How I Made $860,538.38 PROFIT in 4 Months!
First off, I would like to make it clear that this post is NOT to impress you, but to impress upon you what’s possible! This is a quick review on how I went from one of my worst years of making money online to my best year, and all it took was one big idea, one web site and several hundred hours of effort along with many sleepless nights. This is “How I Made $860,538.38 Profit in 4 Months!“.
MARKETING EXPERIENCE & RIDING THE WAVES:
Time and time again, I talk about how you must change your marketing niche every once in a while to continuously make new money online. Over the years I have done everything from content web sites, to sweepstakes and freebie type sites, to running my own Affiliate Programs and even permission based email marketing. In early 2004 I had one of my best years with making money online, then later on in the year things started to slack off and this continued on through most of 2005. At the time I wasn’t making much money and it was quite depressing. It’s very tough to get back into the groove when you hit a few underachieving projects in a row. In short, I was in a dip… and at the bottom of my latest successful wave. It wasn’t until October 2005 that I came up with my next big idea that would soon bring me my best months and year!
FIND A NEW IDEA & TAKE CONTROL OF IT!
Social networking was just starting to catch fire and for months I knew there was a way to profit from it, but I just hadn’t come up with an idea yet. MySpace had millions of users on their network 24 hours a day, there had to be a way to take advantage of this. Soon enough I realized, instead of trying to sell to all of these users, why not offer them something for free. I ran through some ideas and came up with my own site to provide free content for social network users. To make a long story short, my site and my content went viral extremely fast. Instead of having users upload their own content or have to search around for what they were looking for, I provided everything for free. In no time I was receiving thousands of users to my site daily. At max points I was pushing up to 180,000+ unique visitors per day, while pushing TERABYTES of data bandwidth. Imagine hosting thousands of images, viewed by millions across several different social networks!
MANAGEMENT OF MASSIVE GROWTH:
Just two months after going live with my new site, I was starting to accumulate some amazing hosting costs. Imagine the cost on hosting thousands of widgets, text applications and images, which are loaded millions of times a day across social networks like MySpace! The only reason why I was able to afford these insane hosting costs, was because of the massive volume of users I was receiving back to my site, not only through social networks, but also from Google and other search engines. You only need a small percentage of a very big number to click on ads, fill out surveys or take any action, to make money. In two short months I went from having a single dedicated server to having over TEN, then with the insane bandwidth costs added in I was paying up to $12,000 a month. At this time I was currently with EV1Servers.net, and leasing all of my servers. Since I’m not a tech/programmer type guy, I also had a server management team watching my servers constantly to make sure they were always running, just being down for a few minutes would have lost $100s of dollars. This server management team was not part of EV1Servers, and cost $1000 a month to manage all of the servers, and keep the servers balancers in place. By the end of the third month, I talked with my server management team and we decided it was time to for me to invest in my own servers and take out the middleman for hosting. I went on to order 17 servers from Dell, which are all held and managed in a data center now.
MONETIZATION IS KEY:
On average, my site was receiving around 100,000 unique visitors per day, and I was generating most of my ad revenue through Yahoo Publisher Network, ValueClick Media and CasaleMedia. It wasn’t until a year later that I would start testing CPA offers on the site. To my surprise, the CPA offers from networks like NeverBlueAds worked extremely well. Originally I had stayed away from promoting a few of their offers because I thought they were over saturated and wouldn’t convert. I finally took their advice and listed a few on the site and to this day they are still pushing some great earnings through the site.
TO EXPAND, SELL OR STAY THE SAME:
Back in April, I wrote a post asking the question… “To Sell, or Not to Sell?“… This was a question I had to ask myself when I was approached by a company that wanted to merge/purchase my MySpace resource site. I not only turned down their seven-figure deal, but I was lucky enough to not be one of the many sites screwed by the company, as they tried buying many other sites as well. Once acquired by the company, they would wreck the site with adult-like video content and I heard from several people on how they got screwed out of their owed money and contracts.
SUCCESS IS FOUND:
Two years, and over seven-figures later… my little site idea that rapidly became one of my most profitable ideas yet, is still running strong. Despite the fact that I really haven’t touched the site in several months, it’s still receiving over 25,000 uniques per day and still making a decent amount of change.
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EARNINGS DETAILS:
As I mentioned earlier, three of the main initial revenue sources I monetized my site with were ValueClick Media, CasaleMedia and Yahoo Publisher Network. While I did use other programs such as NeverBlueAds and Google Adsense later on, these three programs were heavily used during months of peak traffic. As for promotion costs of the site, during this three month period, there were none. No ppc Advertising either, everything was viral traffic and a couple links off my other sites. This write up focused on how I made $860,538.38 PROFIT in 4 months. The site is now well over two years old and has since earned over seven figures in profit/earnings.
ValueClick Media is a company that buys your web site advertising space on a CPM basis. From my stats chart below, you can see the monthly increase in revenue went from $243.63 to nearly $30,000 a month.
CasaleMedia provides the same type of service as ValueClick Media, but are more strict with acceptance into their program. They also have higher CPM rates, but usually purchase a smaller percentage of your ad space. Peak earnings with CasaleMedia were around $7,000 a month.
One of the major reasons for my dramatic increase in income, was due to the release of the Yahoo Publisher Network. This program, run by Yahoo, is basically their response to Google Adsense. Like Adsense, you are paid an unknown percentage for each click you send to the contextual advertisements displayed on your site.
It wasn’t til about a year after launching the site, that I would start testing with CPA offers from NeverBlueAds. To my surprise, the majority of offers I listed on the site performed extremely well. Even though I thought the market was over saturated on these offers, there was still a high demand. With the new revenue generated from NeverBlueAds, the site was able to pull in another $60,000+.
For any of the doubters, or photoshop addicts… Just to prove my legitimacy, take a look at the video below!
Popularity: 35% [?]
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First! Zac, no need to convince me. See you at the summit. See, my video post about you is true, I’ve known you long enough to know you’re the real deal. Now let’s win some money in Vegas!
http://www.jimkukral.com/zac-johnson-is-one-bad-making-money-mofo/
If you want to WIN money then you need ME along. At least at the NL Holdem Poker tables. Good luck, guys!
This is incredible and a very motivational post! You are a hero! Always be thinking and willing to adapt to change. I just found this site…nice photo of you and Mark Cuban! You aim high Zac! You should release your profit and expenses for this blog, like John Chow does, it would be an interesting read!
Wow Zac, I was already convinced, but that was really cool. Thanks for sharing.
Zac, regardless of whether you show the video or not, there will be critics and doubters. Screw them, and keep doing what you are doing. Great job! See you at AWS.
Just WOOOW !
This post is great motivation to keep people like me working at it cause this is one of those days when I just want to give up.
Congrats
Thanks Zac
Great inspirational post for everyone that is trying to achieve their dreams with affiliate marketing! Congrats on all your success Zac.
Zac,
One of the coolest affiliate marketing stories I’ve ever heard - the fact that you earned that kind of money in such a short amount of time without expending anything on ppc traffic or blackhat SEO tricks is outstanding!
Can’t wait to hear more about this during ASW next week.
Kris
http://www.PepperJamnetwork.com
Much appreciated. It was quite an amazing task, when you see that it was done without paid promotion through ppc marketing or other unethical tactics. Affiliate Summit will be great! I’m looking forward to meeting all of my blog readers this weekend.
Photoshopped!
Just kidding, nice job! It’s refreshing to see a “real” post about long hours and sleepless nights leading to a big payoff. (Unlike so many of the “hey I started a blog and got rich” hype posts.)
Excuse me…don’t step there on it. That’s my jaw on the floor.
congrats zack, inspirational
That’s a complately insane amount of money to earn in 4 months. Way to go.
Zac- awesome job man! I know one day you will be interviewed on 60 Minutes (like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was last month)
Question- Did it take you a lot of time to gather / create all the content on your MySpace sites? From visiting them, they are quite massive with content so I was curious how long it took to put them together.
Thanks!
Thanks Vinny. I spent so many sleepless nights working on this site, it was definitely my biggest site yet… as much time consuming as well. Although, when you are working so hard on something and seeing results, it’s almost more fun than anything else.
WOW made > $860,000.00 in 4 months, very impressive and motivative!
Would appreciate if you could let me have the link to the site that enable you to make that impressive figure.
Truly impressive. This is a great success story.
Very impressive. Another guy that got into one of these hot items at the beginning. That’s a big reason you kicked ass. Early on social networks and early on YPN.
Hi Zac! That’s awesome good job.
Congrats
MarcArt
http://www.marcartigas.com
NICE!!!! i always wonder how u guys do it….. but can u give me a link to your website that you are earingng this much from… thankyou….!!!!!!!!CONGRATULATIONS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Yeah, what site is that?
Thats an insane amount of money
dugg and stumbled
wow, thats inspiring. cool man, cool.
Agreed - Great Job!
Hi Zac,
Well sometimes you have to step up to the accquistions from other people, and in the process give hope and tips and tricks to many other people.
I also started on NeverBlueAds.com (through your refferal) after reading some posts on how to achieve success on cpa networks.
Keep the knowledge flowing, and do not worry about the 20 something entering in the IM area.
Vijay
Great post Zac. Looking at that check is extremely motivational!
“super affiliate dollars” I like that catch phrase! damn nice work Zac! See you at the summit! great work!
Congrats! Way to stay ahead of the curve. I’m sure you’re already brewing your next seven figure idea..
All the best,
Jeremy
Nice stats, have you had any success since YPN has been acting up, why did it stop at 300,000k? Would you want to continue and make more?
I’m confused. What was the content on the site?
Zac
My question to you is why have you saved those six figure check photos for now? I mean you are in shoemoney territory there. I want to see what happens when word about those pictures get sent around the BlogWorld. What is your myspace page? I would like to see what you are using there and how it is set up.
I thought long and hard about releasing this post. While making a decent amount of money in the quiet is fun, I’m also looking to help others make money online as well. Releasing this info only helps and legitimizes my earnings statements and advice of this blog.
Nice stuff Zac. This is definitely an inspiration for all of us.
Hey Zac,
Cool post.
Why not get wires for payments above $10k?
Seemed like it might be simpler to handle.
But being able to post a check is soo much cooler!
I do mostly wire transfers and direct deposit now.
Good idea.
I can’t stand the idea of having good ol USPS lose a valuable check in the mail!
Showing that check is so much better than saying that you make such and such amount of money. Was this a one time swing in earnings and how much is a steady income now from your myspace page?
This was a high point for the site, though it still makes several thousands a month in profit.
You may have covered this elsewhere, but why YPN and not AdSense? I’ve tried YPN on several different sites and never got anywhere near what I was making with AdSense.
Yahoo was pulling much better numbers at the time. Several months later I switched back and fourth between the two. Google Adsense earnings from the site were well over $50,000 as well. Best to test both programs on your site and see which converts best with your traffic.
Zac,
Those screenshots are 2 years old? Your not a one hit wonder are you?
Ye of little faith… I’ve been posting earnings from many different programs since this blog went live. Once does not thrive for 11 years in this industry, being a one hit wonder.
wow……the little affilaite engine that could……..I think i can….i think i can…
Then you find something that works and Cha Ching
Can’t you just feel the inspiration in the air. Thanks for sharing!
Zug.com linkbait comedy crew
I tried adding up the numbers but they just don’t add up. When you say profit, I assume you mean gross minus expenses (ie server costs, any other costs such as ppc if any, etc etc).
And since this was only a “4 month” span, I assume you meant from Jan 06 to April 06 (since your YPN account listed up to April 06). The only thing is your YPN didn’t list dollar amount for January and the other screenshots didn’t list April’s earnings and went beyond the 4 month span.
I mean it’s obvious you made a lot and theres no doubt there but I couldn’t make it how the income was broken down to be PROFIT. There was no mentioning of expenses vs gross and the exact 4 month period. Could you clarify =]
Yes very good point Steven, could you clarify how this could possibly all be profit??
Don’t you think Zac deserves the benefit of the doubt? He’s not trying to trick us with his numbers. I wouldn’t be so concerned with the actual dollar amount. I for one am brainstorming ideas on how I could possible do something one day this successful!
I wasn’t doubting him. Apparently you failed to read my entire comment. I stated that I don’t doubt that he made a lot of money. I just like to make sense of it. I don’t care if you are concerned with actual dollar amounts or not, but it’s interesting to know (in my opinion). Sometimes, the minor details really do help you see the big picture. In this case knowing what his expenses were can possibly in some way help you better understand how he was able to profit so much.
Easy to clarify. On top of the big 3 programs listed, there were also several other programs/ad networks running on the site at the same time, such as Google Adsense, IncentaClick, AdBrite and many other cpa offers. These offers alone, more than covered the cost of server hosting. I could have went into more detail on these, but it would have just flooded the post with way too much information. I focused on the top three revenue sources and made sure the extra revenue from all other sources were able to cover the server costs.
Very impressive,
Zac,
I use all your tips on all my websites. I am not making big numbers like you but its a start.
[…] do? Zac just made the impressive post How I Made $860,538.38 PROFIT in 4 Months! The most impressive thing about the post, for me, is the video, lol. (more video please, […]
Nice job there Zac — pretty impressive. Keep up the good work!
Wow! Awesome! How exactly did you make money from a CPM network such as Casale/ValueClick if you do ppc/CPA? Great job!
Guess I didn’t read the whole thing, you ran a resource site, awesome! What sites do you run?
thanks for posting the proof, nothing inspires me more than seeing the bucks!
[…] 2006 Zac reports that he made $860,538.48 over the course of four months from one of his sites. It’s a fantastic amount of money to be […]
Hey Zac, awesome story, are you not going to share your myspace resource sites?