March 30, 2007

$100K Site History - November 2005 First $1000

Still CoolI’d always known I could make a chunk of change with Coolest Gadgets but it was November 2005 that really confirmed this to me. Through out the month it was averaging around 1,000 visitors a day and 3,000 page views, it was also the first month that it earned over $1,000 of combined income.

The site was beginning to pick up links naturally now and it also benefited from a fluky bit of paid promotion that exceeded all expectations. Back in October I’d submitted CG to Cool Site of the Day, this cost me $27 (they are accepting free submissions at the moment) then at the beginning of the month I got an email saying CG would be cool site of the day on November 3rd. What this basically means is they will send a swarm of visitors my way who will vote how cool the site is.
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Filed Under: Building Traffic, History of a $100K Site 22 Comments
March 28, 2007

Why ethical blogging is good for your business

earlI’m a firm believer in karma and the philosophy of doing to others as you want done to you and in the blogging world I find this rings particularly true.

One of the things I always do when reporting on a story I found on another site is link to them as the source. Other than just being plain polite (they did find the story first after all) it also offers various benefits:
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Filed Under: Blogging 7 Comments
March 26, 2007

First bit of traffic to the $100K Site

CHart

I launched Coolest Gadgets back on August 18th 2005, like many people a lot of what I did was via trial and error. From the offset I wanted to have multiple posts per day which I soon realised takes a lot of bloody work so I took on a paid writer very early on.

I found my first paid writer, Anita via Digital Point, one thing I always try to do is compliment a job well done publicly and criticise privately. I posted a personal review about Anita’s work on DP which resulted in Anita getting more work and me a good reputation (hopefully), the only downside being Anita got so busy she had to turn down some other work I wanted doing. Anita carried on writing for CG for about 6 months and I still see her stories cropping up in comments and search engines to this day. I will be doing a post later on about finding good paid writers.
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Filed Under: Blogging, History of a $100K Site 14 Comments
March 22, 2007

Choosing a $200,000 Domain Name by Error and Fluke

I know this is meant to be the history of a $100,000 site but as I’ve just been offered (and turned down) $200K for it I thought I’d try to sensationalise the title a bit, sorry 🙂

The choosing of the domain coolest-gadgets.com was a lucky mistake that I’ve learnt from. I knew I wanted to do a site about gadgets so to choose the name I did a search on Overture to see what gadget phrases had the most searches. To my surprise Overture reported that the term “coolest gadgets” was searched for over 10K per day on Yahoo (and the other engines that use Yahoo’s technology).
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Filed Under: History of a $100K Site 21 Comments
March 20, 2007

Real World Examples of the $5,000 Hour

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I remember reading a while go about the five thousand dollar hour, where you spend an hour working on an idea that will earn you an extra $5K over the space of the year. I quite like that sort of hourly rate and have been fortunate to of had four such hours in the last year. So that’s an extra $20K for 4 hours work, if only every hour was that productive.

All 4 ideas were small tweaks and additions to my main site Coolest Gadgets and can easily be replicated on other sites.

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Filed Under: History of a $100K Site, Money Making Tips 30 Comments
March 18, 2007

History of a $100,000 Site

When I first started the journey of quitting the 9-5 rat race and becoming a full-time webmaster entrepeneur guy who makes cash on the web, I looked for stories and examples from people that had done it before me. I never found any that included all the gory details so I thought I’d share my experiences, warts and all.

The site I’ll be sharing the details of is www.Coolest-Gadgets.com (CG). I own and run quite a few sites but CG is my best success story so far. In CG’s first year it was making over $100 a day from Google Adsense, it’s now just over 18 months old and the forecasted profit for this year is well over the $100K mark.

To start with I want to share the traffic levels and Adsense income over the first year.

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Filed Under: History of a $100K Site 18 Comments
March 18, 2007

Welcome to Self Made Minds

I always find it a bit tricky doing the first post on a blog, so here goes. First off welcome to Self Made Minds, the site is run by 2 online entrepreneurs, Scott and myself Al. We’ve both quit the 9-5 rat race and make all of our earnings off our own projects, we’re not millionaires yet but well on the way :).

The purpose of this site is share some of the things we’ve done right and also mistakes we’ve made along the way, if you don’t make mistakes you’re either doing nothing or doing something wrong.

Comments and suggestions are always more than welcome.

Filed Under: Site News 18 Comments