Site Experiment : One Year Later - Part One

In the first quarter of 2006, I decided to try an experiment. I wanted to build a series of sites, do almost no work, and see how much money I could make. It’s been a year and the progress has been nice.

I started out by forming a set of rules for the operation of this experiment. These rules were somewhat against my normal rules of operation (namely not using quality content).

Here’s an example of ten of the rules I followed:

1. Site will use WordPress for easy setup and operation.
2. Site will have at least five 250+ word articles. They can’t cost much and the quality doesn’t matter. Most of my sites for this experiment started with just five articles.
3. Site can’t have more than 20 articles.
4. Site will use Ad Sense as a main profit component and will sell advertising later on.
5. Site can’t pay for any advertising.
6. Site can only spend money for content and directory submission.
7. Site can’t spend more than $20 for directory submission.
8. I will do an initial marketing push.
9. I’m not allowed to market after that except in any attempt to sell advertising.
10. I can’t spend more than one hour per month on the site after it’s setup and the initial marketing push is over.

Okay, that’s 10 of my rules. As you can see, I’m almost begging to fail—or so it seems.

I made a series of sites eventually, but it started with just one. That site was put online with about five articles. I left it that way for months and then I added some more articles.

After the initial marketing push, I just left the site alone. The only work I’ve done is checking my AdSense stats.

Is it making me rich? Hardly. But, it is making a profit and that’s the important part.

This month (April 2007), it’s making me about $1.59 per day. That’s with no work. The last time I did anything for this Web site was three months ago when I spent about three minutes adding one article. That’s it.

So, why get excited about a measly $1.59 daily? Well, I have more sites that followed this formula. Should 50 of those Web sites do this, that’s $29,017.50 annually—without lifting a finger. What about 75, 100 or 200?

Almost nine months ago, I set up another site. This month (April 2007) it’s making me about 63 cents daily. I did 75% less work on this one than the previous site I mentioned. This site has 66% less articles and wasn’t promoted as well initially. I know that if I add five more articles and do a few marketing tasks, it will go up.

Tomorrow, I’ll continue this article on Internet Business Entrepreneur and wrap it up.