How I made a million in 3 months Part II

September 25, 2007

This is a continue of How I made a Million In 3 Months.

After continue about this issue in WebmasterWorld, there is a guy with a nickname midwestguy he said that he knows markus sites from the beggining:

FWIW:

To Markus007: Congratulations, Markus! Way to go! As a programmer/analyst, I’m SO glad you’ve shared your real life experiences. It points out that an intelligently designed, architected, developed, deployed and CLUEFULLY MANAGED web property can indeed scale to awesome heights from a solid, but comparatively modest hardware and software platform. THANK YOU!

It is SO nice to know this kind of sanity exist in the world rather than what I’m regularly exposed to in “Big Company IT”. It pukes me to see the “I know all” look in the eyes of the non technical managers of IT PHB types I’m around all day that think (and dictate) that the “only” option to serve up their 50K or so relatively simple dynamic request per day is some huge multimillion dollar sink hole of a J2EE/Oracle/middleware-ad-nauseum mega datacenter complex. And of course, it just HAS to be all Java. After all, these are “Enterprise Class” dynamic pages that are being served up! Yeah, right…

Anyway — again — way to go, man! And whatever you care to share about the components and configuration of your setup will be most appreciated by the techies among us (especially the database, development languages/tools and “home brew AI” stuff curious folks with a technical bent always like to know and compare notes about).

Take care — and absolute best wishes to you and yours!

To others, FWIW: I first saw Markus’ site when it only had about 40 members. I checked it out after reading a post of his in a forum thread (I don’t remember where) in which he discussed his site, the market segment his site was in and his THOUGHTFUL, WELL REASONED approach to proceeding in a market segment currently ruled by other giant, entrenched, well known competitor sites.

I have a photographic memory of this, sitting in my home office, reading his post and then visiting his site. I even remember the banner at the top of his home page (with dolphins jumping out of the water) and some of the pictures on his home page. I kid you not. So his site really did have humble, but confident, purposeful beginnings based on a thoughtful, well reasoned approach.

So anyone who thinks his success is due to him just being in the right place at the right time for some “easy pickins’ ” are simply mistaken. He had Goliaths to battle, as there were “giants in the land”.

When he started (much like Google in search, BTW) there were already lots of big competitors who most folks assumed had that market segment all sewn up for themselves. The “conventional wisdom” most people parroted was that the huge market incumbents positions were totally unassailable without a mega-million “get big fast” budget/effort by another giant with the staying power of very deep pockets. Once again, a case of “It’s not what you know, but what you know that isn’t so!”.

FWIW, why not spend your creative energies trying to come up with (and then testing/refining/staying with) a way to grow and thrive in whatever market segment you decide upon instead of looking for reasons why “it won’t work, so why try”?

This post is not meant as a flame to anyone. Simply as a gently as I care to make it wake up call and reality check. Someone once said “if you think you can or you think you can’t — you are right!”. Well said.

Now get moving — because life’s too short and we’re all too old to be limited — and defeated by — our own mental limits we place upon ourselves.

Want a better future? Then CREATE IT! The only one that can stop you is YOU!

What…you still reading!? GET GOING!

Sincerely,

Louis

Some other advices from Markus:

If All search engines vanished tomorrow I wouldn’t even know as they have so little impact on my traffic. Less then 2%.

Also when it comes to traffic ranking, alexa is useless. 60 of 600k visitors have alexa installed. 60,000 have ranking.websearch.com ie free smilies installed. For sites like webmasterworld its more like 1 in 20 users.. Also use the overture keyword tool for determining ranking by typing in sitename.com

My advice is focus on giving users a reason to come back. SEO/spamming etc may get you traffic to get started but there is no way that will get you big.

ip2location.com has a database of IP’s. Whenever someone comes to the site you look up the IP and get its location. Then you dynamically change the channel in your google ad before its sent to the visitor.

Lots of speculation about what will happen, all i will say is in competitive industries only the paranoid survive. It is like playing chess, and you always have to think 5-20 moves ahead.

What ever new projects people decide to do there are important things to take into consideration.

1. Do things that leverage your skills, if you are a good writer and love writing WRITE!. If you are a good programmer, do something where programming is a barrier to entry. If you are an amateur and you go against people who are experts you are either going to lose, or spend most of your time learning.

2. If you build a team, the strength of your team will be based on your weakest team member. If you have 10 programmers, the resulting program will run as fast and effiently as the worst coder made it. This is because all the code runs together. If you have a brillaint marketer but a bad coder you won’t go anywhere. If you have a great site but no marketer you will not go anywhere.

What i find amazing is everyone knows these things, but very few follow them. But the most imporant thing to remember is you have to be realistic about your skills/abilities, pick only the fights you can win or change the rules so they are played on your terms. It is no coincidence that very successful/rich people always say that one of the most important things they learned on the way to being successful was to know what thier limits where.

Sounds like a well written response from a competitor fishing for information.

For the last few months i’ve had calls from many calls VC’s saying take our cash or we fund your competitors. I’m showing up in the top 50 sites in the USA and Canada on some ranking systems. Even though I blocked comscore and alexa the other ranking systems still carry huge weight. I do have competitors, though i’m a good 6 times bigger then all of them combined. These established competitors are have been seeking or have gotten between 5 and 10 million each in funding. To everyone in my industry I haven’t been under the radar for a while, and am the number 1 threat now.

In short staying in obscurity with the general public and giving up my first mover advantage would be the dumbest business decision I could make.

Poeple who read these forums are still thinking in terms of 1 person business fighting the 800 pound gorillas. I’m a 1 person company that has become a 800 pound gorilla and that makes it a whole different ball game.

Other members advice:

That’s exactly what I was going to say. Many people do SEO because that’s all they know, or they don’t have much money. If you have a site that will keep people coming back and/or telling their friends about it, or viral in some other way, it’s easier and much faster to just spend a little money promoting the site in the beginning.

I haven’t messed with SEO in years. With my last project I said what the heck let me play with it and see what happens. So I hired a guy to write a bunch of articles, get me more links, etc. etc. and did all the right things. Within 4 months I was #1-3 on Google and Yahoo for my top keyword phrases. And you know what? … it was about 2% of my traffic just like Marcus said.

We all have a different perspective of any view
Inevitably some would like nice “designery” stuff” and then there are those who would like more information etc.
The important factors are this:
1. Is it KISS? (Keep It Simple Stupid for those that do not know). Yes
2. Are people using it? Yes
3. Is it making money? Yes
4. Any simple question I’ve not asked above but which is valid? Yes

Current mobile phones come with a plethora of options however what do 99.99% of us use them for? Phoning or texting!
If you don’t believe that ask the phone companies who blew BILLIONS on 3G licences. The Net is simple, do not try and complicate it like self-build Scandinavian furniture. For the moment Markus has got it right and he has no need to worry if it all fell over tomorrow. Jealousy? Nothing better to stir the spirit:-))

What we should all get from this is that if you get enough traffic you can make a lot of money with adsense. The trick is to spend a lot less than you make. A free dating site is not a new concept. The real mystery is not how he was able to handle the growth but how he got the growth. I can make a site that functions just like a site that charges money but how do I get the people to come there. Not just anybody can do this. It would cost a very large ammount of money for somebody to have this site made and another ton of money to handle the traffic once you get it. You can only do this if you are a web programmer and know a lot about how to set up the backend and a good chunk of money. If you just have the idea and limited skills you will need a very large chunk of change.

All this said I know a large percentage of the people reading this would think they died and went to heaven if they made $1000 a month in adsense.

That seems like too simplistic a lesson to draw from this site, especially given that the forum topic here is “AdSense”. More than one poster here has exhausted the available AdSense inventory for their website long before they got anywhere close to Markus’ level of traffic.

Others see such incredibly low rates of return that the amount of traffic required to reap the returns Markus is seeing would be pretty much impossible to achieve (still speaking about strictly AdSense income here).

The lessons I like here are (some mentioned reasonably often in this forum):

* Big for-pay web service categories might offer opportunities for a free (AdSense-sponsored) competitor.
* High degrees of optimization and automation may let you turn a profit where others cannot.
* It’s the total equation of traffic * CPM, and low CPM is no automatic disqualifier for big bucks.
* If you want the really big bucks from a web service site, you’ve got to limit yourself to the categories that can offer both high traffic and a very large AdSense inventory.
* If you can automatically geographically divide up your content for users, you may be able to tap into more AdSense inventory, including ads for local competitors who won’t see you as such.
* Web services based on user community may require an upfront investment (time or money, pick one) to grow, but can keep you from being reliant on free search engine traffic.

Even if you’re not swinging for the fences for making huge bucks from AdSense, you ought to pay attention to the point about geography. If there are opportunities to segment any of your content geographically, you may have a chance to pick up geotargetting AdWords advertisers that you didn’t know existed before. As local search becomes more important to both users and advertisers, this becomes a more valuable concept to publishers.

I had that loads of money problem, but I solved it by starting a horse farm and acquiring adjoining land as it comes on the market. They say the secret to making a small fortune in the horse business is to start with a large one

I’m living proof!

My revenue has been doubling year over year since 2002, and I don’t expect growth to slow because I’m entering new less competitive niche markets with existing technologies that have proven themselves in some of the most competitive markets out there. So while generating $4M a year as a one man army isn’t a milestone I’ve yet achieved, I’m not but a few years away. I say congrats to Markus for kicking some corporate butt! In a world bloated with T. Rex’s, it doesn’t hurt to be a velociraptor

With regard to worrying about money, I agree with those that say you never stop worrying. Sure, if you stay living in that small house or apartment you can invest all that new money and never worry about bills. But I think it helps to remember why we’re all capitalists. It has a little bit to do with friendly competition and working your way up the socio-economic classes. So, when you can afford that 4,000 square foot house, or when you can picture your kids growing up in that new gated community, or when you see a brand new Benz, you may opt for those things because they make you feel good. So, eventually you find yourself paying a $5,000/month mortgage, a $3,600/month car payment, $2,000/month for private school for your kids, $2,500/month for a college fund, $5,000/month retirement account, and so on. Yes some of it is a bit materialistic, and yes a little bit superficial, but it’s very much a part of human nature. If you’re single or married, trust me having that Benz, having that big house, opens doors. If you don’t want to see what lies beyond those doors, then by all means, invest all your money in green stocks and live in a Yurt on an island in the middle of nowhere. Whatever makes you happy

With regard to worry, I think that’s especially true for entrepreneurs because I think there is a certain degree of tension and drive that entrepreneurs have when it comes to their future. Call it a fear of entropy maybe. And that fear drives productivity, makes you work a little harder and play the game a little smarter so you can help ensure your own personal and financial growth. I think it also doesn’t hurt to come up poor, at least in my case anyway. I remember being pre-school age, living in a 12′x50′ trailer, and watching my mom pick out produce from supermarket dumpsters. Being called third class and so on. Boy that sort of childhood will light a fire under your arse, I’ll tell you that for nothing!

Sean

First off…
Congratulation Markus007.

Secondly,
Most questions I can concieve, have already been asked and it appears I have some homework.
This has really stirred my concept of a business model… I have some ideas I want to pursue farther
I have little else to contribute directly to this thread except hopefully some leveling thoughts.

I think my comments, if taken in context are still on-topic…

Quite a while back, I learned something that I would like to share.

“If you want to learn how to do [x], talk to someone who does [x].”

I’ve substituted [x] with what I was originally told because I’ve found that the concept applies to more than just one thing.

The overwhelming truth should not be lost in it’s simplicity.
The world is full of people willing to share advice.
Ironically, most of the talkers have never done what they so freely suggest others should do.

Recognize who you should be listening to and who you should not.
Ignore the naysayers. (For humor, come back in a few years and you’ll see them still hanging out and still saying the same things but still not having accomplished much more than they have today.)
If you’re smart, pluck the true gems of knowledge from this thread and take them as your own.

Peb¤