One of my long-term goals is to make enough money off the internet to enable to me to quit my job while still enjoying the same level of income. Many people have similar goals, I think. It isn’t so much that we hate out jobs (I personally love mine), but rather that we’d like the option of not going into work every day, or we’d like to give ourselves more security.

So, the first step you usually take is figuring out just how much you need to replace your income (which includes things not necessarily in your paycheck: your employers portion of FICA taxes, 401k matching, insurance, time off, etc). When I did this, I realized I’d want around $260 per day, stretched over all 365 days of the year. This gets a bit intimidating - if I extrapolate from past data, I realize I’m going to average $.25 per click from ads, and get around a 5% CTR, meaning I’ll need over 20,000 pageviews per day! Ouch!

It is really easy to get overwhelmed by this and not know where to start. It is extremely difficult to build a site that gets a decent amount of money per click, and that gets over a few thousand pageviews per day. I got stuck on this for quite some time, and never really made much progress.

One day, I had an idea for a small site that was highly targeted and would get really good CPC rates. I built it over the course of a week (actual development time was only a few hours), and then didn’t spend much time on it for a while. Within a month or so, I realized I was making about $10 per day off it - not enough to get rich off for sure, but a decent start. A bit of tweaking, and I had it up to $20 per month.

I later took the same concept and tried it on another site, with decent success. And then, I realized, I didn’t have to make one big site that made me $260 per day, all I really needed was the $260. I could build 26 websites that made me $10 per day, or 13 that made me $20 per day, and still meet my goal. If the websites were easy enough to build and maintain, this would be a viable option.

Indeed, creating a website that makes $10 - $20 per day is actually pretty easy. If you can reproduce that same formula over and over again, you can make some decent money. Here are a few more reasons I like it:

- It gives you almost instant cash flow. Instead of trying to build up a website where all your money goes back into it for years, your sites don’t really need a ton of advertising and other costs to keep going.

- It insulates you from changes in the market. With one website, you are susceptible to your advertiser base changing, your content becoming outdated, or a better site coming along and taking all your traffic. With smaller ones, that can still happen to each one, but you’ll rarely see all of them having problems at once.

- It is easy and attainable. You get results within months that helps to motivate you and give you some cash in the short term.

I’ve been using Ruby on Rails instead of PHP lately to help get sites out there quickly, and that is really starting to pay off.

I’ll be writing up some of the actual sites I’ve made using this strategy and the general formula I use later on this week.