These days, there’s lots of commercials that I see out there. They’re like, build a website, we have all these templates, you can be up and running over the weekend, in five minutes and 10 minutes, whatever. When I started my website about 10 years ago, it was 2010.
I’d been commuting back and forth to work. I was listening to the radio and I just kept hearing all these reports of all these companies that were getting millions and millions of dollars invested in them. And I thought that’s cool. I just don’t understand it.
How does it work?
So I started doing some research and I came across at the time it was called site built it. and site build it had a key component to it that said, basically, their pitch to people who are interested in paying for their service “was anybody can build a website”. which is very true. And their pitch was “but will teach you how to build a web business”.
The differences is that anybody can build a website; but your website is only as valuable as the traffic to it and the people who are buying your products.
That was very intriguing to me. Because the whole time I was thinking to myself, how do you get people to a website? Other than advertising; you go on to TV, radio, billboards. I knew I knew that much. You could pay a bunch of money. To advertise and all those different types of mediums.
But I thought, I’m just a single person with this one website that’s very specific to speech pathologists.
How do I get somebody there and then how do I make money with it?
And so I started learning about it and site-build-it has an entire education component to it, which made it very much worth the money to me and it was very little money. By the way, it was only about $30 a month or more if you paid for a whole year is $300 You get two months free I believe it’s still the same today.
That’s how I started learning how to build an audience through search engine optimization and through building valuable relevant keyword focused content. And what evolved from there was a building out content, started getting picked up by search engines started getting traffic to the site. And then I thought okay, well now, you know, monetization always comes after you’ve built the value and so on.
And my original thought was, I wanted to just put advertising on air that was it. And just I didn’t want to do anything else other than build content and then make money passively by people clicking ads, looking at ads, viewing ads.
It took me about five years before I quit my job. There was a lot that went on during that five years. I could have done it sooner. I probably could have done it in like a year or two and I focused on it and moving, changing jobs and having kids and all these kind of things.
It could have been a year to the for getting the traffic that I was getting. And then it may have been I don’t know, maybe six or 12 months for product development and all that kind of stuff.
It took me about six months before I started making money on it. So I spent the first three months doing the learning and the education. It took me three months before I bought my URL.
I probably spent about three months learning and then another three months or four months building content, and then I finally started getting started getting picked up by search engines. And then you know, I probably started making, 10, 20, 50 bucks a month, off of advertising and whatnot.
The website is called ‘home speech home’, which had no relevance to really any entrepreneur ever, but you’re very welcome to go check it out. The site is basically content that my wife and I developed for speech therapists and parents and related professionals to use with children who have trouble with speech therapy.
What site build it syllable teaches you to pick a niche and to focus all your content and all the keyword research and build an entire website around one specific topic.
What does it take now to keep it running?
Currently, it depends on how much I want to make. So if I want to make more than I could spend maybe five to 10 hours a week,
Honestly, two hours a week if I wanted to make more because if I wanted to run sales and my products on a weekly basis, I have a lot of my emails already pre written and I use them and I reuse them over and over again and run the sales every week or every other week or for Black Friday or whatever the case may be.
But for the most part right now it just kind of runs and runs on its own and then if I want to make a little bit extra I can leverage my email list and run a sale on one of my digital products.
Making Products
When my wife and I said that we needed to make products we were gonna make flashcards but then I started looking into my data and on Google Analytics and in Google Analytics, they were showing all these people coming from iPhones.
And so I thought to myself, well I can, I can take all this content and I can put it in so people don’t have to sit and scroll through a really long page. I thought of an app that I can put together that will allow people to access this content pretty quickly.
I spent a summer about 2500 bucks. Having this app, I designed it myself; it was very ugly, and I had it developed and in the first year, it did 1,000% sales. So I did $25,000 in sales from a $2,500 investment. And then I took the proceeds and I reinvested them to make it even better.
And then I paid for professional designer and all these different things and was able to do probably double that the next year. Because it was much prettier and it had more features.
From there, I then developed the flashcards we developed a few more products and developed a store and then pretty much right now I have so I have two different sites that make up ‘home speech home’. First site is the content site which drives traffic.
The content site typically it’s 150 to 200,000 visitors a month and about 500 to 600,000 paid views a month, which means the average visitor looks at about two to three pages on the site.
That’s my traffic engine. From my traffic engine, I’m able to then put my own ads on there for my own products and then redirect them to my store or redirect them to the app store to purchase my products.
How do you make money from that?
For the ad sales. In the beginning I was making a lot more. Over time that slowly dwindled. Last yaer at this time with ads I might have been making $150 a month. So it was never a primary thing.
The app sales, I actually have gone through a couple of iterations after I had revamped it and reinvested all the proceeds, about a year into it with the new version, I was doing really good with sales. But then after the first year, I had some people start contacting and saying, Hey, you should have done this, you could fix this. but you’re thinking so then it got me thinking, I need to I need to create a recurring, I need to have an app subscription.
About a year after that though Apple came out and started pushing like hey we have this whole subscription suite where you can check you know, your your subscribers, how long they stay subscribed for over a long period of time or short period, who’s unsubscribing, and subscribing every day and so forth.
And so that allowed us to get recurring monthly money to keep updating, improving, fixing the app without giving all our money away after we made it a year later.
But the app on average with subscription sales, so we sell a subscription to the app and we also sell it as a one time purchase for people who don’t want the subscription with all the apps in the subscription. Depending on the month. I can do anywhere from like $8000 to $10,000 a month. So that’s that’s the app revenue.
And then and then I took the same content and turned it into digital downloadable flashcards. They’re all automated. The sales process is automated when they buy they get an email with the link to download it. So pretty much when you asked earlier, how much time I spent every every day or every week or every month. I could probably work a couple hours a week and I would be fine.
The flashcards if I run sales on them every week I can usually do anywhere from 2500 to $5,000 a month. So all that combined in I was sitting usually around 10,000 to 13,000 a month.
Is there a change of the season at all?
Yes 100%. So our sales usually come between September and may because the majority of our audience who frequent the site are our teachers and so they’re working during the school year and then in the summer, our revenue usually is like halved because they’re off on spring break or on summer break.
So is it just you that created this website or do you have people that work with you employees or your wife is also particularly an employer with you or how’s that work?
Yeah, so she’s not technically an employee. But she’s, you know, partner partner in the company. And yes, it’s pretty much been her and I’ve been I’ve done most of it. We’ve paid a few people here and there to create content or we have when we had to pick out all the pictures on that in the beginning for the app.
We hired somebody to help us kind of screen those so that we didn’t waste as much time searching for them. We had other people search for them, bring them to us and then we would kind of filter them out.
Recently in probably the last six months, I’ve also added on another new revenue stream, which has been great, which is not new. They’ve been around. They contacted me back in March of 21. They said hey, we think this might be a good fit for you. So I was like, Hey, I’m always open to trying things. And so I implemented their ad code.
what they are is that kind of an aggregator. What they do is they put like the pop up ads on the bottom of the screen. I’m sure you’ve seen him before he visited a website ever. They put little pop ups from the top, from the top down from the bottom up from, they’ll put them on the side, that kind of stuff.
One Monday back in March, the end of March 2001. I implemented their ad code on my site and one ad on the bottom. That popped up on the bottom of the site both on mobile and on on the website or on the web. And in like the first month in April, I think I made like $600. It’s way better than Google Adsense and running Google ads on my site. So I thought that was really awesome. And then the next month I did like $800. Then the next month I did $1200. And it turned out that it was over the summer too. And so that kind of helps supplement a little bit in the summer. Today we are recording this episode, and I’m on track to do $3,000 this month alone, and it’s been 100% passive income with this ad company by just by putting their ad code on my site six months ago.
So that’s been that’s been kind of something that I’m moving a little bit more towards using this company and building out more content because they’re, they’re not based on clicks. They’re based on impressions and so they’ll pay me a couple dollars for every 1000 views. So since my site gets around 60 to 70,000 views a day paid views a Day, That means I’ll get so many ad impressions and then they pay me a couple dollars per 1000 ad impressions.
So my new kind of like way I’m going I’m still obviously going to be selling my apps, my my content or my flashcards and all those things. But now it’s pretty much I’m getting paid as long as I’m getting traffic to my site. I’m getting paid, right? I’m making money on the traffic that people were coming on making it off of people were buying the apps or buying flashcards and so that’s kind of how I’ve wanted so it’s turned out to be really good and so that’s that’s where I’m kind of going with. My new strategy is to build out more content for more views.
So if you had to do it again, What would you do differently?
I wanted to help people. That’s why I became a speech pathologist. But I learned early on that nine to five just wasn’t for me. I just don’t enjoy it. I didn’t enjoy working with kids. That was fun. It got a little frustrating sometimes, because I couldn’t help them make the kind of progress I was looking for.
Then it came down to I was only making like $40,000 a year and I didn’t get paid over the summer because we’re off on break. So as my wife and I talked about starting a family, having more kids, everything just gets more and more expensive and so I was like being a speech therapist in the schools making 35 $40,000 a year isn’t going to cut it.
That’s when I started looking into this. I was like if I can do something where I can still work my job and then also be making extra money on the side. Hey, that sounds good to me. And then when the realization came that I could have it be my fulltime thing, stay at home, work from home, be at home, have my own home office and do my own thing without anybody telling me what to do.
If you’re familiar with the book; Think and Grow Rich; I highly recommend to anybody who wants to change anything about their current life. The premise of the book is, whatever you think they’re all I can think about in the future, was working from home, being able to eat every nail if I wanted to with my family. that was kind of what my motivation was there.
Case some point there was this girl and one of my corporate mastermind group at one point entrepreneurs trying to miss out on this one. She mentioned one book (The Invisible selling machine by Ryan Deiss) about email marketing because I understood the value of email marketing If you don’t have an email list get an email list; work on getting an email list.
She told me to read this one book on email marketing, and that book alone helped me to realize that I how I could leverage my email marketing strategy to sell more product. before I just though oh I send an email out once and I sold the product to some people, I guessed the rest wasn’t interested.
But the problem is with that thinking; people are ready to buy in different times. So they may not be ready today or they may be ready two weeks from now or a month from now or six months from now.
I have people on the email list have been on there for five years and just bought something from me yesterday. And I’ve been sending them content for five years.
The point is that she referred me or she recommended this book to me and this book was $10. And that book when reading and applying strategies in that book has maybe over maybe hundreds of 1000s I’ll say hundreds of 1000s of dollars by just implementing the knowledge that was in that $10 book.
Reading
The power ratings. It’s one of the best things you can do because you’re so worth your self educating yourself in this world. So what I’m saying is you’re always learning there’s nothing you will never know everything. So always been learning. It’s very cheap. And being an entrepreneur, especially as you get into any more work,
How many hours you spend reading and researching this before actually started
I spent months reading. site build it has a this 10 day action guide and today is just depends on how long it takes, right? It’s not a 24 hour day, but it’s you know they have these 10 days; but day one might take you a week. day two might take you a month.
I would go to work, come home as soon as we had dinner, hung out with the family a little bit. My oldest child was only about one at a time. As soon as we put her to bed I was down on the computer at like eight o’clock at night. from eight to midnight. I was watching the action guide videos, reading the articles. You know, and it was like having one article and that would have five articles linked out to it so I’d be reading all those.
I spent months educating myself about how it’s done, and how it works and how the internet works. With content creation anyway. I’ve been doing that ever since. There’s no end to the amount of information that’s out there.
What are the mistakes you made?
The biggest mistakes I made was just not focusing on it because in the beginning I was not really focused on it for a number of months. I was kind of looking for anything to get out of my job. I hated my job. My advice is to just get started.
You know, oftentimes I think we kind of psych ourselves out or maybe you get overwhelmed, because it’s easy to get overwhelmed in this information. Right. There’s just so much information out there. And and that was certainly my case and that’s why I did like Soul building for that reason.
, just realizing, realizing that you can do it. I think that that’s probably the biggest takeaway from this episode that I would want people to have and that is no matter what it is which you want to do, you can do it.
I knew nothing about the internet; how to create content, how to search engine optimize. I knew nothing about it.
Now, I’m able to travel with work. I’ve taken my family to Paris or taken them to Costa Rica. I’ve gone to Switzerland snowboarding in the Alps, all because I can meet in the middle of the week, and get cheaper flights.
I can do those things because I own my own time like my website and developed everything, all the products I’ve developed all work without working on them every day all day long. I didn’t know any of that before.
If I can learn how to do it, you can.
Another advice I would give is that failing is okay. We’re taught growing up that it’s a bad thing, but it’s not. Even if it is, everybody is going to fail and it’s okay. What’s important is what you do with that failure.
Say, you decide you want to start a website and you’re going to go do this. If you try and start it and something happens where you fail and you’re unable to continue with it for some rhyme or reason. If you continue to let that keep you down and not try anything else that’s the real failure.
Never give up. It’s going to take some time and effort to get there. So just buckle up and get it done; stick with it.
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