Make Your Basket Bigger

Written by John Cow on July 31st, 2007

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One of the things the Holy Cow preaches is that you should never put all your advertising eggs in one basket. He’s right, there are horror stories online about people making a living on Google alone and then got banned losing all their money.

The Big Beef’s monthly blog income, which exceeds $12,000 per month right now, can be broken down into nearly ten different income generators. Not a stupid thing to do if you think about it.
Now let’s take it one step further, what if your site is the only money maker you have? Imagine it gets hacked, your backup is corrupted or it just stops generating money like it used to. Then what? You’re screwed!
Take the concept of the eggs and the basket to the next level and start running more websites. Don’t spend the money you’ve earned online off line but invest in buying or starting up other websites.

But I have no time to update all them websites!

You don’t have to. There’s more to the Internet than blogs believe it or not. Some of the wealthiest Internet mooguls don’t even have a blog. Think of people like Markus Frind who owns Plentyoffish.com, the most popular free dating site on the planet. He’ll never have to work again. Think about a service you could offer to people. We’ll name a few examples to get you started.

  • Online Proxies - Help people to surf anonymously or to blocked sites. Once set-up, no work needed. (Sheetr , BobJones)
  • Forums - Which one of you isn’t member of a forum somewhere? The value lies within the network of contacts you can buildup. Takes a little work to startup, advisable to get a lot of friends to start posting or get paid forum posters to fill the forum up. Nobody signs up with an empty forum. (iProblem, feel free to sign up and join our new forum! :D )
  • Upload Sites - Give people an easy solution to share files with someone else if email or IM doesn’t work. Once setup, no work required.(TheUpload.net)
  • Automated Blogs - Not the most ethical thing to do but it works. Setup a blog, install a certain plugin that grab RSS feeds from other sites and publishes them. This will fill up your blog in no time so Google has something to index.

Note that none of these will give you a massive income overnight but they all add up to some nice pocket change. Given some time, they will gain traction in the SERPs and get a higher PageRank. This will make the property more valuable and chances are that you can sell the whole site to someone else that’s looking to get started making money online with websites. Also remember that once you get some decent PageRank from Google, you own these sites and can link from one site to another, like we just did :twisted:, hence strengthening your little online empire.

One of the places where you can shop for established or turnkey websites is sitepoint’s marketplace. Remember that you’re investing money, not throwing it away. If you’re patient enough with buying, building and selling sites, you might be able to buy the next plentyoffish and never have to work again!

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38 Comments »

Comment by Enkay Blog
2007-07-31 14:34:18

Cool post and great tips. My blog is also about how you can make money online and also make your blog better!

 
Comment by Colleen
2007-07-31 14:48:32

::nods head::

I completely agree. With the paid blogging I do, I’m signed up with 7 or 8 different companies. I don’t do work for every single one every day, but should one have a slow week, I’ve got other options to fall back on. It also gives me more exposure to advertisers.

 
Comment by Personal Blog
2007-07-31 16:38:10

Good stuff, I have two sites that I haven’t had time for and are doing nothing for me. :neutral: I believe one of the .com’s could do something if I take it a different direction, the other I was hot on this whole MFA sites and recently the horror stories were coming up about them so I’ve taken that down.

 
Comment by Personal Blog
2007-07-31 16:47:15

I just realized, it’s July 31st. Are we going to get a final review of the Cow’s first month today or tomorrow?

Comment by John Cow
2007-07-31 19:35:31

Tomorrow

 
 
Comment by Fatgadget
2007-07-31 18:35:05

Cool Post,

I have a few other ideas for sites, which I intend to work on in the future, at the moment I am concetrating on the one blog.

It will be intersting to see The Mad Moo’s stats for the first month.

:mrgreen:

PS congratulations on making it in the Technorati Top 10K in under a month. :shock:

 
Comment by cooliojones
2007-07-31 20:20:24

Something a lot of people don’t think about. What do you think about using different hosts if you have a couple of very successful blogs? Overkill or something to consider?

Comment by mahdi yusuf
2007-07-31 21:33:11

why would you spread yourself over different host providers, if you have successful blog, stay with the host you have now, they will most likely provide discounts for you return business!

Comment by Making The Money
2007-08-01 09:43:30

I work with 4 different hosting companies, you need to spraed you IP’s around, especially if you’re planning on linking between your own websites.

(Comments wont nest below this level)
Comment by cooliojones
2007-08-01 12:22:55

I was kinda thinking along this level. For instance, if you have issues with one host (customer service or other), or if one host crashes for some reason, your entire investment isn’t down the tubes. You could use other hosts simply for redundancy. That’s what eBay, Google, Yahoo and the other big bulls do.

 
Comment by Cubofild
2007-08-01 12:42:13

Is there “AUTO BACKUP” hosting solution for small sites\blogs? So you pay some monthly fee (20-30% from original monthly fee) to host live BACKUPS on their servers and then if your main hosting crush you call them to get ALIVE your website from their server (affcourse paying full month fee to them if they start running your site from them after first host crush) :?:

 
 
 
 
Comment by Cubofild
2007-07-31 20:21:42

It’s hard to lose not only this month check, whell all money you would make in future with them! Becouse that find more networks to run on your site if posible even if they make you less money sometimes… :roll:

 
Comment by mahdi yusuf
2007-07-31 21:33:51

great ideas i always wondered if i could start a file sharing site, see how it goes!

Comment by Personal Blog
2007-08-01 20:54:44

Idk, that’d be hard, You’d have to use PPC probably to really get it going.

 
 
Comment by Tom
2007-07-31 22:45:12

Great Post!

This is the first time I came across this website.. Very nice spoof, haha

Comment by mahdi yusuf
2007-08-01 09:31:59

spoof? john chow is the spoof, this IS the original! :lol:

i see you reset the top comments from one again i see :D

Comment by Navjot Singh
2007-08-02 20:02:42

Will Mr Chow agree with you? :mrgreen:

(Comments wont nest below this level)
 
 
 
Comment by Fatgadget
2007-08-01 00:57:11

Didn’t notice the forum one before, pretty cool :mrgreen:

 
Comment by Colin Klinkert
2007-08-01 02:23:53

Great post Mr. Cow!

I too have my eggs in MANY baskets, but you know, I think im suffering from spreading myself too thin! I don’t put enough time and energy into 1 project before I move to the next, so I have many sites all producing quite low income…. I have a plan to change that though

Just think of both sides of the coin guys, you can have too many baskets too

Comment by mahdi yusuf
2007-08-01 09:36:20

i have some tips for consolidating, all your sites, you at least focus your marketing drive to one then that pulls all others up!

 
Comment by Navjot Singh
2007-08-02 20:01:09

This is my situation too. I have 3 sites currently…all generating way too low income. Don’t get time or should I say lost energy to revive all of them.

 
 
Comment by Johnny
2007-08-01 05:01:29

great information as always, keep the tips coming and the Moo Juice flowing.

 
Comment by Ali
2007-08-01 11:05:41

Good post there. Offering a good free service that can provide you residual income for months or even years to come is something virtually anybody can do. But not everybody does. Which is good, more room for me :twisted:

Comment by Cubofild
2007-08-01 12:35:22

I must add that if you burn your, for example free proxy service (or similar free service) with popups\popins hell’s you will not get lot of bookmarks! :idea:

 
 
Comment by Fatgadget
2007-08-01 13:01:23

And the Top Commentator Contest begins again :razz:

Comment by Webd360
2007-08-02 04:17:25

Yes it does, maybe if I start off right now and make one or two a day I will be able to stay in the top 10.

 
 
Comment by roundouts
2007-08-01 14:01:53

Just curious. How much do you think a proxy site can make in a month. I use proxies everyday from work and barely even notice ads let alone click on theme.

 
Comment by Pedro Sardinha
2007-08-01 14:38:45

Be careful with proxy sites…

1. Adsense don´t like them

2. Some host don´t allow them

3. Some sites consider it as pishing, can report you and your host can ban you…

Also be careful with Upload Sites,

dunno why but they seem easy to hack, my friend had one and was the site giving problems…

But I agree, don´t keep your income all coming from the same stuff :)

 
Comment by blog contests
2007-08-01 17:31:14

Have to love money for nothing!

Comment by Enkay Blog
2007-08-02 16:38:19

lol! Doesnt everyone? I would love free money too!

 
 
Comment by digitalnomad Subscribed to comments via email
2007-08-01 18:52:20

I like the way you cows think. I see it is time to start over with comments…could not keep up with Coolio last month.

Comment by Webd360
2007-08-02 04:15:20

Him and Mahdi just ran away with it last time, I wonder if they’ll do it again

 
 
Comment by Steven
2007-08-01 22:17:52

I would also consider taking your income offline as in building a business that isn’t dependent on the internet either in the one in a gazillion chance the internet ever dies LOL

 
Comment by Joyce Babu
2007-08-01 23:14:45

Making bigger basket will be useful for big sites like this. For others, it means a longer waiting period to cross the minimum threshold.

Comment by Enkay Blog
2007-08-02 16:42:24

Even for some smaller websites that are seeing a lot of traffic it is important to diversify because you cant rely solely on one source of income.

 
 
Comment by Webd360
2007-08-02 04:13:56

I am planning on diversifying my income sources soon, having more sources makes losing one much less detrimental.

 
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