Who wants to be a millionaire?
Who doesn’t!
Since I’m from the UK technically I should be working in British Pounds Sterling (£), but it’s easier to become a USA millionaire because 1 Million British Pounds (£) does not equal 1 Million United States Dollars ($).
£1,000,000 = ~$1,600,000
$1,000,000 = ~£600,000
Basically it’s easier to become a US millionaire than a British millionaire, so for now I’ll target becoming a US millionaire first :-)
What is a Millionaire?
There will be many reading this who are on quite modest incomes who could truthfully state they are millionaires, even multi-millionaires, just as long as they use the right currency.
The image to the right shows US households with a networth of over $100,000, closing on 40 million US households have a networth of over $100K, in other countries (different currencies) some of these $100K+ US households would be millionaires and over the next decade some will be US millionaires.
I’m a Multi-Millionaire
I’m a multi-millionaire if I measure my net worth in these currencies (randomly checked around 25 currencies using xe.com and these are the ones I’m a millionaire in):
Argentine Peso
Afghan Afghani
Chinese Yuan Renminbi
Albanian Lek
Hong Kong Dollar
Jamaican Dollar
North Korean Won
South African Rand
Russian Ruble
South Korean Won
Japanese Yen
With some of the above I’m worth 50 million plus, I’m living in the wrong country :-)
But not a millionaire in these currencies:
British Pound
US Dollar
Euro
Canadian Dollar
Singapore Dollar
Australian Dollar
I checked Bitcoins as well and my Bitcoin networth is in the thousands, that just doesn’t feel right, it’s not even a real currency! Next I’ll be measuring my net worth in World of Warcraft gold :-)
As you can see when talking millionaire it’s important to consider the currency and I’m using US Dollars as my yard stick.
US Millionaires
Someone with a net worth of around $165,000 in 1970 would now need $1,000,000 to have the same networth.
A million dollars just isn’t what it used to be I’m afraid, have you seen the price of flared trousers and disco balls today!!!
It shows even when an economy is struggling there are entrepreneurs and investors (just like you and I) who are earning a lot of money.
Make a Million Dollars Business Ideas
And here’s where we go wishy washy and vague :-) If it were easy to pop out a few million dollar business ideas and add them in an article on the Internet we’d all be millionaires.
Rather than try to feed some bullshit business advice how following these 10 steps will make you a millionaire in 3 years even though I’m not a millionaire (I will be if my income stays steady) I’ll try to list what pitfalls to avoid and what others have done to join the millionaire club.
If you got a job when 20 years old paying $50,000 a year and invested and saved carefully you might be a millionaire by the time you are 50. Not very realistic though for your average 9 to 5 worker, I’m afraid working hard per se does not make you rich.
2. Invest other peoples money: For example in real estate unless you already have a lot of money you will have to use borrowed money to make your millions in property. In the UK there’s a big buy to let market (our house prices are exorbitant compared to the US), investors put a small deposit down on a property and have their tenants pay off the mortgage.
As long as nothing goes wrong, you know like a housing bubble driven by sub-prime mortgages there’s a lot of money to be made.
An awful lot of millionaires have made their fortunes from other peoples money, if you can leverage another persons wealth to increase yours, well done.
3. Offer a service or skill few others can provide: There’s only one Wayne Rooney (net worth around $50,000,000) and one Justin Bieber (net worth around $160,000,000), love them or hate them, they offer a service/skill that’s in very high demand and tens of millions are willing to pay for.
Do you have a service or skill that converts to millions?
4. Get rich quick schemes: Unless you are running the get rich quick scheme (which tend to be illegal or dubious at best) it is not a way to make a millionaire. If you are too dumb to realize the people behind get rich products and services tend to be scam artists who make their money off the gullible and desperate you really do deserve to remain poor.
If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
How to Become a Millionaire Overnight
I remember when I first got Internet access a very long time ago there was an email scam on the go: The MAKE MONEY FAST chain letter. Basically the scam was a pyramid email scheme, you’d receive an email with 5 snail mail addresses, the get quick rich scheme was send each of the 5 addresses a $1 bill, remove the top address from the list and add your address at the bottom and send the email out to at least 10 people.
There were silly numbers about how you’d be a millionaire in no time at all (theoretically true, you’d become a millionaire overnight), but the truth was only the really gullible would send out the letters with the $1 bills and most would just add their address to the list and spam a bunch of email addresses in the hopes of gaining cash from the gullible.
Not a lot has changed online, the get rich quick scams have become less obvious, but if you read something that says you can make $10,000 in 30 minutes, why on Earth would the author of the article tell you how and sell it you for $100 or $50??? Just doesn’t make sense. If you had a way to make thousands of dollars in 30 minutes would you A: use the 30 minutes to make thousands or B: spend 30 minutes creating a website telling others how to make thousands in minutes?
Hmm, it’s a no brainer. Use your commonsense and don’t fall for make money fast scams.
Why My Money Making Product WON’T Make me a Million Dollars
If you are a WordPress users and looking for a better SEO’d theme, buying Stallion Responsive won’t make you a millionaire over night, won’t make you a single dollar without hard work.
It’s one SEO money making tool in a set of tools required to make money online from websites. It’s one possible piece of a successful online business jigsaw.
My SEO theme doesn’t write content, it doesn’t generate links, it doesn’t make websites, it doesn’t build relationships with other webmasters or build great customer support.
What it does is aid a webmaster in presenting their content in the best light to Google. My customers still have to do a lot of work to make money from their WordPress sites.
The reason why it’s highly unlikely to make me a millionaire (at least from theme sales) is currently the WordPress SEO theme market isn’t that big. Right now (April 5th 2014) this site is ranked number 2 for the Google search SEO Theme:
You’d think that was an awesome high traffic Google search result, but hardly anyone searches for SEO Theme, it’s in the tens of searches a month!
Even the higher traffic SERPs like WordPress SEO aren’t a massive amount of traffic, WordPress SEO sees around 15,000 visitors a month, a nice number of visitors to make a good living from, but it’s not millions of dollars of sales traffic. On April 5th 2014 my site is ranked at number 13 for the WordPress SEO SERPs, so still have some work on that Google ranking and SERPs can go down as well as up (can’t guarantee any SEO results long term).
Let’s say I wanted to be a millionaire in 3 years just from selling Stallion Responsive, let’s go through some numbers.
I’m selling Stallion for $100 per theme license, over 90% of the price is pure profit for me (so over $90 per sale: this doesn’t take into account tax). To make a million dollars I need to sell over 11,000 copies.
Over 3 years (36 months) I need to sell a little under 308 theme licenses a month or 10 a day.
Since there’s not a lot of SEO theme specific traffic I have to target general WordPress, SEO, Make Money type traffic which won’t convert well to an SEO theme sale: my visitors need to be WordPress users, be open to buying a WordPress theme and understand WordPress SEO isn’t just about a plugin or two (there’s a misconception with WordPress users that plugins can provide good SEO, they can’t, only themes can).
Uphill battle to say the least to get a decent conversion.
If I can get Stallion theme sales to
1% conversion I’d need 30,000 search engine visitors a month.
0.5% conversion I’d need 60,000 search engine visitors a month.
0.1% conversion I’d need 300,000 search engine visitors a month.
0.05% conversion I’d need 600,000 search engine visitors a month.
I recently created this site (few months old) and recently released the latest version of Stallion (two months ago) so don’t have enough data to know the conversion yet. Based on earlier theme sales I’m anticipating the lower end of the range, so to make a million in three years I’ll need this site to be a top site in the WordPress SEO and make money online niches. I’m going to guess I’ll need 3 to 4 million visitors a year to make a million dollars in three years: I won’t hold my breath :-)
This doesn’t mean I won’t make a lot of money from this site, that’s just one product, it’s not the only revenue stream so won’t need that amount of traffic in reality, we’ll see in the future, wish me luck.
Update September 2014: Changed the price of the WordPress SEO Package I sell here to $500 (add new features well worth the price), let’s see what this means to making a million in 3 years.
I’m selling Stallion for $500 per theme license, over 90% of the price is pure profit for me (so over $450 per sale: this doesn’t take into account tax). To make a million dollars I need to sell 2,200 copies.
Over 3 years (36 months) I need to sell 61 theme licenses a month or 2 a day.
If I can get Stallion theme sales to
1% conversion I’d need 6,000 search engine visitors a month.
0.5% conversion I’d need 12,000 search engine visitors a month.
0.1% conversion I’d need 60,000 search engine visitors a month.
0.05% conversion I’d need 120,000 search engine visitors a month.
Since the price has risen significantly It’s going to result in a lower conversion rate, at $100 my best day this year (2014) was 5 sales. Highly unlikely I’ll have many days like this at $500 a license. Way too early to say what the conversion will be at $500, but it could be lower than 0.05%.
What I do like about selling Stallion Responsive is I don’t need the money, I make more than enough money via other means (I own over 100 domains running the SEO Package I develop), means I could save every penny from theme sales for a retirement fund.
Update 2 September 2014: Changed the price of the WordPress SEO Package again to $200 this time so I can sell via Clickbank and have an affiliate program again. Sold an earlier version of the SEO package through Clickbank and planned after the $500 price would use Clickbank again. Clickbank would not accept the package being sold for $500 without a period of time at a maximum price of $200 to make sure there aren’t too many refunds!
I need an affiliate program for serious promotion, so looks like customers are getting a bargain for now!
At $200 per theme license a little under 90% (Clickbank is over priced, they charge more than PayPal) of the price is pure profit for me (so just under $180 per sale assuming it’s not via an affiliate sale, loose a further 20% if through an affiliate). If no affiliate sales to make a million dollars I need to sell 5,500 copies.
Over 3 years (36 months) I need to sell 155 theme licenses a month or 15 a day.
If I can get Stallion theme sales to
1% conversion I’d need 15,000 search engine visitors a month.
0.5% conversion I’d need 30,000 search engine visitors a month.
0.1% conversion I’d need 150,000 search engine visitors a month.
0.05% conversion I’d need 300,000 search engine visitors a month.
Since I don’t know the number of affiliate sales I’ll get the reality is the numbers above are under estimates. My guess would be I’ll need over 2,000,000 SEARCH ENGINE visitors a year to make a million dollars from Stallion Responsive sales in three years. This is search engine visitors, with qualified visitors via affiliates promoting Stallion Responsive will be significantly less.
Get the right people promoting a Clickbank affiliate program and you can make tens of thousands of dollars a month. So far not had a serious affiliate marketer promoting the earlier version of Stallion.
Are You Millionaire Material?
Most people reading this will not be a millionaire in their life time, not because they aren’t capable of making millions (almost everyone is capable of becoming a millionaire), but because statistically speaking most people never make it.
Some will make their millions down to pure dumb luck (win the lottery for example), others will inherit millions and the rare amongst us will earn it through a combination sheer hard work AND working smart.
That being said statistically speaking someone reading this who currently isn’t a millionaire will be in the near future. With that in mind I’m open to donations when you make your millions, I’m not greedy a 3% ‘inspirers’ fee seems fair :-)
David Law
Website - SEO Gold
Beautiful Women Looking for Millionaires
Maybe you can catch some of the “beautiful women” looking for millionaires on your way up !
Happily Married: Money Can't Buy Love
LOL Andy,
Too late, already got one, been together for over 18 years, it’s the wife :)
Seriously though, very glad to say I’m very, very happily married.
David Law
Journaling how to Become an Online Millionaire
Followed your link to this site after I purchased one of your wordpress themes. I have been thinking about journaling my steps to becoming a millionaire myself – mostly so others can benefit.
I have a few questions.
What is your average payment per click?
Do you run any “image only” adsense ads and if so do they get a better ctr and higher average value per click? I kind of think that they do. Not enough evidence yet though.
Of the hundreds of sites that you have, do you find you have a few sites with lots of visitors with some of the other sites being a waste of time. Or do you always make more adsense income per site than what it costs to keep it going?
Journaling how to Become an Online Millionaire
WordPress Question
What do you do in WordPress to keep the same post at the top of the list like you did here?
How I Make Money Online
Hey Clayton,
The same post question is a plugin called WP-Sticky: update Sticky Posts are part of WordPress now.
I’ve found tracking my affiliate success/failure really helpful, my SEO business is running smoothly, but because of my back problems I’ve avoided taking on too many SEO clients (can’t over do it).
The opposite is true for affiliate projects, they pretty much run themselves long term and more importantly if I feel terrible one day there’s not a business behind the project relying on my SEO expertise, so I can leave them half finished for months at a time. That being said had an operation on my lower back late last month and hoping it’s been a success (still in post op pain), if it works can really throw myself into business.
My cost per click average SUCKS because I have a lot of traffic to some very low cost (from a AdWords perspective) content like classic literature, I’m lucky to make 10 cents a click from that traffic!
First sites I built was for generating PR, I wrongly believed having millions of pages would be worth while because each new page generates a small amount of intrinsic PR. The amount is so small it’s pretty much canceled out by the PR cost in getting a large site indexed! So I built a set of sites with public domain content (classic literature) for generating PR. Now I’m much smarter :) and tend towards creating pages that have a function, if a page doesn’t do something useful, I don’t create it.
I tried image only ads and found they don’t perform that well, also tried text only ads thinking if image ads only don’t work well text only should. Text only was better than image only, but not as good as mixed, I guess it’s to do with the amount of money advertisers are prepared to pay and the way Google AdSense determines which ads to display on our content, IME it’s better to let Google AdSense decided which ad performs best for each page.
I have just over 100 domains currently, but they don’t all have sites on them. Of the domains used about 50 would be considered full sites, but about half of those are affiliate sites form years ago when Google didn’t downgrade thin affiliate sites.
Out of the rest I’ve got about 15-20 good domains. A good domain would be one where I’ve not run a SEO test that could result in a penalty and have fair quality content. I consider this site a good quality site, though currently it only gets a trickle of traffic a day since I’ve not added much diverse content (only 21 posts and 9 of those are revenue reports which will only cover a small number of SERPs). So I get about 20,000 visitors a day not so evenly spread over about 20 domains, rest are either not used, redirected or penalized/downgraded in Google etc… (I do way too many SEO tests :-)).
So yes I have quite a lot of domains that currently could be considered a waste of time. For example AdSense income for these over the last 12 months.
Amazon store, thin affiliate : car-auto-parts.info (below 1,000 visitors) $2.35
Amazon store, thin affiliate : cell-phones-store.info (below 500 visitors) $2.63
RSS feed site (not unique content), used to be a Amazon store : athomedayspa.com (below 1,000 visitors) $1.74
Remember the above are year figures, I’ve probably made similar from Amazon from the first two so might barely cover the yearly registration fees.
March 2006 to March 2007 those three sites made ~$180 and the year before when I first made them and Google wasn’t downgrading this type of thin affiliate site they made over $1,500 (probably about $3,000 including Amazon sales).
As you can imagine when you find a way to make a site in about 2 hours that can make you $500 a year, ($1,000 when you take Amazon sales in to account) you tend to make more of them :) I only made about 30 of them as I was so busy with my SEO business. Now they don’t even break even as a whole:
I pay for two dedicated servers at around $1,500 a year, domain registration about $10 a domain and that’s about my only costs. So about $2,500 in costs, so each domain has to make $25 to break even each year. I’ve let about 15 domains with Amazon stores on them expire over the last 12 months.
The best sites are those with unique interesting content, one of my domains at one point was making about $60 a month from AdSense, discovered Clickbank and have added less than a dozen Clickbank reviews and supporting pages to it and it makes most of my Clickbank revenue now.
David Law
How I Make Money Online
Making Money With Clickbank Products
Thank you for the response David.
I read on one of your posts that you do not have a clickbank product yet. The information provided above is valuable to me and those starting website businesses like me. I believe that the above information – expanded on – with some of your WordPress Themes added as a bonus – would make a very valuable clickbank package.
After a 6 or 7 years of researching, testing, downloading, etc, I have come to the same conclusion as you have as you have stated above and now from YOUR research and success I can verify that I am heading in the right direction. My final piece of the puzzle to help create the success is your talian wordpress theme that I am now configuring. (the theme gives my site the code and structure that SE’s love)
I have thousands of pages on my website and most will be moved into WordPress. It could be argued that my site will be too much for WordPress and that I should use Joomla or something but I want to keep it simple and build tons of content. Many others will be building hiking content at my tracksandtrails.ca website soon because of your excellent ability at coding WordPress SEO Themes.
Thank you,
I pray that your back operation will give you mobilization.
Making Money With Clickbank Products