I get questions about how to create profitable websites from subscribers to my Unusual Ways (To Make and Save Money) Newsletter. I do have some experience in this, after many years building an online business that produces far more than any job I've ever had. Here are some of the common questions along with my answers.
Q: How many sites do you have?
A: My wife and I have at least 30 websites, but we only actively work on and maintain a dozen or so.
Q: Are they all decent money making websites?
A: No. In fact, even after five years of doing this I can;t predict which sites will take off and which will never quite catch on. Some sites that I poured a lot of time into make less than $50 per month, while others that I barely look at for months on end make hundreds per month. Our two sites that make the most (more than $1,500 per month each) are about real estate and brainpower. I suppose the lesson here is to create at least several sites, in case some don't so well.
Q: How do you make money with your websites?
A: Three basic ways. First, we have pay-per-click advertising. This is the easiest way by far, since we can just forget about a site for a while and collect as people click. The second way we make money is with affiliate programs. To be honest, even the best one out there only nets us a few hundred dollars monthly, and many of them don't make $20 for us. There are experts on affiliate marketing - I'm not one. Finally, we do okay selling my own ebooks. I have about 20 that I've written, and they sell for $5 to $27 at the moment.
Q: If you had to start over again, what's something you would do differently?
A: I would create sites based on niche markets that will always be around and on subjects that don't change much over time. My site on how to remove carpet stains is still very relevant, for example, but my pages about real estate from 2004 seem pretty out-of-date. I don't like having to rework a site continually.
Q: If you started now, what niches would you target?
A: I would still target most of the same niches as we have. I would probably identify ten niches that were most interesting to me, because it really helps to have an interest in what you're writing about. But I would concentrate on the three out of those ten that had the most profit potential. That would include a money-related site, of course.
Q: How many visitors do you need to a site to make money?
A: That varies tremendously depending on the niche and the nature of your site. We have sites that make as little as a couple cents per visitor (thankfully they have high-traffic), and some that make five or six times as much. We rely on volume, which is not the best plan, but it works for us. Some sites make over a dollar per visitor because they target good niches and sell high-dollar items through mailing lists. They would love to have our hundreds of thousands of visitors per month!
Q: If you were to ignore your interests and just try to systematically make a website that made the most money, what would you do?
A: First find a niche that serves high-value visitors. You can do this by opening a pay-per-click advertising account to see what you need to bid for certain keywords. If advertisers are paying two dollars for a certain keyword, for example, then it makes sense that each visitor they get must be worth that much. Go to the sites of those advertisers to see what they sell. Sell that or something similar.
Delegate out the writing and have dozens of pages targeting all the related keywords, but especially those that indicate buying intention, like "review of. " or "where to buy. ". Get articles written for you to distribute, to promote the site. Pay for help with a link-building campaign. Have a newsletter or other mailing list that visitors are encouraged to subscribe to so you'll have many opportunities to market to them.
Develop a site that makes an average of a dollar or two per visitor, and then optimize it. If you can get even a few thousand visitors monthly, you can make some decent money. If you can make two dollars per visitor and get ten thousand of them every month, you'll make almost a quarter of a million dollars annually. That's how you create websites if you don't care what they are about. Otherwise, list the niches you actually like and just choose the one that has the most profit potential. That gives you the best of both approaches.
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InboxDollars Review
An unbiased, in-depth review of InboxDollars
To preface this review, let me just say this: I'm not a fan of so-called "Get Paid To" websites. Like, at all. I have absolutely hated every Get Paid To site I've ever signed up for (although it's been a couple of years since I've last tried one). From my experience, they're tedious, mind-numbing vortexes of suck that aren't worth the time or effort.
Now, with that said, I have to admit that I've been extremely impressed with InboxDollars since signing up with them a couple of days ago as of this writing. I went into the site with extremely low expectations (pretty much figured I would just take a quick look around the site, try a couple of offers, and never return to it again), and Inbox Dollars has managed to surpass those low expectations, and then some. This is going to be the first money-making site of this type that I've ever been willing to actually recommend to someone.
Before I proceed with the rest of this review, let me get the disclaimer out of the way first: InboxDollars will not make you rich. You probably won't ever earn enough from InboxDollars to buy your own private island. You won't even be able to quit your job, tell your boss where he or she can shove it, and retire on the money you make from InboxDollars. But, you will have the opportunity to consistently earn a few cents (or even a few dollars) every day doing some simple tasks online that are very easy and don't take up too much time. Sound good? Alright, cool. How about we take a look at the site now?
The first thing that impressed me about InboxDollars was how nice the site looks. Very professional - clean, simple, and intuitive. Most sites like this usually look pretty chintzy and untrustworthy. The second thing that impressed me was just how much stuff there is to do on it. There's really a lot of variety in the kinds of activities on the site that you get paid for. From reading emails (you get $0.02 for each e-mail and so far I've gotten 2-3 per day), taking surveys (pay varies but most of these seem to be in the $0.25 to $1.00 range), watch video advertisements (worth $0.01 to $0.04 each from what I've seen so far), fill out offers (haven't done any of these yet but there are a couple of interesting ones that I'm planning to do - again, the payout varies but these are where the big money is. I've seen offers with rewards of $20 here.), search the web (worth $0.01 for every 2 qualified searches), and even simple online tasks that work similarly to Amazon's Mechanical Turk. There's even a coupons section, and you can earn cash back from shopping with selected retailers - Pretty great bonus for the frugal-minded. And there are also monthly sweepstakes that you can enter, or games to play if you want to as well. This is a very fully-featured website. There's a lot more to do here than in any other site of this type that I've seen.
Anyway, let me walk you through a bit of the site and take a look at some of the promotional offers you get for signing up. First of all, there's a $5.00 sign-up bonus, so that's nice. There's also a list of tasks you can complete and get paid for which are basically just showing you how to use the website:
Very easy to do all of this stuff, and it'll add an extra $1.18 to your coffers. The "Take First Survey" part is pretty much just providing your background information. These are really easy:
I've completed some actual surveys beyond the profile ones so far. Not my favorite thing to do in the world but the surveys seem to usually be a reasonable length and haven't been too tedious and they pay pretty well. They've also been really easy to qualify for so far, which hasn't always been the case in the past from other sites for me. Might just be me being the right demographic for the ones I've tried so far, I don't know.
And here's probably my favorite part of the site: The Spin Win thingy.
I didn't exactly expect to ever actually win anything from this as from my experience on sites like say, iWon, these things are always rigged against you and you might as well not even bother. Not so with InboxDollar's wheel, though - I actually won $0.05 on my very first spin. And then another 5 cents on the second spin. And then a $0.25 cent survey bonus, and a couple of sweepstakes entries as well. Needless to say, this thing is extremely generous. Hey look, I just won another sweepstakes entry while I was taking these screenshots:
You get a spin for every survey you successfully complete. The link can be hard to find when you don't know where it is, so I'll go ahead and let you know now that you can find the Spin and Win link at the top of the Surveys page after you win one. You also get a free spin everyday (called Billy's Spin Win for some reason), but as far as I can tell the only way to access it is by downloading and installing InboxDollars' toolbar (and doing so will get you a $1.00 reward). I personally don't like installing toolbars like this and figured I'd probably delete it after receiving credit for it, but damn if I don't actually find the thing pretty useful. I think I'll probably keep the thing around for awhile.
I haven't gotten paid by InboxDollars yet as I just signed up and haven't reached the $30 payment threshold to request a check yet, so I'll edit this review with an update on that as soon as I can. I know InboxDollars has been around for years now and has a solid reputation so I'm not too worried about that.
Anyway, that's about all I have to say about the site for this review right now. To sum it up, I think InboxDollars is a very solid option if you're looking for a site to make a little bit of extra spending money in your free time, and I wholeheartedly recommend it. Seriously, I do. If you want to sign-up for the site, here's the link (full disclosure: that is a referral link and I'll get a kickback if you click on it and sign up. If you don't feel comfortable with that, here's a non-referral link to Inbox Dollars you can click instead, or just go to your search engine of choice and search for the site yourself. I don't want anyone to think that I wrote this review just to make a few bucks. Ain't my style.) Thanks for reading!
