The Progression of My Online Business (Regularly Updated)

1 replies
Hey guys, my name's Dylan, I'm almost 21 years old (just days away) and I've been doing this online thing, full-time, for a little over a year now. I've been in a partnership (50/50 split LLC) for the last year, and we both recently decided to go separate and get our own LLC's because of the constraints the 50/50 split put on us. I think it was a good decision, but I've noticed that since I don't have another person working beside me, it's all on me now and that's a lot of pressure to deal with. I'm starting this thread because I'd like to give back to the community by keeping everyone updated with my progression, while also documenting my success and struggles along the way. I hope this thread can be beneficial/inspiring/motivational or at least a decent read for some of you.

How far have I gotten in this last year?
Well, I'm bringing in about $3,000 - $4,000/month before taxes, and I'm in the U.S. so taxes here take a pretty significant hit on my income. The downside? It's all from writing articles and absolutely none of it can be made while I sleep or take a vacation, which is ultimately my goal. I write over 10,000 words of content everyday and I get paid pretty low rates by the clients I write for. It's a lot of work, but it's paying the bills and giving me some money to get my real online business off the ground.

What is my plan for the business?
To sell search engine optimization (SEO), link building, web design, and PPC advertising services. There's A LOT of competition with these services, but these are things I've been studying since I was 12 years old and I'm very confident in my ability to provide them at a lower cost than my competition and with far more value. I mean, come on. Just look at some of the link building/SEO sellers you see around the forums, "submission to 1,500 article directories?" Unless you're using this for tier3 links, I'd only recommend it if you want to cripple your search engine rankings. I know I've got the experience and the motivation for it, so this is where I'm starting. After this business is up and running, I'll be moving into affiliate marketing and other types of service based websites that can be outsourced.

I think my services will be better than what's already out there because I know SEO, I know web design, and I have a good team to help me. As far as link building and SEO, I'll be offering manual syndication services to top, high PR sites, as well as software-assisted link building using SENuke XCR and such. For the software assisted links, I'll be doing really high quality spins (manual spins at the sentence level, then spun at word level with WordAI) and I won't be blasting thousands or even hundreds of sites. It will be submissions to a controlled number of sites, only the highest quality ones. The manual syndications won't need spinning since it's all done manually by a guy on my team. We will be offering good anchor text diversity, good URL diversity, and good link diversity across lots of websites. That's my recipe for success for my customers I'll also be offering really high quality services like manual blog comments, guest posts on niche related websites, etc. These services won't be cheap for my customers, because we do them right and make sure they are top notch. Some of the manual blog comment sellers are just blasting auto approve lists that have OBL's of 100+ and they call this a 'manual' service. I'm happy to say, that will not be our plan of action

What have I got already?
I've got the website for the business up and I've even got a custom made client panel that I spent a couple grand on. It will help me organize/maintain orders once they start coming in. Keep in mind, I don't plan to hold down these orders all on my own. I've got a team behind me of link builders/content writers/designers that I've hand picked off Odesk and various other places. These are guys I trust to do services for the business and I've tested them out thoroughly and they do good work.

I've also got about 10 other domains that I purchased which are related to some of the services that the business provides. These domains/sites are going to be used to push some of those services a little harder. I'll get them ranked for their respective keywords and that should provide some more traction in the SERPS for the business. The downside to this is that my custom made client panel won't be able to be installed on each of these other domains, so I might have to manually take orders on these sites and add them to the client panel on the main business site. Either that or get back to my coder and have something better made but at the moment, I'm strapped for cash and need every penny I've got.

I'm going to keep the income I make from writing separate from the income I make from the websites. Mainly because I think it would be confusing. Yeah, some months I pull in a good income of $4,500 or so (before taxes) from writing, but that's not long-term or sustainable, so it's not income I bank on for the future.

Profit: $-480

Expenses so far for the business: (not counting the money spent on the custom client panel for the business website. If I counted that, I'd be in the red another couple thousand or so.)

$170 for daily public proxies list (will be needed to scrape for sites to add to my SEO software to provide software assisted link building)
$150 for 3 years of web hosting (shouldn't be needing that for awhile now)
$10 for the domain name
$70 for 3 months of a VPS to run SEO software (I buy 3 months at a time)
$30 for $200 BING advertising coupon (will be using shortly and I'll update with the profit made)
$50 for some SEO work and other organic promotional work that I've outsourced to my team & done a little on myself

Edited by moderator: "Follow me" type threads are not allowed. That's why I locked this one. Good luck though.
#business #my journey #online #online business #progression #regularly #updated
  • Profile picture of the author IprovideSEO
    Dylan,

    Congratulations on your online success, you are on a very similar path that I took and seem to have that same entreprenurial mind. I am 23 and operate an SEO/Web Design business that was doing well for all of last year and is just now starting to really take off and pull in profits.

    Keep doing what you are doing, and make sure to update this thread even if you have to come back to it 3 months later.

    Goodluck
    Signature
    Need high quality SEO services at the best price for your small business? Call today for a free SEO or Web Design quote!
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[7817248].message }}

Trending Topics