Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

I’ve mentioned before that I derive some of my income online from websites I have purchased - forums in particular - that bring in a steady stream of passive revenue.

It’s not a huge source of income for me (about low four figures at the moment), but given the return on investment - you can buy a website and earn back your investment cost within 12 months at most (usually closer to 6 months) - it’s hard not to take advantage of all the amazing opportunities currently available in the online real estate world.

Dominiche

Ed Dale became famous as an Internet marketer because of his amazing story of selling 38 niche websites for 5 million dollars. He’s gone on to make over 9 million from website trading and it’s pretty clear Ed knows how to make money from buying and selling websites.

Ed, along with his friend Frank Kern, created a program called Dominiche, which teaches people how to replicate their system for locating, buying and profiting from website real estate. Earlier this year Ed joined the team at StomperNet and it appears that Dominiche came along with him.

Presently Ed is producing a series of videos introducing people to the world of buying and selling websites as part of the relaunch of Dominiche, this time brought to you by StomperNet. I just finished watching video number 8, where Ed explains how sometimes it’s better to have little money when entering the web property market.

Yaro Quits Blogging

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With a title like that you would think this article is going to be all about taking the money you make from blogging and sticking it in shares or property or some other form of investment, and you would be right, but the investment method I’m going to explain to you today is not exactly typical. In fact I bet not a single blogger reading this article will have done what I do with some of my blog profits (feel free to leave a comment and prove me wrong though).

What am I talking about?

I’m talking about reinvesting the money you make blogging into web property, in particular buying websites that generate passive income.

I’ve long been a fan of flipping websites, in fact if you type that phrase into Google this blog turns up as the number one ranking article for the previous article I wrote, How To Buy A Website And Flip It For Profit. At the moment though, I’m not much of a flipper, more a buy, renovate and hold type of investor.

Bloggers Are Broke

Let’s face it, most bloggers when they start out are broke. Chances are you don’t have a few thousands dollars lying around for investing in anything and as a result a low-cost start-up, like a blog, is a common pathway for a budding web entrepreneur to follow.

Blogs might not turn a profit quickly, but provided you put in the elbow grease and follow some principles (Blog Profits Blueprint anyone?) you will start making some money eventually. That’s exactly what I did with my blog, although I had the advantage of a nice salary sized cash-flow coming in from my existing web business when I started blogging.

There is an inherent risk when buying websites. I would say that buying a site and optimizing it so it makes more money is an “easy” way to build passive income (I’ll explain how it is passive in a moment) and it’s a much less labor intensive way to make money online than blogging is, but for most people it’s out of the question. You either don’t have the money or don’t know how to do it or you have too much fear holding you back. Starting a blog is a much less scary proposition for most people.

However, once you build a great blog and your income source is stable, why not start to experiment and build income sources that are not as labor-intensive as blogging? A blog cash-cow can be the perfect fuel for building a nice portfolio of web property which quietly makes you money in the background while you spend your days writing a blog and enjoying the fruits of your labor.

It’s Early Days In The Web Property Market

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The recent series of articles I wrote on blogging as a business model sparked a few queries about how I have gone about outsourcing the writing of my blogs. In the article I talked about how it is important to move away from being solely responsible for content output, otherwise you limit your potential for growth and are effectively self employed.

SmallBusinessBranding.com Case Study

Over a year ago I purchased the blog SmallBusinessBranding.com (SBB) from Michael Pollock. When I first took over ownership of the blog I began writing the content myself, doubling my writing commitments since I was also writing to this blog, Entrepreneurs-Journey (EJ), at the same time.

I had a lot of difficulty writing to two blogs. Each time I wrote an article for SBB, I realized it was appropriate for EJ as well. I went from writing one blog 100% of the time to dividing my output across two blogs, and I knew from experience running two businesses at once would end in weakening both sites (see my business timeline for the story of the English School I was running [badly] as a second business). I decided to come up with a solution to keep SBB running without me as the author, since I wanted to devote all my writing output to EJ.

After asking for suggestions in my forums and brainstorming, I decided to bring on one or two bloggers to write for SBB. My initial plan was to advertise for the bloggers and test them for a month. If they proved dedicated I would offer them revenue share of income generated by SBB - I was thinking something along the lines of 50%. I was going to do some number crunching first to work out how many posts were done vs how much they would get paid, but this situation never eventuated.

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I have a confession to make. Ever since I installed the SearchStatus extension into my FireFox browser I have discovered a new addiction to go right along with my healthy love for PageRank - it’s close cousin, AlexaRank. In this case the bar is blue, and unlike PageRank the statistic AlexaRank represents has more to do with traffic and reach than search engine ranking authority or incoming links, but like PageRank is probably best interpreted as a “fun tool” rather than a definitive way to evaluate a website.

The image above is a snapshot taken from the bottom right of my browser. Those bars change for each site I visit. PageRank (green) changes on a per page basis while AlexaRank (blue) is fixed for the entire domain. As much as I try not too give much weighting to those two metrics, I find myself looking at the bars every time I visit a site to help me determine whether the site is worth watching, how well it ranks and how popular it is. If both bars are high I tend to care more - I want to assess why a particular site is doing well.

Before I continue, if you have no idea what PageRank is read this article - PageRank Explained - Keeping SEO Simple. If you have no idea what AlexaRank is, then read on…

What Is AlexaRank?

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If you read Rich Schefren’s latest free e-book - The Final Chapter (aff) - you will have come across a link he provided to a great tool called Search Status for the Firefox browser.

You can download Search Status here

It’s a neat little Firefox extension that provides you with some handy shortcuts for things like PageRank, AlexaRank, backlinks, keyword density, link reports, whois and a bunch of other search engine marketing related tools.

Rich mentions this tool in his section of the Final Chapter as a resource for conducting competitive intelligence. You can use it to find which sites are linking to competitor sites so you can find out their likely JV partners, affiliates and traffic sources, which is valuable information. Rich had discussed some great points in the e-book about performing research on your competitors and I have to admit he takes it to a new level, I never thought to do some of things he suggests.

Personally I very often use backlink checks and the various tools provided by Search Status when I am evaluating a site I am thinking of buying or monitoring my own sites. Having all the tools available from my browser window makes these jobs just that little bit more efficient.

If you are obsessed with backlinks, PageRank, AlexaRank, and all the other search engine metrics, this tool is a must. Thanks to Rich for bringing it to me attention.

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