(Written by guest contributor Tim Golen)
I\’m going to tell you a true story. When I was first hired at Infomedia, I helped develop an online training program that turned into what today is known as The Profit Vault (http://www.theprofitvault.com). It was designed to be a 13-week course that contained all of our company\’s knowledge about how to set up a website and start earning revenue from it. I was in charge of developing the system, and we had several other people who were in charge of putting content into the system. The content is based off of a lot of the Joel Comm products and knowledge that we had learned through years of experience.
At the time, I was pretty overwhelmed at the amount of knowledge being put into the system, but I didn\’t ever pay attention to it. I had never had a website that made revenue, and I figured that it wasn\’t something that I was cut out for. About six months ago that all changed.
I remember sitting at my desk, thinking about The Profit Vault and asking myself \”I wonder if all that information and knowledge really works.\” There was only one way for me to know for sure, give it a try. I began to go through the content, one week at a time. It didn\’t seem too bad. I was certainly capable of doing the required work, but I realized that I also needed to be motivated to get the work done. I decided then and there that I would put forth my best effort and see where it took me.
I began with my personal blog at http://www.golen.net. It was a blog that I\’ve used over the years to post useful information, pieces of code, or comical stuff. Since I had a website to start working on, I then needed to determine a hot subject to write about. I looked around me at things that I was interested in and I turned my attention to a game that had just been released on the iPhone and I was pretty addicted to: Angry Birds. I started to write and graphically document the different strategies on how to beat each level and post them to my blog.
I soon began to get my first real traffic, and they were all looking for my strategies. I quickly went from around 50 visits a day to around 1200 visits a day. I then did the next logical step, and placed some Google Adsense code on my site. It was simply a matter of a few days before I started to see some revenue. It was nothing big at first. In fact, it was a good day if I made more than $.50. However, I could see the potential. I quickly realized that I needed to do better SEO and keyword research. I also went out and setup a blog specifically for my strategies (http://www.angrybirds.mobi). I chose a .mobi because the biggest portion of my traffic was from mobile device since Angry Birds is a mobile game. I also used WPTouch on my blog to make it look and work better for mobile devices.
I continued to work on my blog and post strategies, reply to comments, and experiment with advertising. Last month I had my first month where I earned over $100, about six months after I had started working on the site. This month I\’m going to make twice that, and there is still room for me to grow and improve. I\’m getting over 2000 visitors a day to my site and it\’s on the rise.
It\’s going to take some hard work, but there is still room out there on the Internet for people to make money with a good website. I wish you lots of luck!