A personal webmaster makes money by building websites, earning 500,000 in two and a half years!

2005 to 2010 should be the golden year for the development of individual webmasters. The new and old grassroots webmasters who hang out in major forums and QQ groups are like chicken blood, exchanging contents related to operation, optimization, ranking, code, etc. The enthusiastic atmosphere is no less than that of a pyramid scheme. Every individual webmaster has a dream of being the second Li Xingping - that is, the junior high school graduate who sold hao123 to Baidu for 50 million yuan.

After 2015, the group of individual webmasters who were once famous and powerful in the world suddenly lost their voice, as if this group had never existed. The world of the Internet is like this, full of huge opportunities and traps, and even more whirlpools. Fate belongs to the few who can seize opportunities and avoid traps, and everything is inseparable from a deep insight and understanding of human nature. The essence of the Internet is human nature, not technology. In fact, there are still many personal websites in niche fields on the Internet that are doing relatively well. At the beginning of 2015, I published an article entitled "Analysis of Projects that Exploit Human Weaknesses to Make Money", in which I mentioned pornographic websites. To make it easier for netizens to read, Qidian has moved an excerpt of this article here.

How to make money by building a website

Romantic experience website

When foodies go to a place, they will search online to see what delicious food there is; and when wolves go to a place, they will also ask around to see if there are any special services there. In Beijing and other northern regions, men looking for high-quality special services usually go to silk foot clubs. This gave rise to this type of navigation review website. If you search Baidu for keywords such as "TuTu Experience Network", "Fengyue Experience Network", "Beijing Silk Foot Club", etc., you will see many websites of this type.

Personal webmaster earning experience

This type of website is skirting the law. There is nothing illegal in the content of the website, but everyone knows that the ones introduced above are industry clubs that provide special services. Since it is a gray industry, the advertising fees are also high.

Personal network earning

In the above picture, the popular stores in the red box in the first row generally have a price of around 4,000 to 8,000 yuan per month, which is determined by the ranking of your website.

The silk foot experience website was created in 2011, and its profit model matured in 2012. It was first invented by a man from Hebei. Of course, the first person to try it out must have made a lot of profit. According to him, the monthly advertising fee at that time was between 100,000 and 200,000 yuan. Later, many people followed suit, and copycat websites sprang up like mushrooms after a rain. Competitors also attacked each other, and the profit margins gradually shrank.

When I wrote this article, around the end of November 2014, I had already built a similar website. At that time, I didn’t have much intention to run it, but I heard that it was very profitable, so I just kept it running for fun. When I say play around, I mean spending about two hours a day managing the website and working on its projects.

There are only two profit models for pornographic websites: either selling VIP memberships or selling advertising space. When I first started building the website, I had already decided on a profit-making strategy: to make money by selling advertising space and earning money from merchants.

Around September 2015, after more than half a year of operation, the website's traffic had stabilized at around 100-200 IPs. The website had already achieved a certain ranking, and most of the traffic came from search engines. Some businesses came to us to advertise. I remember the first advertising fee was 3,000 yuan. When I received the first advertising fee, I had already determined that this type of website had great potential.

The website started to have a stable income in 2016. At that time, the website had been in operation for a little over a year, and the monthly income was about 20,000 yuan. These didn’t take up much of my time. I only spent two hours a day updating content and publishing articles.

In March 2017, due to some changes that happened to me and the need for funds, I had to transfer the website to cash out. The entire transaction is guaranteed by A5 Webmaster Network and the price is 250,000 yuan. The buyer is a very cautious person. After all, no one's money comes from the wind. He spent a month monitoring and determining whether my advertising revenue was real. Finally, a successful transaction.

Payment record

Chat history with buyers

Chat History

I have been running this website for two and a half years, and the advertising fees and website sales have brought me a total income of about 500,000. The current takeover is still operating and has a stable income every month.

So, it’s not that all personal websites die because of lack of revenue, it’s just that we don’t understand the real needs of the special groups around us and their pain points. As long as we serve a small group of people well, our personal website can thrive.

Now the vegetables and meat in the bowl of Internet soup have been almost all eaten up by the giants, but there are still a lot of leftovers, and many niche websites have survived by relying on the profit model of collecting advertising fees. Let me give you a few examples below.

1. Online earning websites

The Internet is a place where advantages and disadvantages coexist. Some people make money through the Internet, while others lose a lot of money because of the Internet. But you want to enter the online earning industry, what should you do? The reason why the newbies are called newbies is because they have an urgent anxiety to make money, but they have no way to solve this anxiety.

In addition to having the guidance of veterans, the necessary tuition fees still need to be paid! Therefore, online earning forums that teach others how to make money online are very popular. If you search Baidu for keywords such as online earning forums, online earning methods, etc., you will find many online earning websites. The site is filled with picture advertisements of all sizes.

2. 6hecai Exchange Forum

For 6hecai lottery players, there is always one or two chances to hit the right number by analyzing the newspaper, and these one or two successful experiences are tantamount to a strong stimulus for them, making them form a conditioned reflex to analyze the newspaper before choosing the number. Moreover, compared to blind guessing, newspaper analysis is somewhat more "scientific", and lottery players need to use this method to fight the fear brought about by the uncertainty of the lottery.

In 2004, I saw a 6hecai forum, which used a tree-shaped forum program, where people who bought 6hecai peripheral gambling were communicating enthusiastically. To this day, this forum is still very popular. What is amazing is that the advertising prices of this website are very high, and the current monthly income is at least around 200,000. Similar forums are also very popular, and the website is filled with advertisements.

There are also many niche websites that we don’t know about, but they still make huge profits.

As an old grassroots personal webmaster who has been making websites for many years, I personally feel that there is still a big difference between making websites now and before.

1. A website is just one of many platforms for displaying content .

The content of the website can be presented on WeChat public accounts and major self-media platforms. Use large platforms and large traffic to display content. While working on the website, I also focused on running several platforms such as WeChat public accounts, QQ space, and personal WeChat account. Display the content of the website on these platforms simultaneously. A website is just one channel among many for delivering content.

2. Get rid of traffic thinking and focus on IP thinking

When we built websites in the past, we always tried to find ways to increase the traffic to a large enough level. It was indeed easy to get traffic in the past. As long as you did a good job in Baidu SEO, you would still have traffic. Today we have entered the era of mobile Internet. Search engines are no longer the only traffic entrance. It is difficult to increase traffic and then make profits from it.

Personal webmaster traffic statistics

IP thinking is to attract every visitor to the website, keep them and provide good service. The more trusted IPs you have, the more monetization you will generate. The traffic of this website has always been around 200 IPs, but more than 200 IPs can generate nearly 30,000 in revenue every month. The key point is that I have used IP thinking to the extreme. Now the traffic of this website is stable at more than 200 per day (the buyer has not modified the statistics to view the code), and the monthly income is stable at 20,000 to 30,000.

3. Content without interaction is dead content.
When we built websites in the past, we only provided content and did not enable interaction. A website without interaction is a dead website. There are many ways to interact. Anyway, it is to give visitors to your website the opportunity to interact with you. Only when there is interaction will feelings be created. Don't just provide a cold page to your visitors.

Nowadays, people are more interested in reading comments than reading articles. Some time ago, the comments on NetEase Music Cloud were all over the subway, touching the hearts of many people. Interaction and flirting are the medicine that goes straight to the user's throat.

There are only two things to consider when doing Internet business. The first is traffic, and the second is still traffic. Any marketing method that is not aimed at obtaining traffic is rogue. Without traffic, there is no monetization, and without monetization, there is no money.

Thoughts: This article not only broadened my horizons, but also made me pay more attention to the importance of directional traffic IP. Why can others with only 200 IPs have a monthly income of 20,000 to 30,000 yuan, while I have ten times the traffic but less than one-tenth of their income? This article also reveals why so many websites are eager to optimize online earning keywords. Online earning keywords themselves are a targeted group. Maybe compared with the ideas of Tiemao webmaster, the content and direction we focused on before were really humble and pitiful. Therefore, if you want to make money, you should find a fresh niche market. This way, you can get rid of the competition and make money more easily.