative:

Even with all of these negative drawbacks I still wouldn’t have it any other way. The same freedom that causes me stress is what makes working for myself so much more enjoyable and challenging than anything I did in any of my past jobs. I’m a huge fan of this life style and building online businesses. In the coming weeks I’ll be changing several things about my blog to make it even better for people looking to succeed at building their own online business. In the mean time, feel free to read my suggestions on how to quit your day job. Just remember, that being self employed isn’t always awesome.

Stay tuned…

Update: We should have all the testers we need, thanks for all your help and I’m eager to show off this software soon!

I’ll need less than 1 hour of your time to test the software and all testers will receive the final software for free. Contact me here, on Twitter or respond in the comments below that you’re interested and which country you’re located in.

Upcoming: I want to explain what I’ve been up to during the first part of this year and how I’ve been building my online business in new ways for 2011.

Image By AMagill

How Does It Make Money?

Traditionally, this was one of the single most important questions you needed to answer when you started a business before the internet was around. It was generally something that you thought about for hours, days, weeks, months before deciding to launch your business. You would have to include the information in a business plan if you were going to get a loan for the money you needed to help get your business off the ground.

The Internet Business Mentality:

When the internet came along people decided they didn’t need to ever have a plan to make money before launching the business because the barriers to entry were so low. The late 90′s saw dozens of web companies going public that never even turned a profit let alone had a viable business model to survive on. Most of these companies failed and only a few remained after the tech crash, but even now 10 years later I still see people starting online businesses without any idea on how they will ever make money. Call me old fashioned, but unless you have a solid plan on how to make money with your business all you have is something “cool” (aka Web 2.0 companies). This is the same reason why I see so many people failing with their websites today. It takes less than $100 to create a website, throw up some Adsense and hope for an avalanche of clicks to come through. When you don’t make money it’s easy to give up because after all, you spent less than $100 right?

Why I Ask ‘How Does It Make Money?’ For Every New Project:

My First Online Business Experience:
When first I started to try and earn money online five years ago with the launch of my first video game forum I never stopped to figure out how the website could make money. I never did any research on forums beyond the software I needed to run them. I never found out that forums have traditionally the worst click thru rates on advertising and that many advertisers avoid them like the plague. I never stopped to figure out that a video game based forum is even worst for making money because the target demographic is nearly impossible to sell to because they either have little to no money or only buy inexpensive $60 video games. Because I failed to ask these questions the most that website ever made was $500 a month despite the 500,000+ monthly page views at the height of it’s popularity.

Finally, A Viable Business Model:
After several more attempts at running my head into the wall without ever “getting it” I finally decided to branch out and find new potential web business models. I had the unoriginal idea that people are always buying things online so why not provide a gateway between consumers and their shopping destination that provided great advice on what products to buy? This is what lead me to Amazon’s affiliate program and how I earned $40k+ with just Amazon’s affiliate program in 2009 and have earned even more now in 2010. I took what I learned and put it into a training course designed to show people how to build income generating websites which you can see more information about at Niche Profit Course. I did this because I thought other people were probably having the same problems I used to have as well floundering around online without any decent idea to make money online.

Moving Into The Future:
Since then I’ve launched several new projects some of which I’ve discussed on this blog and others that I’ve kept private for the time being; however, the one question I always ask before I launch any for profit venture is “How Does it Make Money?”

Do you?

I’ll be writing a follow up blog post to describe how and why I used investment bankers to sell this website, but I would first like to publicly thank Shoemoney and specifically the reputation that surrounds his Elite Retreat event for even getting my foot in the door. I’d also like to thank some other great friends for the advice I received prior to entering any discussions as well as some advice during the sales process including Shane Pike and David Adams from Escalate Media. Last but not least I’d like to also thank Zane, Brad, Frank, Stephanie and the rest of the team at Founders Investment Banking.

Founders is behind a bunch of other big sales like the notable $14.9 Million sale of Bankaholic.com and if they needed another person to vouch for their awesomeness I’m happy to toss my opinion out there as well.

What’s Next?

This is the first of the two cool announcements I alluded to last week. Today’s announcement is more about me but the next announcement will be more for all of you, my readers. I am shooting for a December 1st launch date of the new project but the one thing I will say is that if you’re not earning at least $1,000 a month online this will be great for you and the best part of all is that it will be completely free . If you want in be sure to sign up for my newsletter list here.

Check Out: Get Rid Of Your Website

The main reason why I’m sharing this on the blog is that I just want people to know that I’m the guy behind GetRidOfYourWebsite.com and if you’re looking for a serious buyer you can feel comfortable contacting me.

If you have any questions related to the process feel free to ask below and I’d be happy to answer.

Upcoming: Tomorrow I’ll be launching my first WordPress plugin which I partnered with a pro developer and designer to create so stick around to check it out. We’re going to offer the plugin at a discounted price for the first week as well.

*Note: Of course I can’t buy all your websites but I am looking to buy some websites from people that just need to free up some capital.

Income Graph:

Income Analysis:

Amazon Associates:

My biggest earner of the month was of course the Amazon Associates program with $4,843.76 which took up 84% piece of the pie. I’m back up $800 from the last month due to increased traffic across my network of websites and a few new linking strategies I’ve implemented. As I mentioned before, I’m in the process of putting together more info to share on how I earn money with Amazon’s Associates program so be sure to subscribe to my blog so that you don’t miss out. If you are looking for a resource to use to help improve your earnings with Amazon’s associates program you should check out my article on Top 7 tips I used to make $41,438.42 in 2009 with Amazon Associates. I also suggest that if you’re struggling to earn money with Amazon Associates be sure to avoid these common pitfalls. My goal continues to be $5,000+ per month earnings with Amazon.

Google Adsense:

Google Adsense was about $50 higher than in March which admittedly isn’t a large amount but it is a 20% increase. To earn this additional amount I simply looked at the last month earnings report on the 10 different ad types I used in various sizes and colors and eliminated the lowest performing units that had been cycling in my ad slots via the OIOpublisher plugin. As I’ve said before, I really want to get another source of income earning more than $1,000 per month and it will either be Google Adsense or Private Advertisers that make it there first.

Private Advertisers:

I’m still trying to push this number higher and sadly haven’t had a lot of success with third parties to help sell advertising (i.e. BuySellAds.com and Technorati Media). As I’ve stated before, I believe my best chance at succeeding in my goal of earning over $150,000 in 2010 will require me to start making four figures a month from private advertisers. When I have my first $1,000+ month in a category other than Amazon’s affiliate program I’ll have a mini celebration.

Vibrant Media, Click Bank, eBay Partner Network and other Misc Earnings

I used Vibrant Media ads for most of the month and still managed to earn a respectable $154.91. My experiments with using ClickBank products has paid off and I earned even more with them in April. eBay Partner Network only gave $55 and I only use them on a couple websites in a single skyscraper ad slot. I also got a few other random affiliate commissions paid to my Paypal account but there wasn’t enough to warrant discussing it here.

Wrap up:

Now that I’ve eliminated the lowest performing Adsense units I’m going to test out some new more aggressive inline ad placements. I’ve been hesitant of this strategy in the past because I monetize most of the websites in my network with Amazon’s affiliate program and I don’t want users to click away and buy something via an Adsense link when I can earn much more for selling a product via Amazon. But the only way to earn more money (besides getting more traffic) is to constantly experiment with monetization strategies. To ensure the new placements via Adsense do not canabilize my Amazon earnings I’ll be monitoring both the number of clicks to Amazon links as well as the amount I’m earning on a daily basis. Finally, I still need to sell more private advertising space. I’m going to drop the prices I set via 3rd party networks to see if I can entice some more sales on the blogs I’m running 3rd party ad code on. I also use OIOpublisher to serve ads on other blogs and I highly recommend you buy that WordPress plugin.

I have several more interesting case studies to share in May so be sure to subscribe to my blog so that you don’t miss out.