How a 21 year old Made $2.5 Million Online and Blew it all in a Year
- Thread starter Hurr-Durr
- Start date
I guess I though't I'd jump in...
You're absolutely right. YPN was extremely retarded in letting people choose what ads to display, we could easily get 50 cents - $2.00 clicks. Stupid.
I did a Google test at my prime just to satisfy my own self-worth just because I knew I was cheating the system, I mean, a lot of marketers cheat the system, we all do. Or have at some point...
At my peak, I did roughly 11,000 - 15,000 clicks a day with Google, paying anywhere from 10 - 25 cents per click. My highest day on Google was $2,500. Take 15 cents x 13,000 clicks, that's roughly $1,900 per day... x 30 days in a month = anywhere from $50 - $65k per month. I had YPN running steady for 1.5 years. Replace that with Google Ads, 18 months x $60k = $1,080,000. Plus I sold some websites, etc... Maybe I wouldn't have made 2.5 million, but I would have made at least a million easily. Why would I stick with $2,500 a day, when YPN was paying $4 - $10k per day...?
Now, the luck vs skill thing... You can say that about anything? Professional poker players, stock market professionals who gamble with puts/calls guessing whether it's going to go up/down. Entrepreneurs risking investing in an "IDEA," did you know most entrepreneurs have to try 10 ideas, until one hits?
You could say the 12 years of programming knowledge behind me is luck, the constant drive to building websites, and not playing video games, is luck. I programmed day and night, building 30+ different websites trying to make internet revenue. I'm not saying I'm some amazing genius programmer by any means, I'm actually far from smart. I'm just in love with the internet, programming, and business. Nothing makes me happier, besides women.
Sure, me being the first to come up with idea right after "Chase Bad Kids" to build a MySpace help site, was luck. I reinvented the MySpace help site community and saturated it, with my backend. My partner a total fucking jackass sold my backend that I spent hours beyond hours programming myself, for $50 a pop on Sitepoint and Ebay. Goes to tell you, never trust anyone, not even your partners. All those dumb clone sites, were my work, yes all mine, I saw hundreds of them... Not trying to brag, but all those clones, were mine. End of story.
I learned an incredible amount of new skills from SEO, JavaScript, PHP, and creative marketing ideas from building this site. 200,000 visits per day, 1 million page views per day, and a peaking 6k Alexa, luck, sure.
Everything is luck. You go for it, and hope for it. There is no certainty in this world, and never will be. Certainty is boring. I'm not arguing or bashing, just wanted to get the facts out there for everyone.
Appreciate all the feedback, positive and negative. Negative feedback really does get my brain moving the most though, makes me think a little outside of the box. So thank you
Cheers.
PS. The duck face gets you laid. =]
I am indeed launching a ClickBank dating product, this weekend. If any JVs are interested in cross-promoting, hit me up asap. www.womenchasemen.com
I personally think it's awesome you made so much money off a fucking MySpace layout site; kudos to you.
But no offense, but you were a FUCKING 'TARD for buying cars for your friends. Like WTF? You dropped hundreds of Gs on "friends" for no reason? Shit bro, you think they woulda done the same for you? I don't think so.
And yeah, if you took even just 750k of that 2.5 mill and put it into some solid real estate you would have been set for life regardless of what happened to your websites.
And one last thing, why did you sell the MySpaceSupport site for 75k? I'm pretty sure if you just restored the old structure of the site, and then spent 5k on some serious link building, you would have reclaimed the first page spot on Google, and raped YPN for another 500k-1M until YPN completely got canceled.
Anyways, good luck to ya. And if you haven't already, get a GED. It will reflect better upon certain investors.
Probably around 60, they are so cheap, they only cost $50 a session, jeez la weez, because you know I have to pay for sex!
Absolutely, spending money on my friends I completely regret to be honest.
I tried for 4 months as hard as I could to get MSS back to page 1, I bought very high PR links from high authority websites. I spent thousands on purchasing links, I did a lot of black hat and white hat SEO techniques, I did everything I could think of. I even hired an SEO team because I was just out of ideas. They couldn't even do it. By the time I got the new site up, Google already indexed hundreds of pages of the new site within minutes. My dumbass was so proud of the new design and site, that I got rid of the old one within minutes, and even if I did restore the backup, Google already indexed the new site. Google thought my site was brand new, and I dropped to page 8 within minutes. I was lucky to get $75k, I sold it fast as hell once the money kept dropping and dropping.
I've been working with multiple investors, and even investment companies. Not once have they checked my education background, it's crazy, they don't even care about my resume, all they care about is the business plan.
I raised $145k from investors just last year with just a business plan I wrote, and a summary on my experience.
Yup. LOL. It's just my default face, because my smile is even worse than my duck face. True story.
Jesus - This guy is still peddling this story 100yrs later.. like STFU already and get back to work. Sad
That's when you should have immediately changed it back; the ranking gets restored if you do it fast enough--no joke. Oh well, no need to beat a dead horse. What's done is done. Let me know if you're paying dude models for BeModel.com. I'm currently in comparable shape to most standard CK or Jockey underwear models (again, no joke).
Sorry my blog post got on Gawker and BI, I didn't submit, I wrote my blog about a year ago, and it just happened some how...
Jim Rohn is the fucking man. Forget the IM guru crap. This guy is the real deal.
Anyone aspiring to make a dime online or elsewhere for that matter should listen to a couple of his CD's. Totally worth it.
that is not a feeling. It's been happening to a lot of the guys that haven't adapted.
@topic: Cool story bro. Learn from it and don't do it all over again.
I knew the guy who had the number 1 site 'myspacemaster', he was an international student from China. Came in late to the game, after me.. and powered his way to number 1. I still have no idea how the fuck he did it.
Also let's not forget about the 16 year old girl who was banking hard from her own truly original myspace layout site whateverlife.com
Either way it was destined to be short lived.. just look at the search volume for 'myspace layouts'
http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=myspace layouts&cmpt=q
I blame Facebook...
If that is genuinely the case then I judged it too quickly.
It wasn't luck.
Apologies.
There aren't many people who made million in their twenties.
You are one of the few.
With enough effort, you can do it again.
You already did it once
You are one of the few.
With enough effort, you can do it again.
You already did it once
I remember when you listed MyspaceSupport.com on the Sitepoint marketplace (before Flippa) and right at that time it really started taking off. I was just trying to get into the "myspace layout" craze myself but I was just a SEO newbie back then so I could never break that oh so coveted top 10 listing in Google (I even purchased links on your website)
What do you attribute your main SEO success to back then? Blog commenting, swapping links, Myspace profile links, etc?