It was a rainy day at work in a capital city around a decade ago.
I was sitting in a stuffy office with no air-con (or any that worked, at least), and the faces around me were fairly glum. I’d just joined this company from a global brand with amazing perks, and I was beginning to wonder if I’d made a big mistake.
This new place was far less inspiring and the people didn’t seem to love their jobs. Some of the people didn’t seem to like each other, either!
But this was to be a springboard for a huge change in my life, one that nobody would have guessed would happen – even me.
Now, this company was transparent, and shared their daily sign-up and revenue stats with everyone inside the company. Their numbers would pop up on the screen and you would see them first thing in the morning.
While I won’t reveal these numbers, they were astonishing! Someone was getting very rich…mainly the founders and shareholders.
To think you could do those kind of numbers in ONE DAY, all from a simple idea. All with a small business that an entrepreneurial Irish guy had started, and which grew into a global hit he then sold for hundreds of millions of dollars (euro).
That sale happened merely months before I sat myself in a chair in that office (yes, I missed out on the employee bonus!).
Even if I definitely didn’t know it at the time, this was the start of my entrepreneurial journey. It gave me a glimpse, a peak into what was possible outside of the regular paradigm, aka the old 9 to 5.
Fast forward 5 years, and a tip from a very generous, very good friend gave me the idea for my first niche / authority site. This sounded like an amazing business model.
And all I had to do was act on the tip. Would I take action? Yes!!
- Choose a domain.
- Get WordPress fired up.
- Start getting content on my site for that niche!
- Oh, and go try build some links!
Doing just the above got the ball rolling, and as the weeks and months went by, I saw those long tail queries pop up in Google Webmaster Tools (the old name for Search Console, if you don’t know!), and the clicks came in on Analytics.
After a few months, I was doing around 3-4k visits per month, and I kept adding more content.
7 years later, my little site was doing on average $11,000 per month in passive income (my main job was updating the odd plugin). All on the side as I worked my day job.
My highest revenue month that year was over $16k.
I listed the site for sale, and after a while, received an offer.
Now, of course it’s not like click a button, make money. It took years to build the above site, investment of time and money, but it wasn’t that hard with the right strategy. Oh, and a pinch of luck. Plus, it helped that I love this game!!
You can do it too, and I’d love to help you with that through this blog and my Twitter. Those two places will get my total focus until I can see they are really working to get the word out and are clearly helping people to start their sites, grow them, and build their own online empire.
With that comes freedom, opportunity, choices…the real reasons I do this.
Or, you might just be here because you love this business. I love that too! You are welcome either way.
Fast forward to now
So, what has happened since the site sale?
After that, I started investing in new sites and projects (new domains, acquisitions, and content).
Fast forward to today (early 2023), and I have two main websites that are growing fast.
I’ve also just bought a new aged domain (which dates from 1999!), and I’ll be growing that with some outsourced content from an expert writer.
I have also just started this blog you are on right now!
It’s going to be a fun, exciting year, and I’d love to have you on the journey with me as I built a community around Niche Ranger.
You can follow me on Twitter, but your best place to go is my newsletter. Thank you, if you sign up!
See you there!