How I made a million in 3 months

September 23, 2007

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I love to read money makers inspiration posts and not just that but people who write how successfull they are doing in this online business and give you hints on how you can do the same. markus007, has posted in webmasterworld that he did 1 million in 3 months and gave some hints on how he achieved that. Is this true? I really don’t know but what is important about this, are those few points that he mentioned.

Lots of hard work, and a billion+ pageviews

I am without a doubt the top individual adsense publisher in terms of pageviews. Me talking about how I did it won’t help you, but here is what i found you need to be successful in adsense.

Get a database of IP’s so you know where your traffic is coming from. Then create channels for each country. Its not uncommon to see US traffic with a CPM of $5.00 and a CDN traffic at 20 cents and vice versa. If you have access to the hints option, give different hints based on IP. ie if your page is about 401k plans, that won’t get you anything outside of the USA.

You have to create sites that will bring in repeat traffic. If you think you will get rich off SEO think again. If you create a Free jobs site you could net 30 million + a year if you got big. Club listings site, free religious personals etc would all be big money makers. Look for established markets and offer a service for free and support it with adsense.

Have your users create content and lots of it. User reviews of night clubs, Resorts, golf courses etc. Build your site around your users and make them part of your site, don’t build your site for consumption.

Do not enter markets with a lot of competition monitized via adsense. Try and undercut paid content markets by offering a free service, or better yet create your own market.

Keep your site dead simple, it has to load fast and have no more then 2 ads and 1 or 2 pictures other then your logo. Do not confuse your user, give them what they want and give it to them fast.

Troll around various forums and if people are not talking about your market, there is a good chance you will make money.

There are many questions about how to make 1 million in 3 months and will try to answer them briefly:

1. how do you let visitors create content? What scripts do you use?
There are many content management scripts that allows your members write content for you. Wordpress is one of them, a user can register to your blog and then you give him permissions so he can write and will go automatically to the draft. As an administrator you should approve it or cancel it.

2. how do you research niche markets besides snooping around in forums?
There are many services that allows you to check niche keywords and find some new ones. Overture is one free that you can use or Wordtracker is another that I really recommend.

3. how many sites do you think one need in order to earn, say, $50k a month?

You can make $50k per month just with one site or many sites. The question here is Do you have time to manage 50 sites at the same time? To be able to make $50k per month is to attract visitors ( A lot) and get loyal readers/customers to your site. I will recommend to make one site and focuss on it make it your little baby.

4. I know most of your traffic is viral but how do you start it off?
Many webmasters start a website without focussing and applying search engine optimization, please read Plan your site with seo in mind. If you don’t have a budget to get instant traffic you have to promote your site in your niche forums, blogs and directories. Check Content is King, or Links are King: What’s Your Money On

Webwork in webmasterworld asked some nice questions about those tips:

Thanks for the tips Markus.

In terms of income generation is a net of $1.00 per 1,000 pageviews considered above average, average or below average for your target market? Is that a fair average for AdSense sites in general? My guess is that the income is nice but that greater value is to be realized (some day in the traffic stats.

How has your RPM tracked the adjustments you made per your tips? In other words: I executed strategy X and my revenue increased Y%? Care to comment what had the most significant impact and by what percentage?

Did you experiment with ad placement and the number of ads per page? Since 1 billion pageviews is a nice size dataset allow me to ask: What did you find, if you care to comment? Do you believe there’s anything unique to your target market that makes such an approach to ad placement or # of ads “a natural fit”?

With 1 billion pageviews do you find that the distribution of income is constant across the pages or that a subset of the pages are responsible for significantly more income? Any characteristics in common with the revenue generating pages? Do you find that user generated content generates more or less income than “articles” within the site?

Have you employed any strategies to drive your existing traffic to higher revenue sections of your website or network? Care to comment on such strategies?

Since you stress the importance of repeat visitors do you employ an “ad blindness remedy” of any kind?

Thanks again. Hope you don’t mind the questions. I’d just like to add a bit more of your intelligence, insights and expertise to the thread if you’re willing to share further insights. Thanks again for sharing.

and markus answered it:

No ebook, i can barely spell let alone write.

I’m not to worried about people trying to copy me as every other site this site spends over a million bucks a month just to keep the servers running and pay the tech staff.

Webwork, I found that you should just ignor monization issues. I focus most of my time on trying to increase my dailly visitor count. If i don’t increase my users/pageviews by 10% a month there is something wrong. If you focus all your time on trying to make money, your site tends to not grow.

With trends in advertising currently, it is best you build for the long term anyways. Google is coming out with rich media ads which would increase my CPM to $4+ and other ad platforms are working at tracking the users intentions. Ie if you searched for a new car on google a week ago, a random site may display car ads when you visit it. I think in 5 to 10 years, the internet will monitize at the same level as offline. Now is the time to get ahold of as much traffic as you can.

As for the other comments about SEO & PPC etc bringing more money quicker and that can be true in some cases. If you are really good its not hard to earn a grand a day on PPC or SEO. The problem is maintaining your profit margins on PPC and on SEO. You can only build a finate number of sites, or create a finate number of ads. You get to a point where you build sites and ads just to replace the ones that died off that day. I’ll also mention that if you try and sell your SEO/MFA site you aren’t going to make a hell of a lot of money from that.

The beauty about what i’ve done is that my site constantly grows 10% a month, and I build long term value and actually help millions of people and my time spent working on the site stays at about a hour a day.

Some other notes that Markus has to say:
The site is actually only 3 years old. I got my 40th member march 1st of 2003. I had it sitting around a while before that but it was never in any working order. I spent a grand total of 11 grand for the first year. I ran my site off my home computer, spent 1 grand on adwords to start it off, 2 grand on link buying, and the rest on a server and a few ads on high traffic cheap sites. I then had some hosting costs later in the year to when i moved to a data center. I didn’t create any fake profiles, that would be insanely work intensive. There were already 5 or so free and well established sites when i got going, I used SEO to get my first members after my inital adwords campaign and they seeded my database.

As for alexa spikes, those are worthless I manupilate my alexa and comscore for competitve reasons. I don’t want to be on the alexa 1000 spamlist, and i don’t want comscore selling detailed information. In a sample of 600k vistors a grand total of 56 had alexa toolbar.

I put my cash into a cashable GIC, till i figure out how much the taxman gets. As for marketing savy that goes with the territory, but it was a lot harder on the technical side of things. I wrote every line of code on the site, and i custom built every single server. Man did i ever learn a lot about running high performance sites.

As for doubters, nothing you can say will really convince them. But in the grand scheme of things earning 330k/month on 14 million pageviews a day isn’t all that impressive. Now ad supported ivillage earned 10 million a month on 13 million pageviews/day now that is impressive.

This is not finished here yet, we will have part II with some other notes and some other tips. Subscribe to my RSS and keep inform about this issue

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