How many sites for going full online?

[jhora]

I have some questions for those, that already earn their living in IM (if you will be willing to answer it):

How many sites have you had up and running at the moment when you went fully online and how long did it take? I am not asking how much money did you make on them at that point or anything like it, I just want to have some educated guess of how to set my long term goals and also I would like to make my own estimate how much time will it take me to support those sites.

The reason why I am asking that I like to set goals as it is always very stimualting to achieve one (all of you know that better than me) and of course it is easier to measure my progress. So far I was able to make short-term goal (successfuly finish the galenge), mid-term goal (reach state where bills for my IM activities will be more or less covered by income they generate, so i can keep learning without too much money-related stress). I would like to set my long term goal as having portfolio of sites, that will steadily generate roughly the same income I have now from my work. But so far I have no idea, what that means and I have no idea, if I can actually reach that goal while still working - I am hoping that with your answers I will be able to roughly figure that out for myself at the point when I will fully understand the process that is taught by The Challenge.

PS: If this answer was already answered somewhere, just provide a link. I did my best searching for it, but found nothing

[DeanRichards]

It's an understandable question, and one that comes up in one form or another on a fairly regular basis, and I can only answer it from my experience, which is two-fold.

In actual fact, pick any numbers you like and they will be valid. People have gone pro with one site and other people have hundreds and still struggle. It's all over the map. It is the same way with the results people get from The Challenge; some are wildly successful and many are somewhat successful and many bail out. There's just no telling what will happen with you based on what has happened with others... because every possible outcome has happened with others.

Most of the guys I know well enough to have any clue about their income have between ten and a thousand sites... and I'm not exaggerating. I know plenty of guys doing mass site building with server-side software. I know guys who will tell you they're killing it with one or two sites (and they are) but what they don't tell you is that they burned through fifty or a hundred sites getting their chops down. I also know a guy who has been an avid collector of expensive watches for a very long time and he's been tinkering with one website for years and now it does quite well. So like I said, it's really impossible to use how other people play the game to say anything about what results you will have as you play the game.

It really does all depend on you.

Which means that you do, in fact, have some idea of how it might play out based on your experiences so far. It should be fairly easy for you at this point to look at your niche and compare it to others and to maybe look further up the food chain to market level sites if that makes sense for your business. The math is simple. To make more money, you have to expand in some way and that means either more sites or more work on the same site.

Personally, I'm in a niche that is part of a larger market where the market leaders have sites that average thousands of pages with millions of backlinks... so there is always room for me to expand without building more sites, but you may be in a different situation. Or you may be in a similar situation, but it will play out differently for you than it has for me. And that's the problem for your very logical but unanswerable question... no matter what numbers you try to grab onto as a measure of "what is it going to take to go pro" they aren't going to work. Look at your own story so far...

So far I was able to make short-term goal (successfuly finish the galenge), mid-term goal (reach state where bills for my IM activities will be more or less covered by income they generate, so i can keep learning without too much money-related stress).

Trust me, there are many more people who take The Challenge that can't make a similar statement than there are those who can, which is just one more example of the fact that everyone's experience is unique.

I think it is pretty obvious that you're on the right track, so just keep working and growing as a marketer. That really is all you can do, regardless of whether it is going to take you one site or a thousand.

[alx]

What dean has said is bang on, you can't give a number because it depends on so many factors.

What you can do however is crunch a few numbers, if you have just finished the challenge you will be looking at sites getting traffic of roughly a hundred people a day if you can get the top spot.

If you convert at .5% which is reasonable you will make half a sale a day.

If you sell a product for around $50 and you get 50% then you will be making $12.5 a day/$87.5 a week for each site.

So if you had eight of these sites you would make $700 a week. Im guessing enough to quit your job.

You must realise that these figures are ALMOST meaningless, but by doing "back of a cigarette packet" maths like this you can set yourself goals and work towards a target.
To work on the kind of figures mentioned here you would need to sell digital products, so consider that when choosing your niches.

I hope this had helped you create some focus.

Alx

[jhora]

Thank you both for interesting information, your responses gave me a lot to think about. And it also led me to another question - the answer will also be different from person to person, but I hope that not so much:

How much time should I (generaly beginner in IM, but experienced in world of IT and web) invest on daily basis into IM (that means learning IM and working on niches in total) in order to be able to start working full online in one year from today - lets say it will mean to have gross income of 700$ as described in the example from alx?

I know that can differ greatly from person to person and there is no guarantee, but I am hoping to get an average number - an educated guess that will tell me whether I am giving it enough time now and whether I have enough time for the future when my activities will involve more sites and therefore they will need more of my time (I just made an estimate that for one site I would need to write approximately 6 articles a week (2 for blog, 2 for ezine and 2 for squidoo), which means 25 hours a week of just pure writing for 8 sites mentioned in example by alx - adding the time I need for other tasks needed it would need more time than I actually have - that means that there must be things I dont know, which will make it more efficient and that means I should not concentrate on "hours-spent-per-site" ratio but more on "hours-per-day-spent-working-on-any-IM-related-stuff" ratio...

Thanks in advance...

[josephgrobertson]

Well if you go by the Challenge and spend 30 minutes a day (works for me for 1 site so far), then you could just say 30 mins a day per site - or you could add onto that if you decide you are going to take a bit more each day per site.

Not counting setup time of course, which is just a one time 'time-expense.'

The challenge makes it clear that sites need to marinade a bit, and too much action on them each day is not only unnecessary, but sounds like it could potentially cause problems w/ the google.

For reference, I'm only in the middle of mod 4 - and I rushed a bit through the setup out of excitement and interest (site is not yet a week old), but through setting up my fueling mechanics (google reader, twitter, instapaper, forums etc) - it seems like a process that could be made quite effective and efficient.

TLDR: 30 mins a day per site (though im new to this so take my thoughts with a grain of salt).

edit: as a side note, i do spend way more than 30 mins a day, but i'm being pretty inefficient with my time - i should probably be working on at least two sites, just can't decide on the next key phrase (have a few options im juggling).

[alx]

jhora,

I will assume you have a job and you have some extra cash to spend on building this business:

YOU NEED TO OUTSOURCE!!!

You can not write that many articles a week, you will not be able to do it and do backlinking aswell. You don't need to post 2 a week to ezine, just one will do - the same for squidoo. (if this is contrary to the challenge then ignore me, its a while since i did it. Moderators consider me self slapped)

I would write the blog articles myself, and then outsource the rest. A good place for this is -

textbroker.com
At textbroker you can buy 100 words for $1.20 at the lowest quality. See the site for more details.

Secondly you cannot do the backlinking yourself - You really should go to the challenge blog and watch Eds' keynote speech at the challenge conference. It is free and it is exactly what you need to hear right now.

Outsourcing backlinking is very cheap. Places to outsource this:

mturk.com/mturk/welcome - Amazons' Mechanical Turk
Odesk.com - Good freelancing website


You MUST outsource, this is the bottom line. As you have already said, one site will take a lot of your time and you need to test more than one site. It can easily take ten sites before you find one worth pursuing, the challenge sites are like probes that you stick into a market - they are tests.


Go and watch Eds' keynote

Start outsourcing the work

Watch your business develop


Alx

[jhora]

Thanks a lot - could you post a link to the speech on the blog? I searched trough the blog but I didnt find it. And uncle Google didnt help me either...

[alx]

Thats weird im sure it was posted on the blog, anyway here it is:

http://www.ed-ucationonline.com/goin...rence/session1

You can buy the whole conference if you like, see the full conference details here:

http://www.ed-ucationonline.com/goin...t-the-sessions

[craigrachow]

thanks jhora for creating this thread and thanks to all who have replied. these questions and answers have pointed me into a new direction for my sites and IM work.

[DoDge]

jhora,

I would write the blog articles myself, and then outsource the rest. A good place for this is -

textbroker.com

Hi Alx, I just had a look at textbroker but it's an all American deal, do you know of any UK or European based companies?

Thnx