A few of Erica DeWolf’s posts and some of Frank Kern’s free videos have motivated me to start building a list that I can actually market to. My current lists aren’t that big and they usually consist of cheap gamers which I’ve found hard to make much money from. I’ve decided to take another approach.

Two and a half months ago, November 2nd to be exact, I bought a website for $5,000. It was the biggest purchase I’ve made since I bought my car and a huge hit to my bank account. But it was expected to earn around to $1,000 per month and I wasn’t going anywhere any time soon. I figured I could spend the next few months improving the site, increasing its revenue, and using its current revenue to recover from the initial purchase.

Well, the moment I got the site, I pulled an all-nighter and gave it a complete overhaul. That ended up being a good and bad thing. When I bought the site, it was running on a default Wordpress install - a few weeks prior it was running on a default Mambo install. Everything was rusty around the edges. Using the content from its database, I gave it a fresh design, a fresh URL structure, and good on-site SEO. I spent a few days gathering all the old URLs and 301 redirecting them to their new pages. It looks and functions a lot better now.

The bad news is the sales dropped, and by quite a bit. I was suddenly only making about $400 per month. Buying the site for 10-12 months revenue is still not a bad deal, but I was hoping to earn back what I paid within 5 or 6 months. With the holiday season, the monthly revenue bounced up to $800-900 per month, but it looks like it’s starting to slow down again.

I think the good news really makes up for it, though. When I bought the site, it was getting around 900-1,000 unique visitors a day (all organic) and had the top position in Google for its niche keyword phrase. Since then, I have:

• Tripled its traffic - it’s now pushing 3,000 uniques a day
• Gained several above-the-fold listings (and double listings) in Google for my niche keyword phrase
• Gained decent SERP ranks for many new long tail keywords
• Increased the average time spent on the site by a few percent
• Lowered the bounce rate by 4-5 percent

All of that thanks to many SEO tactics I’ve been pounding into my head for the last year or two.

So, using this experience, I’m going to build a list of people interested in search engine optimization. For now, I’m just going to focus on the list building and giving out quality information to attract new subscribers and build a relationship with them. I’ll worry about the money maker later on. I am thinking of kicking off the start of this list by giving away a report and maybe a few videos that outline the SEO tactics I used to triple my site’s traffic in 2.5 months. I’m just not quite sure how to go about it, how detailed I should be, etc. If you have any suggestions, leave me a comment and let me know. I’d greatly appreciate the help.