It's been a while (update)

[jazzdrive3]

It's been a long time since I logged on here. Glad to see the forum is still kicking along.

Haven't quit the day job yet, but have worked up to ~$1,000 in almost passive income a month. This let's me have investment capital for other projects. This was mainly done with some niche marketing and putting myself out there to offer a unique service.

One key tip: partner with 2 or 3 other people who have the same goals and drives as you do and you trust, and you'll be able to accomplish much more.

I have a product release on the horizon coming up fast (our official launch will be later this week), and it could help other entrepreneurs and small business owners on a tight budget. I'll let everyone know here right after the launch.

Any major success stories here lately?

[DaveCraige.com]

Wow, congrats on your success. You are one of the few people here who have made it past the $500 a month mark. Would love to hear more about your businesses.

[jazzdrive3]

Well I pretty much just followed the 30 Day challenge and then expanded upon it with my own experiences.

The majority of income comes from the Ebay affiliate program and adsense, over a range of 20+ sites. So no one site really makes a ton. My largest gets about 300 unique visitors a day (first in google for the phrase) and makes about $5 in adsense a day.

It's a lot of work initially, however.

[tomswiftjr]

My largest gets about 300 unique visitors a day (first in google for the phrase) and makes about $5 in adsense a day.

Congrats on your hard work and resulting success. I'm curious, though: why are you monetizing with adsense? Is your niche a really hard one to sell to? I've heard a lot of folks say that the best thing about adsense is how easy it is to start, but in the long run, it's not the best way to make money. 300 daily unique visitors via SEO is a great accomplishment, but it seems like there's got to be a better way to monetize those folks than that. For example, if you add a newsletter signup and get a 10% opt-in rate, you're adding 30 new people a day to a list, or almost 1000 per month. Push affiliate products or offers to those folks and if just 5% of them buy, that's 50 sales per month. If you make $20 per sale, that's $1000 / month right there, not counting upsells or anything else. And there are folks out there getting 30-40% opt-in rates on squeeze pages, which suddenly turns this one site into something that you could live off of.

Please believe me when I say that I don't at all intend to detract from your success, just curious about why you've chosen the monetization model that you have.

[jazzdrive3]

In super targeted niches, adsense pays big when you get natural search traffic. I get CTR of 10%+.

That being said, I have been trying to brainstorm other ways to monetize it. I do have a newsletter signup, but it's conversion is very low. To get natural search traffic, you can't just have a squeeze page. The site is very informative with lots of content, which is why google has ranked it so high, so it's hard to get them to signup for anything when their questions are answered. The good thing is that I haven't done any work on it in 6 months, and it makes ~$150 per month. 20 more of those type sites...

If anyone is interested in perhaps partnering to monetize the traffic, PM me. The niche is pets, specifically dogs.

[Dus10]

I think the ultimate monetization strategy would be to develop a product/service that you could market through your current stream. Now that you have the SEO and traffic down, develop something that you can sell and get a higher margin of the overall supply chain.

[jazzdrive3]

Already tested current products out there directly related to test demand. They didn't sell at all. It's not buying traffic, but it certainly is clicking traffic. Most of the ads are for informational type sites.

Admittedly, the product's landing page pretty much sucked, but with the mass amount of relevant traffic I sent to it, there should have been some sales.

I'll try something else perhaps.

[blackhatontherocks]

Just to second something here:
NOTHING has jumped my income in the great scheme of things then partnering with a like-minded fellow has.