Find A Unique Concept & TAKE Command OF IT!

MARKETING EXPERIENCE & RIDING THE WAVES:

Time and time again, I talk about how you must change your marketing niche once in a while to continuously make new money online. Over the years I have done everything from content web sites, to sweepstakes and freebie type sites, to running my own Affiliate programs and even permission based email marketing. In early 2004 I had one of my best years with making money online, then later on in things started to slack off and this continued on through most of 2005. During the time I wasn't making much money and it was quite depressing. It's very tough to get back into the groove when you hit a few underachieving projects in a row. In short, I was in a dip... and in the bottom of my latest successful wave. It wasn't until October 2005 that I came up with my next big idea that would soon bring me my best months and year!

Get a new IDEA & Manage IT!

Social networking was beginning to catch fire and for months I knew there was a means to profit from it, but I just hadn't come up with an idea yet. MySpace had millions of users on their network 24 hours a day, there must be ways to make the most of this. Soon enough I realized, instead of trying to sell to these users, why not offer them something for free. I ran through some ideas and came up with my own site to provide free content for social network users. To make a long story short, my site and my content went viral extremely fast. Instead of having users upload their own content or have to search around for what they would look for, I provided everything for free. Very quickly I was receiving thousands of users to my site daily. At max points I was pushing up to 180,000 unique visitors per day, while pushing TERABYTES of data bandwidth. Imagine hosting thousands of images, viewed by millions across several different social networks!

MANAGEMENT OF MASSIVE GROWTH:

Just two months after going live with my new site, I was starting to accumulate some amazing hosting costs. Imagine the cost on hosting thousands of widgets, text applications and images, which are loaded millions of times a day across social networks like MySpace! The only reason why I was able to afford these insane hosting costs, was because of the massive volume of users I was receiving back to my site, not only through social networks, but also from Google and other search engines. You only need a % of a very big number to click on ads, fill out surveys or take any action, to earn money. In two short months I went from having a single dedicated server to having over TEN, then with the insane bandwidth costs added in I was paying up to $12,000 a month. Currently I was currently with EV1Servers.net, and leasing all of my servers. Since I'm not a tech/programmer type guy, I also had a server management team watching my servers constantly to be sure they were always running, just being down for a couple minutes would have lost $100s of dollars. This server management team was not part of EV1Servers, and cost $1000 a month to manage each of the servers, and keep the servers balancers in place. By the end of the third month, I talked with my server management team and we decided arrived to that i can invest in my own servers and take out the middleman for hosting. I went on to order 17 servers from Dell, which are all held and managed in a data center now.

MONETIZATION IS KEY:

On average, my site was receiving around 100,000 unique visitors per day, and I was generating most of my ad revenue through Yahoo Publisher Network, ValueClick Media and CasaleMedia. It wasn't until a year later that I would start testing CPA offers on the site. I'm happy to report, the CPA offers from networks like NeverBlueAds worked extremely well. Originally I had avoided promoting a number of their offers because I thought they were over saturated and wouldn't convert. I finally took their advice and listed a few on the site and even today they are still pushing some great earnings through the site.

TO EXPAND, SELL OR STAY THE SAME:

Back in April, I wrote a post asking the question... "To Sell, or Not to Sell?"... This was a question I had to ask myself when I was approached by a company that wanted to merge/purchase my MySpace resource site. I not only turned down their seven-figure deal, but I was lucky enough to not be among the many sites screwed by the company, as they tried buying many other sites as well. Once acquired by the company, they would wreck the site with adult-like video content and I heard from several people on how they got screwed out of their owed money and contracts.

SUCCESS IS FOUND:

Two years, and over seven-figures later... my little site idea that rapidly became one of my most profitable ideas yet, is still running strong. Despite the fact that I really haven't touched the site in several months, it's still receiving over 25,000 uniques per day and still making a respectable amount of change.

Zac Johnson Blog