JohnChow.com is a blog about how to make money online.  He is very transparent about how he goes about making money online and even posts monthly income reports with very detailed information on how much he earns.  Last month he made $17,828.61 with the site on 170,465 visitors.  Is it possible to create a site that is just half as successful?

It’s All About Creating a System

Remember, I’m Lazy and don’t want to do everything required to build something that big and successful through networking and hard work.  I want to create a system that I can build it and then spend as little time as needed.

I think I know of a system that you could create to get at least some success.

How Much Success Will You Have?

A lot of John’s success is based on the fact that he is a very good marketer and a spokesman for blogging and making money online.  Anyone who tries to duplicate his success has to be realistic and understand that they won’t reach the same levels.  But even 25% of $17,828.61 is a nice monthly income.

What Makes Bloggers Financially Successful?

The main reason any successful blogger makes money is that a lot of people read what they are writing.  Remember, the advertising dollars follow the eyeballs.  Once you have the eyeballs, regardless of the topic, you can be successful too.

To duplicate John’s success, you would have to have a lot of visitors to the site and a lot of subscribers.  Once you have that, you can follow John’s lead on how to monetize those eyeballs. 

Some Goals and Metrics

If you look at John’s published income reports, it looks like he’s brought in $90,708.56 over from September of 2006 to August of 2007 with 7836 subscribers by the end of August (it’s obviously a lot more now).  Here are a few data points to be aware of

• Revenue of $11.58 for each subscriber. 
• 2,970 pages cached in Google
• 3,420 links in Google

Why Not Pay for Each Subscription?

I wrote recently about how I Hate Free Advertising and I mean it.  I prefer to buy my advertising when I know what I’m getting then rather count on a wing and a prayer.

If each subscriber is worth $11.58, what if they were paid $2 each for being a subscriber? 

To encourage subscribers to stay as subscribers they would be paid after a certain period and would also get a share of the profits.  If you have 5,000 subscribers and make $50,000, you could create a pool of 50% of the profits and divide it up for each subscriber - $5 each in this case.

To make sure that users don’t just subscribe and unsubscribe, the notification for payment could be in the RSS feed and would have to be claimed within a few days of the post. 

Pay Someone to Write the Blog

To keep the amount of work that you do to a minimum, you could pay someone to write the blog.  You could come up with ideas and supply them to a writer and pay them a set amount each month. 

If you pay them a fixed amount, it would increase your up-front costs but it would also increase your back-end profits as well.  Or you could pay the remainder of the profit to the writer after profit is distributed to the subscribers and advertising is paid.

The Benefit is in the Long Term

This is not something that you’ll make much (if any) money from the beginning.  You would be paying everything you make initially to get some subscribers.  Once you got these subscribers and you paid off your obligations, the site could be a nice moneymaker for you as it would be a much visited web site.

Risks and Points of Failure

I don’t see the risk of a website like this being much more than $5,000.

• $1,000 for a site all set up and ready to go
• $2,000 for initial advertising and marketing
• $2,000 for a writer at least 6 months.

 These are just back-of-the-napkin calculations and could vary a bit but you get the idea.  The other thing you have to consider is your time.  This would take a bit of time to set up and get started so don’t forget to consider that.

On top of the monetary risks there is still a very good chance that it won’t work:

• Even at $5 per subscriber, I don’t know if you could get a lot of subscribers.  It might not be worth it to a lot of people and it would look just like a gimmick.
• Some subscribers might spam you to get a big payoff.  However, there are ways to get around this which I haven’t discussed here.
• Weak Advertising.  Less likely, but this might not be an ideal market and it might be tough to really monetize the traffic.

In the end, I know it’s a wild idea and I doubt it will ever be attempted.  I’m tempted but I think the time needed to set up something like this wouldn’t be worth it at this point.  But even if you think it’s a dumb idea, I bet you never thought that the Million Dollar Home Page or the Million Dollar Wiki would work either.