No Hype Here: How I Achieved an Hourly Rate of 900 Dollars By Working From Home

The following is a guest post by Patrick Meninga of http://www.thefreedomblogger.com/. He recently sold his website for $200,000 dollars.

It is easy to become cynical when considering most work from home jobs. Nearly all of them promise a huge return on your time investment which is almost always a gross exaggeration of the truth.

But I recently sold my flagship website for six figures, and the site was making good money for years up to the point of the sale.

In fact, I compute my hourly “wage” while writing on that website to be approximately $900/hour. Because I publish at a rate of around 4,000 words per hour, and my website has about one million words, I put in about 300 hours over the last four years.

I admit, the numbers sound too good to be true.

So is this just another scam?

Can anyone follow my example and create a similar payoff?

I believe that the answer is “yes.”

However, there is some serious work involved.

Let me explain to you exactly what I did in order to build this successful business:

1) I chose a profitable topic and built a single website.

2) I focused on quality content and high volume.

3) I promoted the site with high quality guest posting.

4) I focused on income growth by increasing organic traffic.

I chose a profitable topic and built a single website

It is not enough to put up a personal website and talk about your cat and make money from this. Your website has to be focused on a topic in which:

• You have expert knowledge and can write about with real authority.

• There is real profit potential based on advertising.

How can you determine if a topic is profitable?

Look at the existing websites. Look at several of them and see what they are selling and if they have advertisements on them. What are they selling in those advertisements?

Now ask yourself: “What is the value of a new customer in this niche?”

For example, if the advertisers in a particular niche are selling insurance, credit, cars, homes, mortgages, or memberships, then those are high-dollar niches.

On the other hand, say that there are very few advertisers, or that they are selling inexpensive items. These are low dollar niches.

It is still possible to make a good income from low dollar items if you have enough volume, but this is not desirable as it is more difficult to achieve. It is easier to become profitable if it can be achieved at lower traffic volumes.

I would also advise that you put all of your effort into a single website. Many internet marketers would call this a mistake, arguing that you need to diversify and create several websites.

My experience proved to me that concentrating on a single website was much more important. Had I diversified, my website never would have earned so much money or sold for six figures.

I focused on quality content and high volume

You hear it over and over again in Internet marketing: “You have to have high quality content.”

A worn out concept, to be sure, but still very valid. The idea of “quality content” is not going away.

In fact, as the web matures and the search engines tighten up their fight against spam, the need for outstanding content becomes increasingly important.

The website that I sold for six figures had over 1,500 articles, and a good percentage of them were:

1) Lengthy and detailed, ranging from 1,000 to 10,000 words long.

2) Original and insightful, with ideas not found elsewhere on the web.

3) Genuinely helpful in attempting to solve the problems of the search engine visitor.

Much of my content was created in answer to the question: “How can I create an amazingly helpful resource for my readers?”

The trick is that I also produced high volumes of content. This is tough to do if your intention is to keep the quality high.

My rate of publishing averaged out to two new articles every day. With a lucrative topic, this was enough for me to sell out for six figures in as little as three years.

I promoted the site with high quality guest posting

Without promotion, all of that quality content that you create will just sit there, unappreciated.

Because I wanted to increase my search engine traffic, and thus my income, I focused on link building as my primary method of promotion.

After experimenting with some manufactured link building methods, I decided to spend the time and effort to create higher quality links via guest posting.

This takes a frustrating amount of time and effort, but is definitely the best method that you have for creating real authority for your website.

I only published a handful of guest posts for my website, but this was enough to carry the site to huge success.

I focused on income growth by increasing organic traffic

It is so easy to get distracted in the world of Internet marketing, and I quickly realized this as I sought to increase my monthly income.

Eventually I boiled down my marketing plans to only two activities:

1) Creating new content to publish on my website.

2) Creating new content to publish as a guest post.

If you block out all other distractions and focus on these two activities for a few hours each day, you will experience great success in your online journey.

Doing so is a real challenge, however, because there are so many distractions available at any given moment. Plus, creating quality content from scratch every day is by no means easy.

Realistically, this is the bar for success. This is a hype free approach and the numbers are real, but the work is not easy. If you want to earn $900/hour then you need to create amazing stuff, each and every day.

Simple plan but not easy

It is a simple plan, really. Create a website about a profitable topic and put all of your extra energy into it for several years. Focus on quality and daily publishing.

Sure, you can work from home and make hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The question is: “Are you willing to do the work?”