How to Build an Income-Generating Website on Your Hobby or Passion
How to build a profitable website based on your hobby or life experience. This is one way to kick-start your ideal career - with your own online business.
June 21st, 2010 by Becky Turner
For the last three years I've been making my living from the internet. I create simple, content-based websites about my hobbies and passions, such as Sheltie Planet for my love of Shelties, and World of Lucid Dreaming for my interest in conscious dreams (a la Inception).
Initially my income was modest - not nearly a full time salary. But soon I found that the more content I created, and the more traffic I received, the greater my income potential became. Today, this is now my full time "job", adding articles to my websites and finding new ways to monetize them. I earn more doing this than any office job I've ever had.
This is a liberating career choice and is actually what prompted Pete and I to create Career Evolution. This article is about the content website model I use and how you can launch your own profitable website with minimal costs, minimal mistakes, and minimal technical knowledge.
How I Built My First Website
The very first website I ever made was World of Lucid Dreaming in 2008. I made it using a well known internet tool called Site Build It, which is what kick-started my career in online business.
Primarily, Site Build It is an education which teaches you how to start a profitable website. It shows you, via a 10-Day Action Guide, what steps you need to take to set up your website. However this isn't a literal 10 days - if I remember right I spent about a month in my spare time getting to the end of the course. It's a mighty beast and contains a wealth of information on setting up your hobby-based website successfully.
The Action Guide also breaks you in gently with some user-friendly technologies you'll need to run your site. These include a keyword tool, a point-and-click template designer and a page builder (all in-house tools) so the actual site building is as straight forward as possible. For someone like me who had no knowledge of building websites, this was essential.
It took me two weeks to build up the courage to register with Site Build It, because I knew it would be a sizeable investment of my time. But once I made that mental commitment, I just went for it and never looked back. With the right tools and the right knowledge, my new career in online business got off to a flying start.
Today I can safely say it's the best career move I ever made.
The Content Website Model
The most appealing aspects of building an 'infosite' on my hobby is that it's creative, and I work at my own pace. One day I'll write an article about a new lucid dreaming movie, while other days I skip work altogether :)
Thanks to the wealth of articles I've already written, my websites generate income whether I'm at my desk or not. So there is no pressure to clock-in or even maintain my websites every day.
Here's how that model works, as taught by Site Build It. The essential formula is Content > Traffic > PreSell > Monetize:
Let me explain that in a little more detail.
- Content is what makes your website valuable. By focusing your site on your favorite hobby or life experiences, you'll be able to share essential information that people are seeking online. This is the reason people stay on your site and become long term fans.
- Traffic is crucial to the success of your online business. The more readers that stop by your site, the more money you can make. Site Build It showed me how to generate free traffic for life and get my websites ranked high up in the Search Engine results.
- PreSell is the act of building trust with your website visitors, treating them like valued human beings rather than sales targets. I'm offering you valuable career advice and one day you might decide to buy something from my website. As a result, we have a relationship built on mutual respect, not coercive sales tactics.
- Monetize is how you make money from your website. I make product recommendations and receive affiliate commissions in return; other people place advertising via Google AdSense and do no selling at all. You have a great variety of monetization options available.
This simple enough formula forms the basis of your content website. Apply it to one of your interests and you possess an exciting business model.
The Role of Passive Income
As I mentioned above, I earn money 24/7 whether I'm working or not. Internet users from around the world continuously land on my websites and contribute to my bottom line income.
Last year, I took an entire month off to go traveling and you know what happened? As usual, my income increased because of the snowballing effect that Search Engine traffic has on my websites.
This increasing amount of web traffic translates to increasing revenues.
About six months after World of Lucid Dreaming was launched, I turned my attention to creating my second profitable website, Improve Vision Naturally. I spent the next few months focused heavily on that site, yet all the while my lucid dreaming site continued to grow in traffic and income.
So, the fact that my websites make passive income is important. I don't pay staff. I don't stock goods or answer customer queries. I don't deal with wholesale suppliers, shipping companies, or pay sales taxes. Every hour I spend adding content to my website pays me back many times over in hassle-free, passive income - straight to my bank account.
Why Doesn't Everyone Do This?
I ask myself this question a lot. Many people would love to quit their boring day jobs and do something different. Yet if creating websites is so fun and financially rewarding, why doesn't every man and his dog do it?
In a way, I know why. It's because a project like this takes a giant leap of faith in yourself. Some people worry they'll spend a lot of time making a website and then nothing will come of it, so they decide not to take the risk in the first place. And that's a fair concern - after all, how many people have started blogging about their pet peeves or pet rabbits only to see their blogs die lonely deaths when no-one visits them?
I've been there. It's frustrating. But in hindsight, there is a world of difference. The hobby blogger is putting his own needs first, to rant and rave about his bad day, or tell everyone what he thinks about Emo haircuts. Who cares? It's a little egotistical to think that thousands of complete strangers should be centered around your needs, isn't it?
The content website owner, on the other hand, puts his visitors' needs first, by serving up information they are specifically searching for. You can still write about your hobbies and interests - only now you're visitor-focused. If it's a blog about your pet rabbit, now you'll be serving up information about rabbit food, rabbit health, rabbit breeders, etc. It's useful information for complete strangers - and it's actionable.
Realizing the difference between these two approaches was like a paradigm shift for me. Site Build It made it abundantly clear what route I needed to go down, and exactly how I was going to serve my visitors' needs.
If everyone had this knowledge before they start out, I think it would alleviate a lot of fears about failure. It would also give a lot more people the courage to start their own websites for profit (and eventually quit their day jobs when they make enough money online).
The 14-Year-Old Guinea Pig
Site Build It is founded and run by a man called Dr Ken Evoy, first an inventor and now an online business expert. And in the early days he decided to show everyone how easy it is to start a profitable website -- by using his 14-year-old daughter, Nori, as a guinea pig.
Nori followed her dad's CTPM business model to make a site about her favorite vacation destination, Anguilla. The result is Anguilla-Beaches.com - a simple but undeniably successful hobby website. It went to show that even a young lass like Nori could write compelling content, attract free web traffic, and monetize her efforts to the tune of US$1,000 per month - and that was just the start. Today, her hobby site is putting her through university.
To learn more, read Nori's case study which depicts what must have been a very exciting journey for her as a teen starting her own business. I bet she got a lot more pocket money than most kids her age... And now, as an adult, she knows she'll never have to work a boring 9 to 5 job.
Why Use Site Build It?
If you already make a considerable income from the internet, then I am sure you don't need Site Build It. (Although I do recommend you join their affiliate program which will give you another passive income stream.)
However if you're new to online business, or you're scratching your head as to why your blog isn't making money, then you should definitely take a closer look.
With this tool, you don't have to learn HTML or code your web pages from scratch using CSS. Everything you need to make your site is at your fingertips in the form of idiot-proof, point-and-click tools. Of course, you can integrate programs like Dreamweaver and Photoshop with your Site Build It project. But the point is you don't have to.
Site Build It also provides you with an extensive range of tools including:
- Domain registration
- Website hosting
- Email
- Point-and-click site design
- Customizable templates
- Content management
- Traffic statistics
- Keyword research
- Site planning
- Auto-responders
- Newsletter mailouts
- Contact forms
- RSS feeds
- Sitemaps
This is just the tip of the iceberg - Site Build It has many, MANY special tools. Unlike any blogging platform I've seen, many functions are automated and work in the background so you can focus on the important work of content creation. It's this kind of simplification that further separates Site Build It from any other platform.
Site Build It also offers free unlimited customer support as well as online discussion forums driven by a fantastic ethos of help and be helped. This is a very active community with a great team of moderators who pick out the gems and highlight them for everyone else. Every time I visit the Site Build It forums I get new ideas for developing my websites.
Put it all together, and Site Build It is an extremely powerful resource to guide you through the process of building an income-generating website.
The Latest News in Web 2.0
In case you're a technophobe like I once was, web 2.0 is the new generation of interactive web technologies. Think Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, as well as social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon.
These are important technologies because they enable their users to create content for them, which results in the runaway growth of the website. The fact that Site Build It has tapped into this is fantastic.
Known as the Content 2.0 feature of Site Build It, it allows your web visitors to make entire pages of content on their own, in simple text blocks. They can also add pictures, ask questions, comment, and even turn your site into an interactive forum. This feature is unlike anything else I've seen on regular websites or blogs and can rapidly expand your niche site.
The result is more content, more traffic, more presell and more monetizing. Consider this to be an added rocket booster to your site's success.
Getting Started with Your Website
If you are excited by the idea of creating a website, I encourage you to look closer at Site Build It and see if it makes sense for you.
If you have some time now, watch the 30-minute video tour which will clarify everything for you. It begins with the benefits of working from home (which is quite motivational for most people) and later explores some of the key tools and monetization strategies you'll use to make money online.
If you want to see more websites created by Site Build It users, I suggest you check out their case studies or website samples.
And if you have any queries you can submit a question to SBI for free and receive an email answer or phone call from the Site Build It staff.
Like any product worth its salt, Site Build It has an iron clad 90-day money-back guarantee so there's zero risk in trying it out yourself. You can watch the entire 10-Day Video Action Guide and get a full refund if you don't like it. You can even keep your new domain name for free, which is better than a money-back guarantee - that's a free domain.
Final Thoughts
I began my website career in 2008, not long after I emigrated to New Zealand. I had no idea how to make money online and I was burned by some internet scams along the way. But when I started generating an income with Site Build It, I knew I was 'home'.
I consider myself a bit of an expert in online business these days, and it's all because of Site Build It. I receive increasing amounts of passive income each month no matter how much I work, and I am the owner of five profitable websites which I could (if I wanted to) sell off as assets. To say that Site Build It changed my life may sound cheesy, but it's true.
That's why I highly recommend you look into Site Build It if you want to start a profitable website of your own.
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