I have done a lot of reading in the past couple of weeks, both on and offline, and one thing that keeps surfacing is the idea of finding a niche market and growing by diversifying. On the surface these look like the are mutually exclusive, how can you be in a small, well defined area of a particular market (niche) and at same time expand into other, larger, less defined markets?

I think that it all depends on how you look at what your niche is and where you want to diversify into. Currently I occupy the niche of unsuccessful, aspiring web entrepreneur, which is where most people who are trying to break into the “MMO” or Make Money Online niche. Many people just like me buy up hundreds of websites with the idea that, “if one site makes $5/month the 100 sites will make $500/month”. These people are right in a sick sort of way, but who really wants to maintain hundreds of sites? I know I don’t. But how many sites does it take to be successful? 1? 7? 150? I really didn’t know…

So I went to the people at the top of the MMO world.
Darren Rowse
John Chow
Jeremy Schoemaker
Zac Johnson
Andy Beard,
Mark Wielgus
Daniel Scocco
Jim Kukral
Courtney Tuttle
and many others that didn’t email me back or their answers where something like, “we don’t give out that kind of information”.

Turns out the average number of sites these people run is about 5. Now obviously if you have 5 sites you are not guaranteed success but the most successful people on the internet only focus on 10 sites or less. This should tell you something about the person that is just making a mess of the internet with hundreds or even thousands of “ad-rich, content-poor” trying to score $5/month on each one. I thought about stooping to that level but soon realized that with a little more initial effort I could have something 10x as big.

At this point I own 8 domains but this one and another are the only ones I use for anything at all. The latest domain purchase came out of my idea that I need to stick to what I know or learn something new. Well I know cars so I have launched my 2nd internet property GearHeadWiki. It is a site dedicated to all things automotive including something completely new to the internet, free online repair manuals. I envision that GearHeadWiki will get rid of any need for anyone to have to purchase a repair manual for their vehicle again.

If you like cars and want to be part of this project please feel free to create or edit pages. Anything is helpful and if you have any questions please email wiki[at]gearheadwiki.com.

I haven’t updated this blog over a month and I think that sometimes the best way to learn something is to give it a rest for a while, and when you go to try it again, you are better than when you left off. I think this has something to do with your perception of what you are doing (this applies to almost anything in life, not just blogging). When you do something for a long time you get a bit of tunnel vision and you have to take a step back and reevaluate what your goals and aspirations in life are.

When I started this blog I told myself a gigantic lie. This lie was that I was only going to use this blog to tell the story of making money and not to become what actually makes me the money. I then proceeded to try to get my site really popular. Tip #1- If you want to make a site popular, it works better to make a good site and let people come to it than have a crappy site and try to promote it. Tip #2 - If you want your site to make money by telling people how much money you make online, I have news for you…It’s been done. Not only has it been done, but unless you have some sort of new information that hasn’t been written about on all of the top Make Money blogs, you are almost guaranteed to fail at making the kind of money that makes it worth it to continue spending your precious time updating and promoting your blog.

I knew deep down that I would not make any substantial amount of money from this site but I tried (yah for $26.32) but in trying I learned a lot about websites and the more inner workings of the internet.

I also learned a few things about life in my month long hiatus. First - I realized that unless something directly benefits you should get rid of or stop doing whatever that thing is. Second - I learned that having what seem to be unrealistic goals will get very good reactions that have absolutely no weight because you can tell that people don’t believe you can achieve them. Third - I want to be able to actually do whatever I want whenever I want, and that will take quite a bit more money than $15/hour every hour of everyday, and at the same time require me to use less of my time to do it. I need to find a way to make tons of money with very little work, or, my preferred way, to make a ridiculous lump sum of money after a period of work no longer than 1 year. Fourth - If you have seen The Last Lecture you will already know that brick walls are put in your way to sift out who really want something from those who don’t want that something as badly as you do. Fifth and finally - If you only focus on what matters in life you will be a much happier person. This means that, unless you lead a very sad life, Blogcatalog friends, reading John Chow dot com, and Entrecard are out, just to name a few.

The result of my ads on johnchow.com and johncow.com are much less than worth it. For 2048 credits (John Chow) and 1024 credits (John Cow) you get:

THATS IT!?!? REALLY?

I knew that Entrecard was not that good but this confirmed how bad it really is. I get more traffic if I power drop E cards than I get if I buy an ad on one of the top blogs in the world.  This is understandable, however, because if you power drop 300 cards a day, those 300 people are more likely to click back to your site, rather than the thousands that see your ad on another site. This just perpetuates the insanity which is Entrecard.

Despite the poor results I will continue to use the system. Why? Because Entrecard still brings in a lot of traffic for me. However, I won’t be buying any more ads on more popular sites. My advice to anyone, is to buy multiple ads on smaller site rather than 1 ad on a more popular site.

PS. I know that if I had a naked woman on my ad I would have seen much better results (ie. Stak Loaded) but I have a rather plain (but unique) ad and so these are probably more typical results.

PPS. A cool side note, both John Chow And John Cow have bought ads on my site in return.

I have dropped way too many E cards and now I will see just how much they are really worth. I bought an ad on johnchow.com and johncow.com and they happened to be placed on the same day, being today. If you ever wondered if it is actually worth it to do the entrecard thing, or buy E card credits to advertise on other blogs, be sure to check back tommorow and I will let you know. I will do a full analysis of visitors, revenue, and tell you if it is worth it to even spend your time dropping E cards.

When I was in grade 11 I spent a night working for a man who removed flooring for a living. I had previously had a few jobs before this one, but this one was different. It taught me something. It taught me that time is worth as much as I decide it’s worth. All of the jobs I had up to that point had paid me <$10/hour and this one paid me around $18/hour. I didn’t realize it at the time but now have realized that my time is worth different amounts to differnet people. Now I know that might not seem like a big deal, but for a kid in grade 11, to all of a sudden have a jump in pay of nearly 80% is a huge deal. Also it’s not like I had gotten any smarter and also didn’t work any harder than I had at any other job I had in the past but, to this man MY time was worth more.

I realized that the key was to find people that will pay me what I KNOW my time is worth. I do actually believe that I am something special and deserve to payed more than almost all people are willing to pay me. This is all part of the reason I have made this website, to document my quest to get paid what I am worth. I know that I dont deserve the same pay as lets say a surgeon or some bigshot athlete but on the other hand there are many CEOs who go to 4 meeting a year and get paid more than anyone else on earth. You have to think of also what other peoples time is worth to you.

A surgeon might be worth $1000 dollars to you, but if he is only worth $1000 to each person and performs 200 surguries a year, then his time is worth $200,000/year. A CEO of some big company, on the other hand, might only be worth $1 to you but in this case 1,000,000 people think that he is worth $1 therefore he is overall worth more than the surgeon. I don’t know about the rest of you but I would like to be the CEO.

Another point being that, what I think I am worth does change day to day and year to year. For example, I know that I am worth more today than I was when I was 16 and I will be worth more in 20 years than I am today because of what I can provide people through my increasing knowledge, skill, and experience. It basically comes down to supply and demand, I need to find out what is the best way to turn what I can supply into money.