How To Make Money At Home

When starting with internet marketing the tendency is look for big, easy money, to go “glamorous” instead of sticking to the basics. With the amount of products coming out in this niche alone each and every day, all of them telling you to go after and all of them promising different things, it can be very confusing for anyone – no matter how experienced – to get started.

Since I rebought this blog I’ve tried to keep the post content solid and put out information about building a long term business, something I didn’t start doing for quite some time because I was always chasing the big thing. The main purpose of my company is to work on and setup more sites for my niche site empire, and although we’ll also be looking at one time income (like site flipping, for example) our primary focus is small money every day that will add up to a lot over time.

The problem with the “boring” way of making money is that people can’t really see the potential, with all the hundreds of other ways claiming to make you $50,000 per month or $20,000 per day. Why purchase an Adsense eBook that (realistically) tells you you have to work 3 months to start earning $1,000 per month when you have Product A, B, C, D, E, F, G and H telling you you could be making $15,000 per week with *insert method here* starting tomorrow?

So today’s post will show you the potential of what can be achieved with long term website development. I’ve done an interview with Trent Brownrigg, someone I’ve known for a year or so online. One of Trent’s primary business models is niche website development, and he also works on site flipping from time to time. Combine the two and you get a website that he sold for $48,000 – not a bad sum of money by any means, and a true example of the potential of starting a long term business.

The interview is shown below.

Hi Trent, thanks for agreeing to the interview. How did you get started in internet marketing?

TB: You are very welcome!

I actually got started with internet marketing sort of as a fluke. I had no idea what it even was and I certainly wasn’t searching for it or anything like that. I had just graduated college back in 2003 and was searching for a job in the major that I studied when I came across a work at home ad that looked interesting. It turned out to be some envelope stuffing scam or something like that so I never did it, but that was the point when I somehow started researching internet marketing and everything started from there.

What are the main ways in which you make money online?

TB: I like to spread out my income streams so I make money several different ways. I earn from affiliate marketing, network marketing, Adsense, selling advertising, site flipping, from my own products that I create, and sometimes from other ways. But it all boils down to SEO really. I say that because almost all the money I make from those various methods is from websites/blogs that I have gotten ranked highly in the search engines.

My basic strategy goes something like this… Find a niche, build a website, write some content, get backlinks, and repeat the process all over again.

You recently sold a niche website for $48,000. Could you walk us through the process, including the time it took setting that website up, your monetization methods and how you got backlinks?

TB: The site was in the work at home niche so it wasn’t really a “niche” website in the traditional sense of the word. It was actually the first real website I ever started. I had a few on free hosts before it that I threw up as a newbie because I didn’t know any better. But this one was the first site I bought a domain for and actually cared about. It started as a very simple one page website with some regular black text on a white background. Over time I added hundreds of pages and made it look a little better, but it was always a very ugly site. I used a WYSIWYG editor to build it and there was nothing fancy about it. Even to this day it’s still really ugly because the new owner hasn’t changed it much.

I was never worried about how it looked. All I cared about was getting it top search engine rankings so I focused on building backlinks. Regular link exchanges still worked really well when I started the site so I did a lot of them at first. Article marketing was also one of the main ways I built links to it. I am a big fan of article marketing because it has always worked for me. But I don’t do it the same way a lot of people do, which is blast out as many low quality articles as possible to a few top directories. Instead, I focus on writing high quality articles then I manually submit them to all the top directories and some average directories as well as submit them to any websites I can find in related niches that accept them. It takes a long time but it works, and I find that I can get a lot better results with far fewer articles that way.

I also did other things to get backlinks such as guest blogging, home page link partnerships, dofollow blog commenting, directory submissions, forum signatures, social sites, and other stuff like that. It also got a lot of natural links from other websites once it started ranking highly. I never purchased links or did any shady stuff that I had to hide. It was all done out in the open and for free. Pretty much the only money I ever spent on that site was for hosting and the yearly domain renewal. That’s how I do it with all my sites.

When I sold the site it ranked highly on Google for almost every major keyword phrase there is related to work at home, home based business, home business, and make money at home. And it still does.

It was monetized with affiliate links, Adsense, and paid advertising for the most part.

Listing it must have been hectic. Did you get a lot of interest, and what did you do to make your listing stand out?

TB: Listing it really wasn’t all that bad. I spent a couple days gathering all the information I would need for the auction, wrote it up, and listed it on Sitepoint (flippa). I didn’t do anything special to make the listing stand out other than write up a long description with all the information I could think of that anyone would want to know about the site.

I don’t really know how much interest it had because it wasn’t listed for long enough to see. It got a Buy It Now bid of $48,000 just two days after the listing went live. I also had a very well known internet marketing guru offer me $60,000 for it the next day but I had already started the transaction with the other buyer and I didn’t think it would be right to back out of the deal with him just because someone else offered me more money.

I was sad to see it go but it was time to move on. There are times when I do regret selling it but then I think about how nice the $48,000 pay day was!

How do you select a niche? It’s one of the hardest things for beginners, not knowing what to create a website about from the hundreds of thousands of niches out there. Could you give us some tips?

TB: There’s no real rhyme or reason to how I select a niche. It’s quite random. I’ll see something around the house or on TV or somewhere online that I think might be good for a niche site, so I write it down to research later.

Here’s a recent example: I used to hate coffee but on vacation a few months ago I started drinking it for whatever reason, and now I drink it every day. It got me thinking about how many people really do drink coffee and other drinks that are coffee based, such as cappuccino’s and other similar drinks. So, I started researching various related niches and came up with a bunch of ideas for websites. It turns out there are a lot of people looking to buy coffee makers, cappuccino machines, and other stuff like that.

I try to find niches where people are looking to buy rather than just looking for free information. Those are the ones that tend to be much more profitable. If it has some competition but not so much that it will be really hard to compete, and has enough of a market to be profitable then I’ll go after it.

Most people build sites in big niches like “Make Money Online” and simply can’t compete so they give up after a while. I have sites in that niche but I also have them in a lot of much smaller and easier niches to compete in. Finding a good niche isn’t very difficult. There are things all around you that could be turned into profitable websites. You just have to be on the lookout for them and do enough research to see if they are worth going after.

What is your opinion on some of the shadier ways of making money online, especially blackhat programs?

TB: I’ve never done them so I don’t really have much of an opinion on them. I guess I would just say to stay away from that stuff. There are plenty of legitimate ways to make money online that are much better in the long run so there’s no reason to go for the quick buck with blackhat methods.

Have you ever considered doing a large product launch in the internet marketing niche?

TB: Yeah, I have considered it in the past but not for a long time. That used to be one of my goals several years ago but now I’ve been an internet marketer long enough to realize it’s not something I want to do. I’ve done a few smaller information products over the years that made me a lot of money but it’s just not my style so I quit doing it. Not saying I will never create a product again because I probably will, but going for a huge product launch of “the next big thing” just doesn’t appeal to me anymore.

Thanks for your time Trent!

You’re welcome! It was my pleasure. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to share a little bit about what I do.

Hope you guys enjoyed the interview!

When I bought this blog from the old owner, interviews were one of the things that were quite popular on here (check out the category Interviews). I want to continue doing them, maybe not as often but I’d like to keep them around. If you like the interviews, do let me know.

And make sure you check out Trent Brownrigg – there’s links to a few of his sites that have solid information that will help you.

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