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How I Made $6500 From an Online Business

Published by Admin on Tagged My Experience

First off I would just like to say that in my previous article about the 13 year old boy who started his own online business I was referring to myself. I wanted to keep it anonymous because I didn’t want my father to make a connection if I ever happened to mention my blog to him, seeing how I bring up a somewhat sensitive family matter in the article. But now I figure I just won’t link him to the blog and I should be good since he’s not very computer savvy.

So how did I start a successful online business?

Well, I started a lot of different ones to be exact. But for this article we will focus on one specifically, which resides at www.zu5.net. I’ve made about $6500 off of this from December ‘05 until August ‘07, but about $5000 of it came from December ‘05 until December ‘06. Things have kind of died down since then.

It is a free URL redirection service. It may not look like much now, but it used to be pretty popular, pulling in around 8000 unique visitors a day. That was before it had a ton of downtime, which pretty much killed the traffic flow. And now its traffic is down to practically nothing in comparison to the past. I don’t really work on it anymore since I’m throwing my energy at a gazillion other projects that have a greater potential, but about a month ago I got a $3000 offer for it, so I could have added that much more to its total tally. However, I elected to keep it.

So how did I do it?

First I thought about what my interests were on the internet. I had previously used URL redirection services quite often back when I used free hosts like Geocities.com in order to shorten the length of my web address, so I already was pretty familiar with the idea.

Second I built the website. The site runs on a PHP script so if you were to create a site like it you would need to code a script, find a free script, or find a script to buy. The actual process of building the site is too complex to go over in this article alone, but I will try to address building sites in general at a later time.

Third I promoted the website like crazy! Online RPG gamers love URL redirection sites! What I mean by RPG gamers are those who play the browser based games like NoobSlaps.com (mine) or Outwar.com (pretty well known). So if you join one of these games and send your game referral link to other people in the game such that it’s disguised with a URL redirection, that’s a great way to get exposure and new members. You can also promote it on virtually any forum in your signature or in a freebie section. I think I also bought some very cheap advertising (like $5 ads here and there), but I would suggest finding good deals if you’re going to do that, and it isn’t something you necessarily HAVE to do.

Fourth I converted the traffic into money. First I took a look at what types of traffic the site was mainly getting. This turned out to have shifted from gaming to dating traffic over time. The reason? I have no idea. However, I also noticed that a lot of the dating sites were violating my terms of service. Thus, I just redirected all the terms of service violators to my affiliate link for FriendFinder, one of the most popular dating websites on the internet, and started raking in the cash. I did this over and over until eventually the traffic died down a bit. Then it came back again, and then it died down again. My server downtime was part of the problem, and I suppose the other part was that the people violating my terms of service weren’t happy about what I did. Happy or not, it was their own fault for not following the rules.

The other thing is by only redirecting terms of service violators I was able to maintain a free AND advertisement free service. In other words, everyone who didn’t break the rules got to use my service for free without any ads being displayed on their pages. That’s a pretty good deal if you ask me!

Another question you might have is could I have put advertisements on every member page? Yes, and I still can if I want. However, I felt that it would be better for gaining popularity if I didn’t display ads on member pages. And this was true for a while until I had a huge amount of downtime that killed a lot of the original traffic flow.

Overall, this URL redirection service has been a highly successful online business. This doesn’t mean it’s for you, but it definitely gives you something to think about. If you have any questions don’t hesitate to ask.

Free Resources Known To Increase Success:

• 250 Free Customized Business Cards

August 28th, 2007