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$1,000/Month? Try 'Ghostsiting'

by Zeus66
19 replies
I used to make a pretty good living as a ghostwriter, and I was thinking back on those days earlier today. I got out of it because it was caving my head in. I like to write, but not 50 keyword articles about scrapbooking or gardening. Sorry, but if you enjoy that you ain't quite right in the head. :p

But the model is sound. It just doesn't have to be about writing articles or ebooks.

Ever considered 'Ghostsiting?' Here's a basic business plan for the idea. You could pretty easily get a $1,000-$1,200/month business going in a matter of weeks. Somebody hungry run with it...

1. Learn how to set up a good, basic site using Wordpress. There are umpteen guides on this out there. Not hard at all if you don't already know how. Don't overthink it or worry about too many widgets or fancy stuff. Just good basic sites with a few pages of unique content that look nice and professional. I like the Flexibility 2 theme, but there are many other great ones out there and a lot of them are free.

2. Set up a few of these sites to use as samples to show prospects. Put them on separate domains or just use subdomains on your main domain to save money.

3a. Set up a membership program and charge something like $37-$47/month. This would be to build each member one new site per month.

3b. Upsell a service to find niches/keywords for your members, if they can't or don't want to supply their own every month. I would add an extra $25 at least for that service every month. If you don't know how to do good keyword research already, again there are many guides out there. Just research this forum and you'll learn all you need if you really dig in. This is optional of course. You could require members to tell you what the niche and keywords are every month, but you'll find that most will want you to do it for them.

4. Put up a page in the Warriors For Hire section here, and even do a WSO if you can to get some buzz going about your service. Just set up monthly subscriptions through Paypal and you're all set. No need to even set up a site of your own for it, or a forum or any of that other jive. K.I.S.S. and you can rock with this.

This will work because there just isn't a lot of competition. There's a ton of competition in ghostwriting! More every year. But not that many offer monthly website creation services for affiliate marketers, Adsense publishers, site flippers, etc.

John
#ghostsiting #ghostwriting #or month #site #website
  • Profile picture of the author Sacha Sargoni
    Thanks Zues66, great idea. I'm onto it. So simple and powerful.
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  • Profile picture of the author Dennis Gaskill
    What? Huh? You're going to build one website a month for $37? That's way too much work. I just want to push a button and be rich. :p
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  • Profile picture of the author Istvan Horvath
    Originally Posted by Zeus66 View Post

    3a. Set up a membership program and charge something like $37-$47/month. This would be to build each member one new site per month.
    With $37/mo I would need 27 members to make $1,000/month.
    Did you mean to build 27 different sites/blogs every month month for them???

    (Even with $47/mo membership charge it would mean 21 members/sites...)
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  • Profile picture of the author Sacha Sargoni
    my goal is 2000 a month, so i need 43 members. Im offering 2 blogs a month for the basic $47 service. I will be building 86 blogs a month at my peak, or 3 a day.

    I can bang a quality blog out in 2 hours. Assuming an 8 hour day, it leaves 2 hours to provide "premium" services to add to my bottom line.

    Doable? i think so, gonna give it my all anyways!
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    • Profile picture of the author Istvan Horvath
      Originally Posted by Sacha Sargoni View Post

      Im offering 2 blogs a month for the basic $47 service.
      Is any kind of content included or just the "naked" blog?
      (just curios )
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      • Profile picture of the author Sacha Sargoni
        Originally Posted by Istvan Horvath View Post

        Is any kind of content included or just the "naked" blog?
        (just curios )
        No content on the basic service (You provide, I format).

        However, in the true spirit of marketing, first 10 clients get 40 free spun articles, wow.
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        • Profile picture of the author Jarrett
          Banned
          thanks for the tip! cool idea
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        • Profile picture of the author Hasan Barbary
          I really like this idea. I've run a membership site in the past where I built pre-made Amazon stores for my members. I made three mistakes:

          1) I didn't charge enough per month. $10-$20 per didn't cover all the time I put into design, which led to #2

          2) I didn't K.I.S.S. Because I'm a perfectionist, I ended-up over-designing the mini-sites (too much Flash; Video-On-Demand, etc). This directly led to #3

          3) I didn't pay for dedicated web hosting. Especially with WP, I would suggest that anyone planning to roll-out 50 or 100 or 200 MySQL databases from one domain put some serious investment into bandwidth & hosting.

          But still, this is a sweet plan if you get the infrastructure right first.
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  • Profile picture of the author George Wright
    Well thanks a lot. You just spoiled my next WSO.

    Seriously that is a model that you can shout from the roof top and not worry about competition or saturation.

    And then offer One URL and One URL only for each "premium site."

    Grab TheBestWidgetInAnyCity.com and you will sell it. You could add it as a extra first come first serve in your membership site. Someone will buy it to flip later.

    Your basic idea has so many twists and turns one could put on it. Nice idea.

    George Wright
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  • Profile picture of the author Zeus66
    If you can write a few articles per day, you can easily do a site a day. I'm talking about mini sites here. Find a few keywords in a niche and put up a good seed of a site, basically. That's all a lot of marketers are looking for - something they can take possession of and grow themselves. Sure, they could buy something at Flippa, but they don't have control over the topics there. This is more for people who want that control but don't have the skills or the time or the outsourcing contacts to do it on their end.

    Working full-time at this, you could pretty easily set up 2 sites/day and take 50 or 60 monthly members. Might take you a few weeks to build up to that many members, but hey, what business is instant? Not very many.

    And you don't necessarily have to limit it to one per member. You could target serious marketers and offer 3 sites/month to 10 or 15 or even 20 members. Up the price and you've got the same income but fewer customers to service.

    I do think this is an underserved market. Good opportunity for someone like Sacha to stake a claim.

    John
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  • Profile picture of the author Dennis Gaskill
    It's a good plan, especially for someone that isn't making any money now. It does have limitations because you can only make so many blogs in a month, so you're limited in how many members you can have. How about twisting your idea around a little bit and creating one new blog per week, outsourcing the installation, and selling 100 memberships? That's still a pretty exclusive club, just 100 members, but you could change more for 4 blogs installed per month and it would leave you plenty of time to market the service. Say you charged $77 a month, @ 100 clients you make $7,700 a month gross.
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  • Profile picture of the author Zeus66
    Well yeah, Dennis. This isn't going to make anyone rich unless you really run with it, build up to a few hundred monthly subscribers and find some outsource workers who'll do the grunt work cheap. But for a lot of folks who work jobs, an extra grand a month is huge. Especially in this economy. I just hate to see people not even trying because they think it takes too much time or is too difficult. There are so many ways to earn $30-$50 a day online and a lot of them aren't very time consuming or hard.

    John
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  • Profile picture of the author Dennis Gaskill
    Can you tell I used to earn my living designing websites? Can you tell I got frustrated with it? lol - like I said, it's a good plan. I was just trying to show how your idea can be scaled up later. It can help someone later if they set up it with that in mind from the beginning.

    Don't hate me. I was just trying to add on, my friend, not take away. At least I didn't tell anyone about your gay flying monkeys. Oops!
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    • Profile picture of the author MattOwen
      does take some elbow grease but you cant deny this is just another method out there to make money. perhaps i would pay for the service if it saved me enough time on my sniper sites.
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  • Profile picture of the author goliathseo
    Heck you could even go to the extent of outsourcing the installation and customization as well as content writing which would leave you to do only one thing....

    Marketing!

    Of course this is once you have the cash flow to outsource all of the above tasks.
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    • Profile picture of the author Zeus66
      Originally Posted by goliathseo View Post

      Heck you could even go to the extent of outsourcing the installation and customization as well as content writing which would leave you to do only one thing....

      Marketing!

      Of course this is once you have the cash flow to outsource all of the above tasks.
      Oh sure. You could outsource every bit of the grunt work. But the real key until you can afford to do that is to have an assembly line kind of system in place so you can streamline the site creation part of it. Once you learn how to do good niche and keyword research, that part will not take you very long for each site. It's the actual site creation that bogs most people down if they aren't very experienced with it. But that is precisely why this is a good idea to run with! A lot of people just are not at all technical, even enough to do a basic WP installation and set up. But it's very easy to learn to do. That's your hook, see? You do the stuff your members don't want to learn (or are afraid to try). You'll find that many of them are happy to pay you $37 or $47 every month to do it for them and they just see that they're adding a new site to their stable every month.

      John
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  • Profile picture of the author Jacob Anthony
    Originally Posted by Zeus66 View Post

    I used to make a pretty good living as a ghostwriter, and I was thinking back on those days earlier today. I got out of it because it was caving my head in. I like to write, but not 50 keyword articles about scrapbooking or gardening. Sorry, but if you enjoy that you ain't quite right in the head. :p

    But the model is sound. It just doesn't have to be about writing articles or ebooks.

    Ever considered 'Ghostsiting?' Here's a basic business plan for the idea. You could pretty easily get a $1,000-$1,200/month business going in a matter of weeks. Somebody hungry run with it...

    1. Learn how to set up a good, basic site using Wordpress. There are umpteen guides on this out there. Not hard at all if you don't already know how. Don't overthink it or worry about too many widgets or fancy stuff. Just good basic sites with a few pages of unique content that look nice and professional. I like the Flexibility 2 theme, but there are many other great ones out there and a lot of them are free.

    2. Set up a few of these sites to use as samples to show prospects. Put them on separate domains or just use subdomains on your main domain to save money.

    3a. Set up a membership program and charge something like $37-$47/month. This would be to build each member one new site per month.

    3b. Upsell a service to find niches/keywords for your members, if they can't or don't want to supply their own every month. I would add an extra $25 at least for that service every month. If you don't know how to do good keyword research already, again there are many guides out there. Just research this forum and you'll learn all you need if you really dig in. This is optional of course. You could require members to tell you what the niche and keywords are every month, but you'll find that most will want you to do it for them.

    4. Put up a page in the Warriors For Hire section here, and even do a WSO if you can to get some buzz going about your service. Just set up monthly subscriptions through Paypal and you're all set. No need to even set up a site of your own for it, or a forum or any of that other jive. K.I.S.S. and you can rock with this.

    This will work because there just isn't a lot of competition. There's a ton of competition in ghostwriting! More every year. But not that many offer monthly website creation services for affiliate marketers, Adsense publishers, site flippers, etc.

    John
    I really like this idea! one question I have though is about hosting and domains for the blogs/minisites. Would the monthly fees include the cost of the domains and hosting the sites or would that have to be covered seperately by the customer?

    Or are we talking blogs that have free hosting such as blogger or wordpress.com?
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    • Profile picture of the author samish
      It is hard to says than done.

      The key about making money is to find something people are hungry of. I've been trying for years and still haven't found it yet.

      Ended up follow a guy about make money on adsense. So far, I average $1/day.

      Bought a PLR package from a guru, once he got my money, refuses to answer questions.

      etc...

      What I've learned from the whole ordeal is to just don't give up. Find what is wrong that you don't make money by seeing what is other is doing right and change your strategy.

      Here is what I've learned: I paid for 13 amazon affiliate sites with auto-update features. After $550, I make ZERO. I did a search on this forum and found another fellow warrior member do it the different way. I then realize what I did wrong.

      My two cents.
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      • Profile picture of the author MissTerraK
        This is a very good idea indeed if you like website designing!

        However, if writing is your passion and you are ghostwriting, why on earth would you accept an offer to write on such mundane topics as scrapbooking and gardening if you find it blah?

        You don't have to take every offer that comes your way! Actually, if you choose offers that are on the things you yourself are very knowledgable in and have a passion for, it is quite rewarding and lucrative as well, IMHO.

        MissTerraK
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