I was fired from my day job on Oct 13th 2009 and for the weeks that followed I was very stressed out and tried to find a new job (see my full story). A few weeks later I decided that it was a blessing in disguise and decided to pursue my online business full time. 2010 was my first full year as a self employed internet entrepreneur and I’ve already covered how well I met my goals for the year. Today I want to share specific information about the money I made from the year:
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Note: If you’re reading this article and currently have a website you’re looking to sell in the six or seven figure price range contact me and I can give you some advice.
I recently sold Netbook Reviews (one of my larger websites) in a deal worth six figures. I can’t share the specific amount for obvious reasons but needless to say based on the sale of the website and my variety of other online income sources I easily surpassed my 2010 goal to earn more than $150,000 this year. This is very exciting because in the previous year while working a full time sales job I made only $60,000 even though I surpassed my sales plan every single quarter and worked 50 hours a week (and I still managed to get fired hah hah).
The goal of this post is not to brag or anything the goal is to teach you some of the things you should know if you’re trying to build and sell a larger website property for six figures or more. First let’s cover what it takes to build a six figure website and then I’ll tell you how to sell it.
How To Build A Six Figure Website:
Today is the release date of Halo: Reach – the latest installment in the Halo franchise for the Xbox 360 console and because of this fact I will be taking a few days off to play the game (I love setting my own hours 
). I’ve been playing Halo since the very first one was released on November 15th, 2001 for the Xbox (menu screen pictured right). My birthday is on November 16th, but in 2001 I moved it forward one day so I could have my friends over to have the first Halo party. Flash forward a few years and when I moved to Bellingham, WA to attend WWU Halo 2 was released the first quarter I was in school and subsequently I earned my very first D in a class (at the time I preferred to play Halo 2 as opposed to study). Flash forward a few more years and Halo 3 was released the day after I lost my job at Microsoft as a video game tester so I was able to play for two weeks straight before I moved onto my next job in sales and that brings us to today – Sept 14th, 2010 – the very last Halo to be released by Bungie (the creators of the series). Before you ask, yes I am a video game nerd and love playing Halo – I’m also very good at it (I’ve competed on the professional level through Major League Gaming aka MLG and even been flown out to coach a team). Since today is such a fitting occasion I want to share the story behind the creation of my online business and how I used a video game to help me build a six figure income online.
How Halo helped me start my online business:
I’ve been working on this eBook and the full Niche Profit Course for the last 30 days and I’m happy to say that after many delays everything is done. If you are a member of my free newsletter or a Facebook fan you should be receiving a copy of my free eBook: Niche Profit Course Beginner’s Guide.
Niche Profit Course Beginner’s Guide:
The Niche Profit Course Beginner’s Guide outlines some of the core principles I’ve used to sell $938,913.43 worth of products from Amazon.com for a profit of $64,311.13 in the past 12 month’s. This is a good introduction to making money with Amazon.com and I wrote the guide to be completely free. If you want to learn some of the truly in depth tactics and strategies I created a paid training course as well. (You can get it for free here if you weren’t already a newsletter subscriber)
Full Niche Profit Course:
The full Niche Profit Course is available for $97 at an introductory price (it will go up) and it also comes with a free copy of Azon Theme – my Amazon.com optimized WordPress Theme that I paid close to $2,000 to develop – something that I will only offer for the first few sales of the course. So if you want to take advantage of the lower price and the great free bonus I urge you to order it now.
Niche Profit Course Outline
This is the first in a new series I’m starting on “Ultimate Guides”. The goal is to provide a fresh and comprehensive look on an often times stale topic. If you like what you see please subscribe to my blog, share this article via Twitter or link to it from you blog.
Why you should guest post:
Guest posting is one of the best free ways to drive traffic, get new subscribers and free links. In fact this is one strategy I’ve used on this blog a lot and I’ve shown my traffic graphs below, but before we get to that I want to cover the basics and essential knowledge you should know to make the most from guest posting. By guest posting you can get the following for free:
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I’ve reduced the page load times on this blog via a few tactics that anyone using WordPress should implement and because I’m not a technical guy I’ve put together a guide for implementing these tactics that non technical people such as myself would better understand. (I’m shaking my fist at the geeks out there that have written guides too difficult for me to comprehend, but deep down I’m more saddened by my lack of tech savvy skills)
Why Page Load Times Matter:
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I’ve been trying to make money as an entrepreneur for most of my life now ever since my first adventure in junior high school when I began buying Pokemon card packs and reselling them on eBay to people for triple the $3 price I paid (see my about me story). My best sale was for $25 on a pack I bought for $3 at the card game store. I still can’t comprehend how that worked but knowing there were so many idiots out in the world struck a chord deep within me – How do I extract as much money from idiots willing to part with their money? And with this guiding principle in hand I set out on more money making journeys. Not everything has worked out as well as I had anticipated and what follows are my top 7 worst websites ever created:
1. Investing in Drugstore.com stock
Like George from Seinfeld I set out to “make a big score,” but not by investing my library money in art – instead I reinvested the money I made selling Pokemon card packs in Drugstore.com stock at $43 a share. I lost a couple thousand dollars when the stock fell to a few dollars a share as the rest of the internet stocks crashed. While this isn’t quite a website I created in an attempt to make money online it is what helped to lead me down the path to try earning money online by making websites and not investing in them on the stock market.
Lesson 1: Don’t invest in the stock market unless you know what you’re doing. Extra Credit: If everyone in the country is talking about how you should jump in on a trend right now you know the bubble is about to burst.
More failures and lessons learned are continued after the break…
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Best WordPress Plugins
by Chris Guthrie · 31 comments Follow me on Twitter
I’ve compiled a list of the best premium WordPress plugins based on my current use or past experience. All of the plugins on this list are well worth the premium price if you’re looking for their desired function and almost all of these plugins I use to help make more money on my WordPress blogs (see my income reports for more details). I spent a lot of time compiling this list, but even more time working with the companies behind these plugins to provide you coupon codes to save you money. Yes, this isn’t your typical list post as I sent numerous emails and even lobbed in a couple phone calls to get these coupon codes for you. Sadly a couple companies wouldn’t offer any discount pricing, but I believe in their product so I wanted to make sure they made the list regardless of whether the price was discounted or not. Please click through the coupon code links I’ve provided below so that your discount is automatically applied (If you have an issue try manually copy / pasting the code or contact me if you still have problems).
Best WordPress Plugins:
OIOPublisher
With the OIOpublisher plugin you can create ad zones and rotate various different types of advertisements for display on your blog. You can even sell ads on your blog direct to advertisers and cut out the middle man. I currently use this plugin on every single WordPress blog I own so that I can test which ad units perform best. When it comes to ad management plugins I believe this is the best one around.
Price is
$47$37: See more about OIOpublisher hereBonus: Save $10 with coupon code BLOOM-MMOTI (You must click through the link above for the coupon code to be applied)
More of the best premium WordPress plugins are listed after the break (click below to continue)
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