My Site Build It Story
Hi,
I'm Laura and this is my story about how I make over
$4000/£2000 per month from just one of my hobbies.
I'm 26 years old and this is my web
site www.make-money-from-your-hobby.com. This web
site provides free information and is not the web
site I make my living from, you will find out about
that below.
I never really thought it was possible
to make a living from your hobby unless you had a
large business or a shop or sold your craft items
at craft fairs. To tell you my story I need to go
back a few years.
My hobby since I was a young girl has
been building and collecting dolls houses and I always
wanted to own my own doll house business. I thought
it would be fantastic to own my own shop selling dolls
houses and miniatures. Collecting and building dolls
houses was what I loved and what could be better than
doing something you love every day. So when I left
University I opened my own dolls house shop.
I
called it Laura Anne Dolls Houses after me. To begin
with I loved being in the shop, I got to build and
sell dolls houses all day which was what I wanted
to do. What I hadn't really considered when I had
the idea of the shop was the amount of work I would
have to put in. The shop was open five days a week
and I had to be there serving customers plus on top
of that I had to find time to check and order my stock,
build doll house orders for customers and do my accounting
and admin work. I ended up working over 60 hours a
week and the hobby I loved turned into a endless job
and when I did get a little time to myself I didn't
want to spend it working on my own dolls house.
I found myself wanting to go back to
enjoying dolls houses as a hobby and not having them
as a full time business. I didn't think this was possible
unless I went to work for someone else and the idea
of that didn't really thrill me. I liked being my
own boss and although I didn't like the number of
hours I worked I didn't think I could go back to working
for someone else.
One day a stumbled across a web site
online that said you could build an information web
site about your hobby and actually make money from
selling advertising on it. I was very skeptical about
this claim, I already had a web site for the shop
and although I got sales through it I didn't see that
it was possible to charge other people for advertising
on it.
As I read further though the site seemed
to make more and more sense. It said how if you have
a hobby or an interest that you know a lot about it
is very likely that the information you have learnt
about your hobby will benefit other people and that
there are other people out there on the Internet searching
for that information. That made a lot of sense to
me. I knew an awful lot about dolls houses and customers
were always asking me questions about them. If I had
more information on my web site then maybe I could
make some money off advertising on the site and hopefully
also boost my online dolls house sales as well.
The site I came across with this information
was Site Build It. They have a web site hosting program
that sells itself as an all-in-one site-building,
site-hosting, site-promoting suite of tools. It supposedly
eliminates all the confusing technical complexities
and exhausting manual labor involved in building and
promoting a site, and leaves you with the fun part
- creating content.
Site Build It boasted that with their
program anyone could create web pages that would rank
highly in search engines and get lots of visitors.
I found this quite hard to believe. I had been running
my web site for a couple of years at this point and
had never ranked highly in search engines despite
trying the advice of many Internet marketers who claimed
they held the secrets to search engine rankings. I
decided this couldn't possibly be true and went back
to concentrating on working in my shop.
Months went by and I was still working
60 hour weeks and really considering giving up my
business and going to work for someone else. All the
time I kept thinking that there must be an easier
way to make a living doing something I loved. My mind
kept going back to what I had read on the Site Build
It web site and eventually after six months of deliberation
I decided to give it a go.
I changed the hosting of my web site
www.ladollshouse.com
to Site Build It in July 2004 and it was the best
move I ever made.
My goal was to build an online business
that would generate an income equal to a full time
wage.
Site Build It comes with an ebook that
takes you through a ten step process to building a
successful web site. It took me a few months of fitting
in an hour in here and there but I eventually optimised
my web site pages and got them up and running.
I started to see results from the start.
About a month after I transferred the web site it
started to pop up in search engines and the number
of visitors I was getting started to grow. My online
sales went up as my visitors did.
Now my web site www.ladollshouse.com
makes money in three ways:
The underlying philosophy is to rank high in the search
engines for keywords that are in high demand and that
way generate lots of traffic to our site and lots of
clicks on the ads and click throughs to my affiliates.
In November & December 2004 just 4 months after
transferring my site to Site Build It I made over £1000/$2000
profit each month from doll house sales on the web site.
Since then the web site has gone from strength to strength
and has done so well that I closed my shop to work from
home on the web site. There was no sense in running
a shop when I was making more money from my online business
and could work from home with a lot less stress and
work load. Dolls Houses have gone back to being my hobby.
I write about them on my web site and spend my time
building mine instead of building them for other people
- I love my hobby again.
Today 100% of my income for my dolls house business
comes from advertising and sales on my web site. I am
currently averaging just over £2000/$4000 for
this web site. This is all from a simple web site based
on a hobby I love.
Since closing my dolls house shop I have also set up
other web sites on hobbies and interests I have. I currently
have six web sites in total and so far the highest income
for one month has been £11,562/$23,016.
Just take a look at my bank statement at the bottom
of the page.