“If I wasn’t in the rap game/ I’d probably have a key (kilo) knee-deep in the crack game/ Because the the streets is a short stop/ Either you’re slinging crack rock or you got a wicked jump shot.”

How I Turned $1 into $350

This is the quick summary, with the full instructions to follow later on this post. Around November of last year I started hearing about these ‘loan modifications’ and how they were supposed to be the solution for solving the housing crisis, etc. etc.

So I decided to start a blog, http://fdicloanmodification.info/. I bought the .info domain for $1. I created the design for the site, created the content, and just last week sold the site for $350.

I invested no money into the site other than my time (and hosting costs), but my only monetary investment was the $1 domain, and I grossed $350.

So how’d I do it?

Step 1 – Pick Your Niche

When creating a new site, I always make sure to pick a topic that is going to meet a couple of qualifications for me:

1. I know something about it, which makes creating content much easier
2. It is of high value (loan modification clicks can pay upwards of $2)
3. It is moderately interesting (I find loan mods more interesting than say hypodermic needles)

Once you’ve picked out your niche, do some initial research. For my site, I wanted to find an open niche for loan modifications. If I were starting a new loan modification site, I would look for a keyword that was generating traffic, but there wasn’t a site that had registered that exact keyword.

Step 2 – Picking Your URL

For instance, if you search on google for minnesota loan modification, you can see that the top 4 search results are not domains containing those exact keywords, ie:

minnesotaloanmodification.net
minnesotaloanmodification.org
minnesotaloanmodification.info
minnesotaloanmodification.com

If the keywords you’re targeted are included in your domain, you are 1000% more likely to end up on the homepage for a particular search term than if you don’t have those exact keywords, so be sure to register a domain that has ALL almost your keywords covered IN THE SAME ORDER ie (“loan modification minnesota” is different than “minnesota loan modification”).

Step 3 – Writing Your Content

I’ve skipped the step that includes designing your site, as you don’t need to use a custom design and can easily use a free wordpress theme or I may suggest the free premium wordpress theme we released on this site.

Content generation is key to getting your site indexed in Google, and to get traffic and to actually have a chance of selling your site.

The general rule of thumb I like to apply is making 6 posts of 250+ characters or more in the first day the site is online. From my experience, writing these 6 posts will get your site indexed within 48 hours or less.

When publishing these posts, I like to submit them to the popular social bookmarking sites including:

Digg
Furl
Mixx
Delicious

Limit submitting your sites to the bookmarkers to 2 stories per day otherwise your site can get banned and you’ll lose all your work.

Once you write your 6 posts, you should write 1 post everyday for 2 weeks. This can be easy to do, you just need to put in the work.

When I have extra time to write more than 1 post, I simply write the second post, and then set the publish date to 24 hours later.

Step 4 – Monetizing Your Site

So now you have this content, you have these indexed articles, and you’re starting to get users to your site, now your job is to make money off these visitors.

My first choice for monetization is always Google Adsense. You can read about how I made my first $102 from Adsense or our guide to earning more from Adsense but we’ll assume you already know how to get the most of our Adsense.

So for this site, I used 3 Adsense placements, and was getting $1 clicks quite often, so after collecting on the money for a month or two, it was finally time to sell the site and cash out.

Step 5 – Listing Your Site

You can sell your site on any number of sites, but I would personally recommend Sitepoint, it is the most reputable, and has a lot of legitimate business being conducted on it. I personally don’t like SEDO or any of those enterprise sites as I feel it’s to impersonal for me. You can check out my auction on Sitepoint.

In the listing, you want to describe the site as best you can, and provide ANY and ALL documentation the users will ask for. You will want to have a justification for selling, how you’re going to handle the transfer, and any other questions that buyers could ask.

Also, if you want your site to sell, set a reasonable price on the domain. I’ve had people asking $25,000 for a site that’s only generated $300 in its lifetime, which is just ludicrous.

So once you get your listing online, start fielding the questions, you can just sit back and wait for the buyer to come.

Once you have the money in your bank account, you can get to work on your next project, and please thank give thanks to Wise Startup Blog for this tutorial.

If you enjoyed this post, please Stumble it I put a lot of work into this blog for your enjoyment and would appreciate any help you can provide in marketing this post …only if you liked it, of course

Also, we are taking guest bloggers on the site, so please shoot me an email on the about page.

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