I have always prided myself on building new income streams on a shoestring. My thinking has always been that many new businesses such as, say, a restaurant, often fail because they lack adequate funding. Many times business owners must borrow money in order to start a business, and as soon as they do, the clock starts ticking. If the business fails, that leaves the owner with nothing to show for their efforts but a pile of debt and a lot of phone calls from angry creditors. To avoid this situation, I have only sunk what money I could afford to lose into my businesses.
com
Running a business in this manner has some serious drawbacks. First, it can take a tremendous amount of effort and time as you don’t have the budget to bring in outside help or advise you on your next step. In addition, the amount of money you’ll be making will also start out small. I was absolutely floored when our first 2 sites were pulling in $1.00 a day in Adsense revenue, even when I knew that our hosting and domain costs took a large chunk of that away from actual profit.
The advantage to starting a low-budget business is that you really don’t have anything to lose but time. If your idea fails, you can immediately scrap it and move onto something else without needing to worry about the potential ramifications of failure. Given that most business owners suffer several failures before they find success, this gives you an advantage.
Once your shoestring business has found some success, though, you may need to invest additional money to expand your income. This is best if the revenue to do that comes from the business itself (and why starting a side business on the cheap is best when you already have a full time income). So it is that our portfolio of small niche sites is currently earning about $10 a day in Adsense, but my goal is to bring that number up to $15.00 per day before the end of the year. $5.00 a day may not seem like much, but it adds up quickly.
New Horizons
The problem with building new sites from scratch is that it takes significant amounts of time for search engines to really appreciate them and rank the site accordingly. Most often this means a few months of updating content despite getting little in return in terms of revenue.
Now that the portfolio brings in enough money to invest elsewhere, we’re considering plunging that money into existing sites that are making rather small sums of money consistently. This means that we’ll be buying a site that has already gone through the growing pains of a new domain and can hit the ground running. This does raise the price point of the site, generally what it will earn in 6-12 months is what you can expect to pay up front. If we can get enough data to show that the site has current rankings, good content, and longetivity, we can buy these sites to get above the $15.00/day mark. I’ll keep you posted.