Re-evaluating My Online Business Ideas

I’ve decided it’s time to re-evaluate my online business ideas. For several years now I’m been pottering along almost aimlessly and still managed to generate a tidy amount of pocket money from my online endeavours. Like a lot of internet entrepreneurs I’ve been jumping from one opportunity to another and not really getting any further ahead. Now it’s time for me to focus on what has been working and ensure that I earn every thing I can from those opportunities.

First off, my reasons for biting the bullet at this stage. In around four years I’ll be eligible for long service leave from my offline employer (yes, I still have a “real job”). What I would really like to do is build my online business to replace that income within that four period. Four years should be more than a resonable amount of time to build a business. If I can acheive my goal before then, even better.

When I look at what has been earning online money for me so far, I can narrow it down to three income streams, Adsense, Clickbank and Squidoo. I currently have three blogs and and a couple of other websites that are generating Adsense and Clickbank income. I also publish pages on Squidoo. At this stage  I do not produce or sell my own products.

Now lets do some math. My websites and blogs currently consist of around 400 pages of content, some of it written by me, some of it re-published with permisson from various article directories. I also occasionally import related Youtube vidoes into the blogs. All of this requires a fair amount of keyword research and SEO work to get pages ranked by search engines. This work so far generates around $200 a month thanks to Adsense and Clickbank. Not a huge amount, but it sure helps with my car repayments.

Then  there’s my Squidoo income. From about 40 published pages on Squidoo I make around $50 a month. Only seven of my published lenses (that’s squid talk) make more than $1. I’m really thinking it may be more effective for me to produce more Squidoo content. What if instead of 40 Squidoo lenses, I had 400?  Theoretically that should result in an income stream of $500 or more per month. I certainly enjoy making Squidoo lenses and I can see there is certainly money to be made. The income generated may even be higher as more there should be more traffic generated from within Squidoo by the higher number of related pages.or more.

Doing the math helps to make the decision easier. So far, 400 pages of blog and website content makes $200 pr month. 400 pages of lenses should make around $500 or month, maybe even more.

So for at least the next two years or so I fully intend to focus on Squidoo. That’s plenty of time to build a lot more pages. My online income will be higher which gives me more opportunity to invest in outsourcing work and developing my own products. Then I have another 2 years to build on that income.

That’s the plan, now it’s up to me to make it happen.

 

via stevencousley.com