Full Time Income from MMO By September 2021

Hi Brett

It's awesome that you're sharing your journey. I look forward to hearing more. We can all learn from each others successes and failures. I wish you all the best with achieving your goal!

Thanks Serene.


Today's update: I have published my first article on Medium. Has anyone tried it? Maybe it's HubPages for the 20's (anyone remember HubPages?). I was going to guestpost the article on a fairly well known SEO blog but they had a long list of rules and you know what? Their traffic was so small they don't even appear in Ubersuggest.


I have also realised that one of my sites is a potential goldmine for YouTubers who like blogging about quirky stuff. I need to tweak my algorithm and when the time is right I'll pitch to some A listers. I could actually make my own channel, but I'm a coder, not a broadcaster.



I'll briefly talk about pitching... Be wary of moving too early. I pitched my exciting new site to a B list blogger in my niche but he never replied. He did at least visit my site though. But the other side of the coin is that genuinely brilliant ideas are rarely recognised as such. We've all heard the stories of record producers turning down the Beetles or Queen. I've just got to keep knocking on doors.



Oh and if you're reading this and if you have an SEO/MMO blog I will definitely find in Ubersuggest or other traffic estimation sites and you're open to guest posts then PM me.

Thank you for sharing that. hope that you will reach your goals and make the success you want.
Concerning meduim.com, it's the short way to rank in google with your own content. you do well with posting in it rather than a small traffic blog in a same niche.
I look forward to hearing more from you with hope that you will find opportunities with other members to improve your domain authority.

I always find it inspiring the posts about other people's journeys.

Reminds me that we are all in our own journey and as long as we never quit, the glory is there.

Mini update...


My Medium article has had one view so far. I don't know if Medium gives you very little visibility unless you become more active on the site. So I'll not post anything more until I see a bit of progress here.


I am building up new site #4, which I think has a lot of potential. I don't actually have to do a lot because it self-builds. The self build process is now sorted out after some teething problems and I also took time to make the entire site use asynchronous code, which should help if it gets popular and I need to scale.



I should be building new site #1's membership facility. However, last year I bought something in a high value niche that's very underserved with YouTube videos (plus the #1 in the niche suddenly quit). I am getting everything together to do a test video. It's an increasingly popular evergreen niche where the products cost $750+. The barriers of entry are high because of the expense and also it would be quite time consuming to make the videos.



New site #5 (actually a rebuilt blog) had an ad click overnight which was encouraging.


I have a lot of projects on the go but I also have a lot of time on my hands.

Another update:


1. I had one more view on Medium. I thought it would be better than that. Meh, maybe they just make money from other authors who pay for membership in order to boost their own articles. They have some good content, but it's just another blog, and my blog directory has currently indexed over 13,000 of those, 99.9% of which are free to read.



2. My YouTube channel is launched, plus I bought the matching domain because it's a brilliant domain with huge branding potential. It's my first .tv too. They're pricey compared to .com's but I think they're the best TLD there is. Well YouTube is better than Medium because I've already had 3 views. I don't know if the niche is big enough for me to meet the monetization requirements, but it's a fun niche and I could potentially use it to sell some products. My latest purchases in this niche arrived from the USA this morning - $200 worth of awesome gear. Oh and a shout out to Canva for helping me make brilliant YouTube channel art (including thumbnails). The good thing is that this niche is very photogenic.



3. I've been firing off emails in response to Haro enquiries. I've had one reply so far. It's not the one I wanted, but I might be able to fire off a guest post and get a backlink or two. My feeling is that Haro is a good idea but we need a version for us smaller players (i.e. bloggers and business making less than $100,000 a year). Well I'll keep going on this one because I only need one decent backlink to start the ball rolling on my various new ventures.


4. My Ezoic account manager has given the green light for two more of my sites to go into it. I'm not sure if I'm earning the same/less/more than AdSense but what I love about Ezoic is that it gives me income diversification. PM me if you want an introduction to them (you need 10K monthly visitors in a site that's AdSense-safe).

Cool thread - thanks for sharing. Love the pitching updates as well - think that's especially valuable for many on here (were you planning on doing that with YouTubers as well as bloggers?)

A little update...


Haro has proven quite fruitful but you have to be quick and you have to respond to everything vaguely relevant. I've got one definite guest posting opportunity on a really nice travel blog, and the possibility of posting very high quality articles on the blog of a 10 million dollar company. Actually the biggest benefit has been finding out how the 10 million dollar company does their marketing.


I have started my new YouTube channel in a high value collectibles niche. There's also an associated website with a killer .tv domain. I'm making videos from my own animations and stills. I've made 3 videos from 3-5 mins long and one #Shorts. It will take a while for the channel to gain any traction although I have had 2 likes. I don't think this channel will be a moneyspinner but my video production expertise is doubling on every video I produce!


Actually now I think about it my channel could make a bit of money from sponsorship opportunities - it is in a high value shopping niche.



Making videos is fun but VERY time consuming. So this week I will be adding a membership option to my new site #1. It will still be free, but the brand will get a huge lift as a lot more people will be typing the site's name into Google. Oddly enough nobody has actually done what I am about to do, so it could be wildly successful.



I've also added advertising to the site and it's now making ~$2 a day. If I extrapolate the earnings from just this low level then making all these new sites will give me a full time income, I just need to make a new site every ~3 months.



Hot tip of the week: check your video clickthrough rates because on my SEO related channel my clever thumbnail that was a homage to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire gets twice as many clicks as my other videos. Good thumbnails make a massive difference, much like good blog titles do in SERPS.


Oh and Medium has still bombed.

Canva makes very nice thumbnails. Just make sure they match the content. I don't have a problem with this but it's common on viral thumbnails in niches like funny cats (i.e. I wanna see that cat in the thumbnail but it's not actually in the video - that's a guaranteed downvote from me).


One job this week is to yank my products out of ClickBank as they've totally botched PayPal integration and 80% of my customers use it to buy my products. I'll probably go with 2Checkout as they handle my old software business (I think).



I submitted my guest post to the travel blog. I've tried writing more guest posts in the business niche but none are that good yet.



I've been mulling over buying AHrefs. I can do all the coding in the world but I need a bit of article marketing on my site to bring in visitors. It's ranking for its brand and a few random keywords, but that's about it.



I have identified two niches I can aim one of my sites at. Neither are too competitive according to the free parts of AHrefs but I could do with a massive list of keywords to target. I've also done some market research. There are premium tools in the niches but they're (1) rubbish or (2) target the higher end of the market.


I've also had a little look at repositioning site #3. It has potential because it's a super high value niche with wonderous CPM. At the moment the site is aging quite nicely so maybe in 6 months or so I can add some new features.


I had to rebuild site #4 after a disastrous attempt at making the database unicode compatible. I'm kind of happy it happened because now the data quality is much higher. Again with some article marketing this site should fly.


Finally I added something to ProductHunt on the recommendation of a contact found on Haro. It's too early to judge this one.

What's been happening this week?

It looks like my first guest post on a Haro site will be published soon.

I've had a major push on site #4. The database is rebuilt and I've added some useful tools. I've also written a lot of content because although my sites are super useful I'm not yet ranking for the keywords I need to be ranking for.

I tried to get site #1 into a major ad network. I am accepted but my site's code doesn't like their ad's code. I had to abandon monetization plans, but at least now the members area is open. Unfortunately the quality of member is... low. This is a problem with a lot of internet ventures I guess.

It's getting harder for me to populate my sites' databases. On the upside this is an effective barrier to entry for new competitors.

My new YouTube channel is doing pretty well: in 2 weeks I have reached 11 videos, 276 views, 5 watch hours, 9 subscribers, 2 good comments (and 2 spam), 12 Likes and no dislikes. I'm also ranking for my main keyword.

I don't know if this channel will ever get monetized but the experience might be useful because I am mulling over going into the 'how to' niche.

Good on you. Keep up the work. Look forward to reading about your success.

Thanks Chris. Actually I just had a revelation this morning. I think I should switch direction and become a full time YouTuber.


My current vlogging niche (collectibles) is too small and it's too time consuming to create content.


I am going to switch to tutorials. According to my research these are hot. Fortunately I also have a spare channel to use for this (I think you can only start one new channel a year?). Basically I will try and cover how to's that don't yet (but should) have a video listed in the SERPs. Personally I prefer blogs to videos when it comes to finding out how to do something, but I know many people prefer videos. I've definitely watched a lot of tutorials about how to actually make videos using various software tools.

Another update...

• One of my CPA offers got deplatformed by a major Silicon Valley company so sales on a couple of my sites really tanked in April. Thankfully they bounced back on the very last day so I may avoid having to rethink the monetization of those.
• I spent ages writing a guest post for a blog found via Haro. I don't think they'll ever publish it. I've deleted my Haro account as reporters are primarily interested in wokeness and the norm (of which I am not).
• New site number 1 is now doing decent numbers (traffic and income), and the 42% bounce rate should mean it storms ahead in the next few months.
• New site number 2 has been neglected but it is ranking for a fairly big keyword + permutations and I should explore this niche some more.
• New site number 3 is getting reasonable traffic but a major ad platform turned it down (not enough original content, yeah I was tempted to tell them that I have more OC than Google and Pinterest combined).
• New site number 4 is looking really good now especially after shifting from MySQL to SQL Server. I've nothing against MySQL but my hosting company's MySQL server was . I have just one competitor in this niche so I need to go after their keywords.
• My tutorials channel on YouTube has got off to a slow start but I still think there's potential there. My unboxings channel is doing rather better - I'm now up to 21 subscribers and had 164 views in the last 48 hours. I don't think I will ever reach monetization with this one however any unboxing niche is good for getting freebies and stuff. Also I've gained a lot of video making experience from it which is helping my first channel (MMO niche).

April's online income was $1040.48. May is looking very good so far. The main thing though is if I have a good new website idea every 2-3 months then I'll be making some pretty decent income assuming the sites stick around for 10 years.

A monthly update...

• It turned out the HARO blog did eventually publish my article. I got quite a few backlinks from that. HARO is worth a go, especially if you have business experience and/or a larger site and you're sufficiently of interest to feature in roundup posts. I don't have the right face for these, so I'll just let my code do the talking .
• New site #4 has come out of the sandbox in the last couple of days and traffic is starting to rocket. The takehome message here is that if you think you have a brilliant idea, continue to work on it even when you have next to no traffic.
• New site #1 is chugging along nicely and the quality of member signing up is increasing.
• I know people here are mostly bloggers but I primarily build data driven sites and I highly recommend you all think about how you can start collecting data about your niche. I started collecting SEO data in 2013 and I now have a database table with 477,000 keywords as well as a lot of other data. Time series data is especially useful (i.e. the number of X over time). Blogs can earn a lot of money, but seriously, data-driven sites can earn 10x - 100x as much as a blog ever could.
• I got hired for a regular job on the strength of how awesome site #4 is.
• May's online income was $1396.74 so I'm kind of on track.
• Since 2002 I've invested 100% of my online income profits into stocks, bonds, REIT's and other investments. May's investment income was $913.40 and guys that's TRUE passive income because I spend maybe 3-4 hours a month on rebalancing my portfolio.
• My unboxing YouTube's traffic has collapsed, maybe as a lack of freshbot content but also it was overly reliant on being the #1 suggested video from somebody else's very popular video.
• My tutorial's channel's metrics are looking better. One of my tutorials has done pretty well and my angry man rants could be a good second focus for the channel. I know from my blogging days that people WILL comment on posts relating to scams and injustices.
• As for future growth, I saw a Niche Pursuits post about a Diving blog that talked about the use of tools and calculators in driving organic links. In the next month I'm basically prioritising building the same for my sites.

Any new updates?

That is so cool to read a threads like this, it inspire me so much and I feel that I'm not alone in my bad days, everybody have those and we have to find a power in ourselves to move forward

Thanks everyone - here's another update:

• June's online income: $1140 plus I earnt another $900 in investment dividends. On this basis I have kind of achieved my goal. That total was the highest non-job income I've earnt since I started making money online in 1998.
• July's income is likely to be lower although it's always a great month for investment income. My main money earning site also had a traffic spike last week which is always good for income.
• I've given up on YouTube after a copyright strike. I don't know how channels get away with using footage from other sources. I didn't do this, but my angry man rant got taken down. Well screw them, there's a lot of other opportunities online.
• Regular job has hit the rocks, so screw them too.
• I bought a new domain based on meticulous keyword research using the Ahref free competition checker. I am basically doubling down on building directory sites. This one is in a high paying niche with zero competitors. It's crying out for an authority site because the sites come and go in this niche and every one else's attempts have ended in a big pile of broken links.
• I have also noticed corporate niche that could benefit from a directory site. If I get time I'll put something up and see if it gets traffic.
• I have noticed my new sites' Google traffic takes off at around 6 months, so remember to be patient everybody and just keep adding USEFUL content.
• I am worried about being overly reliant on AdSense and eZoic so I want to shift to monetization from list building and funnels. I don't know much about these but I do have a steady stream of visitors that should convert like crazy. I might outsource list building (not sure if this is a thing). I think I also need some sort of 'make money in the weight loss niche' WSO type product.
• I have built 6 new tools and calculators for my various sites. I hope Niche Pursuits is right on this thing!
• I did a bit of a makeover of new site #3. I realise that the traffic is all related to the sites I feature in the directory, whereas to make money it's going to have to shift to a product focus.
• My investment income comes from all the money I've earnt online that I've been able to invest. I have shifted more of this pile into higher yielding investments. I would like my investment income to exceed my online income, because it is true 'passive income'.

August update. If you have any questions ask them below! Anyway:

• July's online income was $1288 and I received another $772 in investment income. I've revised up June's online income to $1579 (currency conversion error, since I do my accounting in GBP).
• My investment income is likely to soar in the next couple of months because in 8 out of the 12 months I receive big quarterly payments from big holdings in 7% yielders.
• If you're a dividend investor like I am then pay close attention to your broker's charges. One of mine charges 0.45% a year which is 9% of my annual dividend income assuming I'm getting 5% a year on my investments! Ouch. I am having a lot of success with 'free' trading apps, but I do not have all my eggs in a single broker's basket.
• I was fired from my day job but WHO CARES because I have funnels to build! Seriously... I realised every site I've started since December is gaining decent traffic, so now I need to monetize them. I think the way forward is to use funnels. I don't know much about these, but that has to change! (edited: not a JV thread)
• I took Ezoic off my main cash cow of a site. I only joined them because I wanted to diversify from AdSense, but they're totally reliant on Google so it's basically just a more strict version of AdSense. Also their support has nosedived like my earnings did (Thursday Ezoic $7, Friday AdSense $39 and Friday is traditionally my worst day). I still don't think Ezoic made me more than AdSense did, but they sure as hell spoilt the look of my site, murdering my bounce rate in the process.
• 3 weeks ago I spotted a keyword opportunity in AHrefs free tool and the site I built around it is looking promising. Now I don't have a day job there is also another, higher volume keyword that I should do something with. I basically have a framework for building directory sites, so I am VERY interested if I find such a keyword where there appears to be no competition.
• Incidentally if you do want to build directory sites then those sites listing dentists, car repair shops, nail bars etc. etc. etc. still seem to be quite profitable. I don't build these, but there is a guy whose sites I keep coming across and every time I look he has rolled out another one. He wouldn't be doing this if the sites didn't make any money. I would say that targeting the non-US, non-English speaking market is key to the lowest competition.

Keep it up boss !!!
I am learning from your story..

October update...


August and September's income were great. In fact September's income was an all time record. October is looking so-so, mostly because ad revenue from my main site has really sunk.


I have a new day job and it's much better than the old one. There are a lot of jobs around right now (in most sectors) so it's not the time to be messing around trying to make nickles from websites.


I also appear to be switching my main side hustle into collectibles flipping. Yes there's more to making money than starting a blog! It's early days yet but I now have around $3000 of inventory I've bought for a good price, and when the time is right I will offload on eBay or Amazon. My tips for product flipping:


1. You make money on the buy, not when you sell. If you buy products for a great price, you WILL do well.


2. Find a niche you know something about, and it's all the better if it's a known brand. The brand I'm focusing on is globally well known and there are INSANE amounts of transactions for it on eBay.



I think there are crossover opportunities here because I could potentially combine my knowledge of building directory sites with my knowledge of collectibles. These sites can make a tonne of money but I need to find the right niche.


As for websites - one site I started earlier in the year is getting a tonne of traffic but it's proving difficult to monetize. I've also reviewed my YouTube channel stats and the most promising one is my coding channel. If I had 30 more good videos I'd potentially reach the monetization threshold. I need to give this some thought.

First a salute to the OP. Fantastic follow up and of course the results deserve a congrats.

Great insights by Savidge4. I am taking notes!

Reminds me on a YouTube Video right before Elon Musk went on SNL these Financial YouTube Influencers were all together and one of them was King of DogeCoin" because he was sitting at $2 Million after he went all in with it.

One guy with impeccable rep told him I will buy you champagne if you sell it right now. Take the money and run.

But he was adamant that Elon Musk would send the stock soaring.

It was quite the opposite and he took a humongous hit during the SNL broadcast when Elon Musk said in this skit when asked what is Crypto exactly...

It's an unstoppable financial currency that's going to take over the world," Musk said. "It's a cryptocurrency you can trade for conventional money."

Che responded, "Oh, so it's a hustle?" "Yeah, it's a hustle," the Dogefather admitted.

Great thread Brett! Thanks for sharing so many details of your life. Just curious heading into holiday season and 2022 just around corner how are things going now? Look forward to your feedback especially during this season of The Great Resignation!!

Thanks for sharing that with us. We should all set goals

Concerning medium ranking your articles on Google I have published some articles on medium with very few view sometime like 5 views I heard you can get good views by submitting your article to publication within medium but these publication don't accept affiliate links
anyone knows of a way around this

New Year... New Goals...

OK so I'll admit that I've taken the pedal off my website building, but my sites are still around, and I'm still making money online.

Here's the status of my various hustles:

New job is going well and I also moved apartments. My priority this year is to keep my job and my apartment. Maybe during The Great Resignation I should aim for a much higher salary, but current role is 100% work from home and the work is not too challenging. Also my colleagues are great, which is always a good thing.

My main moneyspinner website had a huge income crash in December, but I realised it was due to not having a robots.txt file. Duh. It's back now, and continues to make money. I spent a month building the site in 2013 and another month last year rebuilding it, and in terms of money earned it is the most lucrative thing I have ever done.

My stock investing has done very well, with my net worth up 35% since the March 2020 Covid low. In particular the 'free' stock trading accounts I opened in 2020 have vastly outperformed my existing accounts, due to a combination of very low fees and the ability to buy US stocks. I'm primarily a dividend investor and my dividend income in December 2021 was 80% more than it was in December 2020. Most of this money originally came from my online income. Now my stocks income is greater than my online income. There's a valuable lesson here for others.

In December I let all but 1 of my 10 year old dating blog domains expire. It was formerly one hell of a cash cow niche but I lost quite a bit of traffic over the years. In addition to this, my main affiliate payers made a huge mess of moving into mobile dating, and their offers no longer converted for me. The final nail in the coffin was a combination of covid and politics, which killed off my most lucrative dating sub-niche.

I have 3 websites I built last year which are all getting a fair bit of traffic but it's proven quite tricky to monetize them. Probably the best thing to do with them would be to sell 100% of their advertising space to a major player in their niches.

From August I made a major move into a new niche - Lego investing. I currently have 202 sets stacked up in my 'warehouse'. I put a lot of effort into this at the end of last year because collectibles can be an excellent inflation hedge, and I wanted to diversify my portfolio of assets.

I might try to sell some of my sets this year, although I'm in no rush. 2021 was a vintage year for Lego, and I expect my holdings to do well. This year's Lego sets have been lacklustre so far, so I might scale back on the buying spree. The Lego Group has a long history of failure, and like other companies their recent big bet on diversity and wokeness may backfire.

While there's no guarantee of profit with collectibles flipping, the ace up my sleeve is that I have acquired my collection at an average of 30% below retail price, so I am already in 'paper' profit [with collectibles you primarily make money on the buy].

Incidentally, for anyone with an interest in collectibles, there are potentially some great opportunities to build directory/authority sites in specific niches. Lego is kind of the King of the Collectibles niche in this respect - there are some terrific directory sites out there. But don't be disheartened because in many other niches the competition is nothing special. I was actually surprised that the quality of directory and information sites in the dolls (e.g. Barbie) niche was so low... there are some GREAT opportunities here (and such sites are VERY easy to monetize).

Finally I invested in a high end PC and webcam so I'll see if I can finally crack YouTube. This time I'm going to put some effort into creating additional content for my coding channel. I figure the IT job market is so hot right now the other coders are coding not messing around on YouTube. I reckon I can hit monetization with around 40-50 decent videos. This is also a decent niche for monetization purposes.

So far I only have 3 videos but one has generated 150 watch hours - the same as my entire other channel received from 20 videos! Tutorials (about anything) are great because it's easy to get long viewing times and people generally turn to YouTube first these days if they want to learn about a particular topic.

Oh well let's hope 2022 turns out to be a decent year...