I mentioned a few months ago that I had a new project I was working on called Free PLR Articles.  It started out as a side project, and has (relatively) quickly morphed into quite a profitable venture, despite the fact that I give away everything for free.

Simple Clickbank links and AdSense ads pull in a few hundred dollars a week, and I’ve grown an extremely responsive list of over 5000 people in a short time.

The real beauty of this is that with my list, I can do so many things that I wasn’t able to do before.  I have so many projects that are about to be released, and getting it in front of thousands of eyes is as simple as sending an email.

Marketing Gurus are always talking about how the money is in the list, and though I certainly believed them, I never had the drive to establish a good list for myself.  Now I see the opportunities that are open to me.  I encourage everyone to start a list as soon as possible, and cultivate it in your spare time.  It can pay off in dividends down the road.

…and if you need any free PLR articles, look no further than my site.

Cheers,

Robert

Over the years, I’ve created lots and lots of websites.  Some, I haven’t touched in years, and some, I update nearly every day.

One site I created mostly for myself is ComicStripArchive.com

I am a huge fan of comic strips.  I’m not a super-hero kind of person, so I’m not really into comic books, but I love the daily strips - even the soap opera strips, which can often be hilarious without even trying!  Most comic strips have archives online, but most only link to the past month of strips, even if the archive goes back several years.

I created  a simple PHP script which links to the archives for each comic strip, making it easy to find years worth of strips.  Mostly, I did this so I could access old strips easily, but I figured I wasn’t the only one who liked old comic strips, so maybe other people would enjoy it.

Did they ever!

Within a few months, I was getting tens of thousands of visitors a month, and now I get over 5,000 unique visitors a day on a slow day!  The site usually gets over 25,000 visitors a month directly from highly-targeted Google searches.  It’s a marketer’s dream!

The problem is monetizing that traffic.  With that kind of targeted traffic, one would think some decent income would be easy, but I’ve really struggled to make any sort of worthwhile income from the site.  I added a blog, to ensure fresh content, added Project Wonderful ads, and recently added Amazon boxes that have books related to whatever comic strip page the visitor is viewing.  Still, almost no revenue.

I have some ideas to attract even more traffic that I’ll probably implement in the next few weeks.  Still, if 5,000 visitors a day isn’t making much, 10,000 visitors a day won’t make much more unless I’m able to step up the monetization.

I’ve thought about trying to build a list, but I’m unsure of exactly what type of content I would offer, and what type of incentive people would have to join the list.  This will probably be my first step.  Even with a list, though, comic strip readers aren’t the most rabid buyers around.

This would make a good case study, especially if I’m able to increase my profits in a big way.  I’ll be discussing this site more over the coming months, I’m sure.  Be sure to check back.  If you have any profitable ideas, I would love to hear them!

Robert