Business

I feel bad that I haven’t updated you all on my million dollar case study. For those of you who missed the project, I’m aiming to build an affiliate site which makes $30,000 per month, that could theoretically be sold for $1M. Though this goal is difficult enough, I also challenged myself to do it in just 12 months. You can view the earlier posts on my case study here, here, and here.

My project relied heavily on an exact-match domain for my targetted keyphrase, which set me back $550. This reliance was my downfall, but it’s not the only hurdle I’ve faced along the way. As a quick update: The site is currently on page 2 of Google for a keyphrase which gets 100,000+ exact searches per month.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a product launch expert. I’ve read a lot on the topic, but action – which breeds experience – is far more important than knowledge. Since I make most of my income with affiliate marketing and promoting other peoples products, launches aren’t something that I’ve dedicated a lot of time to.

At the end of 2010, that all changed. I spent months working on Cloud Living HQ, which I released for only 72 hours (it’s available again as of today), and managed to make a five-figure sum in a single day. In my state of shock, I convinced myself “You might not think you know about product launches, but you must be doing something right.”

This is an article I’ve been waiting a long time for somebody else to write. Over the years, I’ve changed how I manage my online projects so drastically that I wished someone would come along and say, “Okay, Glen, this is how it’s done.” Sadly, that just never happened.

Instead of waiting around for some perfect solution – though there probably isn’t one – I decided to share with you all, the strategy which helps me to do what I do. Although my system is by no means perfect (and you should really just use the things you think will help you), it is the most effective I’ve found after years of running popular websites. Hopefully I can learn a thing or two from you all in the comments as well.

February 1st, 2009, was a very memorable day for me. It was the day I arrived back at my family home in Newcastle, England, to start working for myself full-time. I had just left a job which for the previous two years saw me working with companies like Nissan, Hewlett Packard and Land Rover as their social media manager. My position in the rat race was actually an awesome one, but it was nothing compared to being my own boss.

As some people here don’t care about making their living from the internet, I understand that this post will not be for everybody. However, if you’ve just made the leap to working for yourself, currently run your own business, or you’re looking to make your money online in the future, this article may be just what you need.

Note from Glen: At your request, I’ve added a Print option to the bottom of all posts. This post is quite long, so you may want to give it a try. As there are over 100 million active blogs online I think it’s safe to say that the vast majority of them don’t earn much money at all. I suspect a lot of blog owners can’t even cover their hosting costs. Whilst there are other benefits to blogging besides making an income, many people do aim to be financially rewarded for the efforts they put in.

If you don’t want to make money from your blog (which I totally respect) then this blog post is probably not for you. If you do want to get a return on the time and creative effort that goes into building a blog, then this guide will show you how to do just that.