Making My First Internet Dollar
August 30th, 2007 Posted in Money, Internet Marketing
I lied. I have made much more than a dollar before on the internet, but this dollar is different. The money I made before was just always on the side and didn’t mean that much to me. I wasn’t so invested in it.
Now… the dollar I made recently meant a lot…
Think about it. I recently quit my job. My initial plans didn’t work out as well as I hoped it would. I’m now living with my parents and assuring them I’ll be making enough money on the internet before the year ends.
I’m pretty confident in that I will make enough money, but I agree that I am delusional. Then again, everyone is delusion, and it’s really about picking the best kind of delusion, but that’s for another post.
I’ve had a bunch of what I call mini failures already. I thought I could just run off to India without any of my own money for leverage. I had a grand delusion of starting three successful blogs and somehow making enough money with them quickly. The problem was the “quickly” part. It’s hard to make money quickly on a blog unless you already have some kind of leverage in real life, which means you are already successful at doing something.
Blogging is hard work. It takes time to create quality content and then you have spend most of your time marketing. One of my favorite bloggers, John Chow, recently posted that making money blogging is about 10% and 90% marketing. Then you keep hearing that content is king, so that 90% is huge. By the way, he makes $12,000 a month on his personal blog.
After this blogging revelation, I went out to try a different approach. It kinda hurt that I had already invested time in blogging, but hey, life moves on.
I moved on to this thirty day challenge where a couple of internet marketers were telling people that they could make $10 on the internet without spending any money. I was quite intrigued.
After a couple of weeks of them telling me stuff I already knew, then they dropped a bombshell. A way to find a niche market and to have a website rank in the top 10-20 in Google almost instantly. Now for many of you who don’t know anything about search engines, it takes work and time to get traffic from Google. It doesn’t help that Google ranks the age of a website as an important factor.
Anyway, Ed and Dan (internet gurus) showed me a way that I could actually see how many people are searching for a term. This is an amazing feat by itself because an accurate way of measuring this doesn’t exist. Google knows, but they won’t tell us because there would just be more spam. Most internet marketers just spend months developing a website to just have it tank because they find out there isn’t anyone searching for or willing to buy that product.
With this new information, I got sucked into it. I searched and searched for the perfect niche. Realizing that trying to achieve perfection without actually doing anything was going to be a problem, so I picked one and went with it. Guess what it was? A children’s toy called Webkinz.
At first I was a bit put off by creating a website around a toy, but it’s actually a very interesting product. Ganz, the company behind Webkinz, has created an ingenious business model. You buy a stuffed animal just like a Beanie Baby. However, there is a tag on it with a special number. You use this number on their website and you get the animal in the virtual world. Then you can do all sorts of things in this virtual world.
Kids are HOOKED on this Webkinz thing. The top retired animal sells for over $1000 on eBay. There are now hundreds of thousands of kids playing around with their virtual version of their pets.
Anyway, I created website around it. It wasn’t a great website, but it targeted people who were looking to buy Webkinz. I then tried to cram as many Amazon and eBay ads as I could. I then did the internet marketing tricks I was taught and bam, I was ranked in the top 10.
I was pretty impressed. However, it means nothing if you can’t convert it.
I didn’t goto bed that night. The web platform I chose to create my site on was pretty slow, so it took me all night and morning. It was a strange feeling because I didn’t feel tired at all. I was so excited about the potential of my website that I was wide awake till about 2 PM.
The fact that I could stay up all night and do this meant something to me. It had been such a long time since I stayed up all night and felt completely awake. It meant I was doing something worthwhile and exciting.
But, I was pretty delirious that day. I kept checking website statistics until my sleep deprivation finally hit me. I was about pass out, so I went to bed.
After waking up at an odd hour, I checked my affiliate account on Amazon. Then I saw it.
A sale!!! I made a whooping $1.70.
My parents asked me what I was so excited about it. I told them and they laughed. They tried to joke around with me, but they didn’t get it. It wasn’t just an ordinary dollar or $1.70.
It’s special dollar because of its passive income potential. Once I spent the time to build it, I would only need to tweak it once in awhile if I wanted to keep making roughly the same amount.
That’s the power of the internet!
I’ve made about $17 so far from the site alone. It’s still pocket change, but I haven’t really spent much time on it except for checking on it and adding occasional content.
But this is only peanuts. It validates something for me, and it gives me motivation to push forward with different ideas. The potential is endless.
I tried to mimic the success in different products, but I’ve had a tough time. I realized that the internet is the equivalent of the wild west. It’s constantly changing. Our Google overlords hide information from us. There are a bunch of bandits trying to steal money unfairly. It’s like a war zone.
It all boils down to the fact that it ain’t easy work. I’m probably making like 10 cents an hour so far, but personally, it’s incredibly rewarding. I’m incredibly excited, and I hope create enough these small websites to generate enough so I can focus on bigger projects.
If you’re interested in making money on the internet in your spare time, I think I will write a nice guide on how to make your first dollar on the internet, so stay tuned.
Thanks for reading.
Carl Zetterlund
