A while back, I persuaded him to take up an interest in blogging about health. Except that I  haven’t had time to develop his blog for him, and he hasn’t had time to learn about promotion, etc. I’ve started and scrapped his blog a few times now. And maybe it’s my own poor health, but i seem to have an aversion to working on his blog. (Yes, I have loads of guilt about this.)

The net result, after almost two years of him waiting for me is that he went to a local seminar a few days ago, run by some snakeoil hucksters. They must have taken down his phone number, because the next day, my father emailed me and said they gave him “an offer he couldn’t refuse.” Instead of asking for US$4200, they offered him their online business package for $3500. He bought it.

Except that their online business package consists of some articles and a dozen or so screencast videos. No website, no content nothing. No assistance. Just how to build your site (use “meta tags”!!!), how to find drop shippers, and how to get traffic to your site. They left out the most important aspect: how hard it can be to have a successful commerce site.

Needless to say, I was peeved when I heard this (I’m on the verge of being a website/ domain broker for various people, and he knew this but didn’t consult me because he thought I was busy). Actually, I was more peeved at myself for not helping my father with his blog and blame myself for his spending that money. Half of the information in that info pack is probably wrong (meta tags? – give me a break), and all of it is free online, somewhere. Okay, if you don’t have the time to spend (took me two years) to learn everything, you may think it’s worth it. My father even told me in late 2005 to create my own info pack to sell to newbies. I considered it, but not for a $4,200 price tag.

Thing that really bugs me, though, is that my father is a busy man, despite being retired. He may think he saved $700 by spending $3500. But I could have taken that $3500 and bought my father income earning websites, or a few nice domain names on speculation, and he would have made money far sooner than he ever will with that bullcrap package of info.

Here’s an example. Let’s say you have $3600. You could buy a website income with a site earning $300/m that is selling at a 12-month multiple. Hold it for 6 months and you’ve earned $1800. Sell it for $4000, and you’ve earned an extra $400, for a total of $2200. That’s a pretty good return, provided that that income comes with very little effort on your part. If it takes time away from other income-earning activities, then you have to rethink your strategy. Maybe you’re better off being a domain mogul, which requires trend smarts and great analytical and speculative skills, but takes far less effort than trying to make a living with a new website.

So to those of you planning to make a full or partial income online, please don’t spend ~$4K on an info pack. Drop me a comment, tell me what you would really like to do, what topics you really know a lot about or enjoy enough to learn. Then I’ll give you some suggestions on what you might try. And it won’t cost you anything.

The point is that without a mortgage to worry about, you are earning real income. Now, when you sell the house, you’re likely going to sell for at least what you bought it for. So you get back your original investment plus some rental income. I don’t want to get too deep into a real estate discussion, but if you see where I’m getting at, let’s continue.

Stock market investors do it too. Property is a big commitment. Stocks are not. If you put that same $100,000 into a stable blue chip stock or mutual funds that pays regular dividends, you’ve bought an income. If you lose a bit on the value when you sell your holding, it’s a tax write off. If you gain, add that to the dividend earnings. You come out ahead, and get back most or all of your investment.

So how does this analogy apply to blogs and websites? Well, building up a new blog is a lot of work, and maybe you don’t want to be a domainer. So why not buy an established blog [Performancing]. There are lots of zombie blogs of good value. The owner hasn’t posted in a while, but the site seems to enjoy some traffic, has a reasonable PR (Google PageRank), backlinks, is indexed regularly by the engines (including Technorati), and most especially, enjoys a monthly income from ad revenue.

As with real estate properties that you buy up, fix and resell for a higher value, the ideal candidate sites (websites and weblogs) are those that have been improperly monetized. You may find it easier to increase the monthly revenue of an existing blog than to get your new blog earning any money at all. Consider these points:

1. Buy a site earning steady revenue over at least the last three months if not longer. Typical cost of a site is 12-18 months of revenue, plus premiums for the PR, if it’s high, and/or the domain name or any software.

2. Keep the site for X months and build up its ad revenue using any or all of the following:
1. More adsense earnings.
2. More affiliate revenue.
3. Text links or banner ads.
4. Amazon
5. Chitika
3. After X months, when the monthly revenue is up, even if you sell the site for what you paid, you’ve made a bit of monthly income. Domain registration and hosting costs are fairly negligible these days.

Don’t forget to keep existing regular readers in mind. Don’t over-monetize, and roll changes out slowly. Each site and niche will have its own ideal advertising methods. That’s something I’ll try to talk about in the future; I don’t think I know enough yet.

[For thoughts on choosing a site, see my Performancing article 5 tips for buying websites, also linked above.]

Example:

• Buy a site for $6,000 (12-18 months earnings) that has earned $500/m for at least 3-4 mnths (i.e., income is steady so far).

• Keep for six months, earning at least $500/m, that’s $3,000+ in income.
• Sell for $6,000 (if you didn’t increase rev), gaining $3,000.
• Sell for $12,000 (if you doubled rev), gaining $6K + $3K plus whatever extra ad revenue above $500/m that you earn.
• Subtract the cost of maintaining it. If you write your own posts, there’s only hosting and domain costs, and maybe be escrow fees during the purchase.
• If the site had momentum from, say, one post per day, you could probably get away with three per week, or hire someone to help write.

Now, that’s not to say you have to spend $6,000 to be successful at buying a blog income. However, if you’re just starting out, don’t buy a site with no income else you’re back in the same boat, and in danger of having too many sites.

If you buy a site earning just $25/m, to start, do you think you can boost that to $50/m and sell it for a profit? You’ll have to decide whether you want to hold a site or whether you’re buying to flip. Holding means paying maintenance fees. But either way, this method of earning a living with a website may be much less effort than starting/ continuing your own blog.

In a way, it’s sort of like trading stocks or investing in real estate. Not everyone can make money from it because it does require some speculation and research, but if you’re tired of blogging or want some way to supplement your online income without a great deal of time, give domaining some consideration.

For me, domaining is interesting because I have a love of language, semantics, word origins, etc. I’ve been doing my own keyword research for the last few years and building a “web corpus” – a list of unique words found online, which might be as large as a half million words or more.

Domaining uses more than one strategy to make money, including parking (CPC ad click traffic), redirecting domain traffic to an existing monetized website, flipping more expensive domains, or buying hundreds or thousands of domains in bulk and turning them over for a small profit per domain.

For example, if you own a thousand domains and each one is parked and earning, say, $0.10/day on average, that’s $100/day or about $3000/mth. That’s not bad if you automate the renewals and park free, considering how little domains cost per year these days. If you use a bulk domain reseller account to purchase, you might pay about $7/domain (all new). So your costs are $7,000/yr but you’re grossing $36,000 per year.

Obviously, under this strategy, you don’t want to buy all the domains at once, as that’s an incredible commitment financially. I plan to spend the next 2-4 years bootstrapping my domaining revenue into an ever-growing portfolio. I’ll report back on my findings and any techniques I learn. If you are interested in domaining, Aviva Directory has an article that describes some domaining techniques for newbies, what tools to use, and how to go about financing your domain investments.