Many people dream of making money online and the first thing is that you need to decide if you are doing a hobby site or a business site.
In 1996 I started a website in a niche market due to the lack of information at that time, and I consistently make money from that site, but now I consider it a hobby site. Here’s why.
Firstly, let me give you some information about my hobby site. As this site came into being in 1996 it is one of the very first sites for that niche to be on the net and today it is the largest site for that one keyword on the net.
The site is also either number 1 or number 2 in google depending on which google site you are on – the .com google site has it as number 2 and wikipedia is number 1 but for all other google sites it is number 1.
Initially the site was hosted but as the years went by and the site grew, it started crashing the machine regularly as it was using too many resources, so not only was my site going down but all of the other sites on the server as well.
Which meant that I had to either forget about the site or move it to it’s own server so all of the server resources would be dedicated to my site and my site alone.
Hosting is about $5 per month and when that is coming out of your own pocket, it does not hurt, but to have a server was over $300 pm and that would hurt!
It was at that time that I decided to put in Google Adsense, which is where you display adds on your site and if people click on them you get a few cents per click.
Google Adsense will payout when the balance is $100 and they will payout monthly. I figured that every little bit helps so if I got $100 every 2 months I would be happy.
After adding in all of the Google Adsense code to run the adds imagine my shock after the first month when I made enough to cover the server costs! Wow! I was totally wrapped with that as that meant that I did not have to get any money out of my own pocket! This was so exciting – my little hobby site was making enough to cover its own costs!
I also have a shopping section in my site where all products offered are affiliate products so I get a commission for each one sold through people clicking on my link to the website that sells the product.
When I set that up initially I used Amazon mainly for their books, but their commissions for books are only 5% and I found another bookstore that had a better range of books for my niche market and paid 10% as well as direct deposit into my bank account instead of getting a check (which happens with Amazon). The book site that I am with now also have a lower threshold payment, which means that you don’t need to earn $100 (like Amazon) before you see your money.
My shopping section is doing nicely and I regularly get monthly payments so I have another stream of cash from my hobby site.
I also have a POD – Print on Demand site and products from that site are also in my shopping section, creating yet another income stream. I will talk more about that in another post.
The front page of my site also holds a PR6 – which is a number assigned by google giving it a value. Here is how the PR (Page Rank) system works.
The higher the number the greater the importance of the page. You have to remember that this is to do with pages and not sites. While there are hundreds of thousands of sites on the net, just imagine how many pages there are!
- 10 – top 10 pages on the net
- 9 – top 11 – 100 pages on the net
- 8 – top 101 – 1000 pages on the net
- 7 – top 1001 – 10,000 pages on the net
- 6 – top 10,001 – 100,000 pages on the net
- 5 – 100,001 – 1,000,000 pages on the net
- 4 – 1,000,001 – 10,000,000 pages on the net
- 3 – 10,000,001 – 100,000,000 pages on the net
- 2 – 100,000,001 – 1,000,000,000 pages on the net
- 1 – greater than 1,000,000,001 pages on the net
So Google considers my site in the top 10,001 – 100,000 pages on the net which is pretty impressive considering that my site is in a niche market and only a hobby site.
So why do I now consider my site a hobby site if I have multiple income streams and make enough to cover costs and have a bit left over? Because the focus of the site is not to make money, it it to ensure that the integrity of my culture is maintained by people of my culture. Yes, my niche market is an indigenous culture – Maori to be exact.
So would you like to see my hobby site that:
- Holds a PR6 Page Rank in Google
- Is number 1 or number 2 in Google for the keyword Maori
- Due to the size of the site has to be on it’s own server
- Has been around since 1996 when there were only 2 results in the search engines for Maori
- Has been fully hand coded and not created with WYSIWYG editors (they did not exist when I first started)
Article from travel blogger at travelasia360.net
