I volunteered to earn one million dollars by December 23, 2007 several days ago. Since then, I’ve been considering my options and planning for it. Before I get to my plans, if you’re interested in racing me to the million, post comments on this post so we can grind out the details and establish the rules. You never know who wants to join in so it’s best if we keep the discussion open, not through email.
With any challenge, it’s best of if you have someone to race/compete with. The competition will give you an extra boost/motivation. That’s why I want competition.
The Mindset:
The first thing that comes to mind is don’t put your all your eggs in one basket! And then… go niche! And then… earn steadily until you reach one million!
If you were literally holding eggs, then yes, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. However, that’s not the way things work. One big website that makes money is worth much more than 100 small sites that make money. If you start out your online career with the intention of building 100 small websites, you’re screwed and will be stuck for a while.
Like anything else, when you put your mind into one task instead of multi-tasking, the end result is always better. I would bet money on the guy that’s obsessed with his one little website rather than the other guy struggling to improve and keep track of 100 sites.
Options: Build a gigantic site, start a service, or create a product.
I’ll take a gigantic site with smart integration of services and products for one million dollars please! I had those three choices jumbled in my mind for a while and finally realized that I don’t have to give up any of those choices.
My Plans:
Continue to work on WPDesigner. Expand its content without wandering too far from the WordPress themes topic. Build a community. Integrate services and products. Crack Alexa’s Top 500 sites. (Making the top 500 sites on Alexa might be more ambitious than earning a million dollars.)
Create 100 sites and let them sit. Why? Isn’t that a contradiction to what I said above? No. It depends on how much time I’ll spend on those 100 sites. They’re just extra money. As soon as they’re set up, I’m done. I’ll develop a guideline or template to quickly set up those sites.
100 domain names cost approximately $920. My challenge lasts for 34 months so I have to renew those 100 domain names at least twice within the challenge’s time frame. That’s another $1840. Total comes down to $2760. I’m guessing each site will take fourteen hours each. Two hours for research and collecting content; two for set up and customization; and two hours for each content page, which there will be ten pages of content for each site. That is 1000 pages in and 1400 hours in total.
Too simple? If you want to race me, whether you’re going to build a big site, start a service, or sell a product, your plan should be simple too or you’ll burn yourself out.
I have quite a few things calculated and already laid out, but I’m not going to post them here because this post is already long enough. I’ll start working tomorrow. How do you think I should earn my million? Any idea?