There are probably tens of thousands of people out there running websites on the side in the hopes of generating enough income that they can quit their day jobs forever. I was one of them. While holding down a series of great jobs, I ran ten or twenty different websites before finding a model that worked for me. Since then, not only have I quit my day job, but I’ve also helped others do the same thing.
The original focus of this blog was helping people blog better. I was very up-front about the fact that you almost certainly wouldn’t be able to make any real money doing that, but I enjoyed helping people who blogged as a hobby.
Ultimately, though, I realized that it was much more fun helping people quit their day jobs. I also realized that there were thousands of scams out there that succeeded by swindling those same people with promises of quick, easy riches.
So now the focus of this blog is helping people go from day job to dot com millionaire — and do it the right way. I’m sharing (almost) everything I know about how to take a site from earning a few dollars a day, to the point where you can live off of it full-time, to the point where you can sell it and immediately realize financial independence.
Let’s see what happens.
Where I’ve Been
I started working on the web in 1995. I was instantly hooked and spent way too much time playing around with it at my first job when I should have been working. Thankfully, at my next job I got paid to work on the web.
Then in 1998 I moved to Atlanta to be part of the small team building HeadHunter.NET. Over the next year, I did everything in Technology at one point or another except for writing COM objects. That was good practice for building my first real website.
The Sybertec.com computer store launched in early 2000. It ran off a server I built that was connected to the cable modem in our study. Despite that, we did more than $1M in sales in 2001 — almost exclusively from Google traffic.
In 2001 I moved over to InJesus.com, a Yahoo! Groups-type site for Christian organizations. I redesigned their website and rewrote much of the back-end as we worked through a variety of revenue models.
Later that year, I was back at Headhunter.net — rebranded by that time as CareerBuilder.com — and my journey through every department continued. After working with iProspect to double our search engine traffic, I moved into business development and then into marketing. There I managed our seven-figure Google AdWords budget and developed the particular skillset that sent me off on my own: identifying, purchasing, gutting and rebuilding distressed websites.
In fact, a site that CareerBuilder had passed on (NursingJobs.org) was my first solo project. I bought it in September of 2005 and sold it 2.5 years later to Internet Brands.
Now I’m writing this blog and starting off on other new and interesting projects! Feel free to drop me a line sometime.
