Million Dollar Business Ideas When Disabled article update April 2014.
I watch TV programs like the Apprentice, Dragon’s Den and How to Be a Billionaire and it is quite interesting to see some of the money making ideas that almost anyone with hard work could put into practice.
I unfortunately have a disability that prevents me from doing a standard 9-5 type job and so many (most) of the ways I could make a lot of money, make my easy millions are just not an option, see Working with Long Term Disabilities.
Making Money Online When Disabled
When I permanently dropped out of University on medical grounds over 20 years ago I had to find a way to make money. Spent a couple of years claiming disability benefits (which wasn’t enough money to have a good life with a young family) before finding something I could do without working for an employer (no way I’d get a job without being able to sit/stand).
Here’s a run down of what I’ve tried online to make money.
I Build An Online Ecommerce Store
I came to the conclusion I should sell something online and after a lot of research discovered lingerie/adult products had a decent markup, some items you can buy for £1 and sell for as much as £10, average markup over 100% and has a big market.
At that time (around 2001) I had ZERO web design/HTML abilities, but needed a website for sales, but couldn’t afford to pay anyone to make do web design. Bought a terrible ecommerce shopping cart software called ShopFactory and began adding products one at a time from a company called Rimba (they sell really erotic/BDSM type adult products). After a few months had an adult ecommerce store up and running with over 2,000 products and was in business (self employed).
At first it went quite slow, but after discovering SEO and a black hat SEO technique for gaining links called comment spamming**, traffic to the site peaked at 8,000 visitors a day and I sold £80,000 worth of stock in a year (personally made £25,000 that year).
** If you care about long term SEO success do not use comment spamming or any other black hat SEO technique, it will cost you long term.
However since I used a blackhat SEO technique Google eventually penalized the ecommerce site and the traffic reduced significantly. I saw this coming in advance (I realized the SEO mistake too late) and despite the potential of opening retail shops etc…(if it wasn’t for my back problems) it was hard on me packing stock etc… (had to sit to pack orders and that hurt like hell) and so before the Google penalty hit for link spamming I had been working towards offering SEO services*** so I could close the adult store.
*** SEO techniques came really easy to me, with my scientific background it was second nature to SEO test what worked with the search engines. In the year or so since registering my first domain I’d also learnt HTML and web design to a fair standard (very good at it now) and could SEO almost any type of site. Due to ShopFactory terrible coding from an SEO point of view (had frames and a lot of javascript) it really taught me the basics of SEO: ShopFactory was almost anti-SEO ecommerce software, so I had to solve a lot of SEO problems.
Google Shit Hit The Fan!
With the Google penalty I had the choice of starting again with a new domain to sell adult products: I didn’t like selling adult products, returns are no fun and my suppliers (had 2 by then) was getting slower at delivering stock on time (at all for some items!) causing big customer services headaches for me. So another adult store wasn’t my first choice. Or I could put all my eggs in the SEO services basket and hope I did well.
I went with the latter and offered SEO services and quickly took on quite a lot of long term SEO clients (I’m VERY good at SEO) who paid a monthly retainer fee for SEO advice and in under 6 months was making more than the adult store business (which I’d put in moth balls, took no orders) without having to sit in a chair :-)
So within the space of a couple of years had started a successful online adult products store, ruined it by using a black hat SEO technique, but had a backup SEO business far enough along to keep the money rolling in. Things were going quite well.
SEO Consulting is Good Business
Over the next 8ish years my SEO business remained stable, though it got harder to keep new clients happy due to how Google had adapted to the SEO services industry. Basically what would take an SEO consultant 3 months to get ranked well for pre 2004, now takes 6, 9 and even 12 months!
SEO clients expect a lot for their money and since I didn’t lie to potential clients about what to expect I was spending more time dealing with SEO quotes from potential clients that rarely resulted in a long term client, (they don’t spend when you tell them it could take a year) than dealing with clients real SEO problems: I enjoyed the thrill of solving SEO puzzles, don’t enjoy sending out pointless SEO quotes.
For the above reasons I’d not been actively looking for new SEO clients since 2008 and completely shut the SEO business down in 2013. Always found it easy to find SEO clients, I could start up again and easily take on a dozen clients within a couple of months.
Will WordPress SEO Themes Make Me A Millionaire?
Started selling WordPress SEO themes late 2007, but it’s never really taken off in a big way. My current best WordPress SEO theme is awesome, nothing else like it exists yet in sales terms it makes very little money.
Fortunately I didn’t make Stallion Responsive to sell per se, like I said above my income comes from a network of sites and they run WordPress, so I built the WordPress SEO theme primarily for me. I released the current version of Stallion in February 2014 and less than 2 months in my sites that’s I’ve modified to work with the new Hummingbird SEO features are generating more search engine traffic and revenue.
Affiliate Marketing
Over the years I’ve tried a few affiliate schemes and have made some extra money from them. Using Amazon’s XML datafeed I created around a dozen Amazon affiliate stores covering various niches.
I setup accounts with Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk, but the UK one didn’t make too much. The Amazon.com affiliate stores however did very well.
Between March 2005 and June 2008 I sold 21633 Amazon products for a total of $407,412.81 which equates to $32,767.49 in affiliate income.
That works out at around $10,000 a year, but the majority of it was in the first year-
Between March 2005 and March 2006 I sold 17195 Amazon products for a total of $299,477.44 which equates to $25,517.63 in affiliate income.
Between March 2006 and March 2007 I sold 3329 Amazon products for a total of $79,488.93 which equates to $5,421.91 in affiliate income.
Between March 2007 and March 2008 I sold 899 Amazon products for a total of $21,542.72 which equates to $1,405.82 in affiliate income.
See more Amazon payment proof.
As you can see started with a LOT of promise, I was planning a lot more Amazon stores long term, but Google penalized them all by the end of 2007 and now the money made is from click thru traffic from my own sites (the stores get hardly any search engine traffic now: since first writing this I’ve deleted all the Amazon stores).
This sort of problem has repeated itself over all affiliate programs I tried that involved using the affiliates content. Google hates thin affiliate sites, a thin affiliate site is like my Amazon stores that just copies content already supplied by the affiliates original site. Google’s approach is why list 20 versions of Amazon.com when there’s Amazon.com to list, so over time thin affiliate sites are dropped from the index.
I’ve also tried single affiliate products from Clickbank with mixed results, so far only found 3 products that actually sell! Those three products have made me roughly $2,500 over the last 12 months, this is from 3 product type pages (they review the products) and a few supporting pages. This info is out of date and Clickbank doesn’t show long term sales, so can’t show up to date info, I think my best year was around $10,000 selling Clickbank affiliate products, but because of my health I didn’t put much effort into it.
If this could be repeated over 30 products I could make $25K a year, but so far not found any other products that sell! The 3 that sell it also helped that I understood the market, other areas I’ve tried I went in cold with little knowledge.
As you can see there’s potential in affiliate marketing, but you have to get the right products and using the affiliates content is doomed before you start if you rely on search engine traffic.
NO Million Dollar Ideas So Far :-(
Unfortunately nothing I’ve tried so far has the potential in itself to make me a Millionaire, in combination I make a very nice living.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining since in 12 or so years I’ve gone from claiming disability benefits with no chance of ever getting a 9-5 job to being able to purchase a large ex-guesthouse with a £36K deposit (in 2006) and have it paid off in full in around 5 years and still have significant savings in the bank.
Just started trading UK shares and my first two trades are just over £9,000 each and these are testing the water trades. Reality is if I continue with what I’ve been doing business wise by the time I retire I’ll be worth millions anyway, so I guess I don’t really need a million dollar business idea.
David Law
Website - SEO Gold
SEO Advice
Hi David,
I have to say that it never ceases to amaze me how a medical condition can change your life dramatically. In my eyes my disability is my motivator. Having people all around me saying ‘you can’t do that’ or ‘its just not possible for you’ most of my life has given me the drive to make my own business and prove them all wrong.
I worked part time (because that is all I could handle) and saved as much money as I could so I could pay a web designer to build a website for me which is all done!
I didn’t know about this SEO stuff and of course I had nobody to tell me so recently I have been trying to do SEO myself because it is extremely expensive. Some companies ask for £500 per month which of course is impossible. I have bought article submission software so I can raise my page rank for keywords, I have done the keywords and meta tags but that is all I can do. Can you give me any SEO advice on this? Or a link to your SEO website so I can see it please?
Thank you for the inspiration!
Richard
SEO Advice
Free SEO Tips
Glad your getting your online business up and running.
Take a read of my WordPress SEO Tips which includes links to relevant SEO sites.
I’m afraid meta tags have no SEO ranking value, the only meta tag with value is the description meta tag and even that one doesn’t increase rankings.
I don’t give detailed SEO advice for free, but took a quick look at your site.
Not a big deal, but you’ve got a couple of extra carriage returns at the top of your pages (code wise) this might indicate extra carriage returns in one of your script files (one of your template files). I haven’t used ASP is years, in PHP I’d look for a couple of blank lines at the bottom of php files. In WordPress having that type of error breaks RSS feeds, so it might cause some unwanted effects.
OK, your home page lacks headers (H1, H2, H3, etc…) it’s believed these are an SEO factor, basically you add relevant phrase within headers. This is also true of your category pages.
You have images with blank alt attributes. Add relevant descriptions to images for increased rankings. Then you’ve got other alt attributes with too much info. For example the poster “Kennedy Space Center – 50x40cm Print” has alt text “The bread and butter of space flight launches: Kennedy Space Center. Spelled in the American way… not like us British who spell it ‘Centre’… it was our language first. Anyway, we digress… place this high quality 50x40cm art print on your wall with pride and show the world (universe) that you’re the biggest, baddest space buff around.” instead of something like “Kennedy Space Center Print” which is what the image is about and adds SEO relevance.
A lot of your links anchor text is awful: “Read More” and “Home” for example! In a perfect SEO world every link will have relevant anchor text, a link to home for example shouldn’t have anchor text “Home” but like I have for the home links on this site the name of the site (which should be keyword rich) like “Stallion WordPress SEO Themes & Plugins”. Anchor text is VERY important.
Your product pages are better, relevant H1 and H2 header, I’d either drop the “Customer Reviews:” H2 header or better yet change it to a H3 and add change to something like “Customer Reviews of Product Name”. I’d also mix up the H2 that’s currently a copy of the H1 by using a derivative SERP, for example on your print pages the H1 could be “Product Print” and the H2 “Product Poster”. If you have similar products (lots of prints) rename some of them posters and have the related SERPs for print.
Also consider rewriting your product text. For example text like:
“The bread and butter of space flight launches: Kennedy Space Center. Spelled in the American way… not like us British who spell it ‘Centre’… it was our language first. Anyway, we digress… place this high quality 50x40cm art print on your wall with pride and show the world (universe) that you’re the biggest, baddest space buff around.”
Could easily include more derivative SERPs:
“The bread and butter of NASA’s space flight launches: Kennedy Space Center. Spelled in the American way… not like us British astronauts who spell it ‘Centre’… it was our language first. Anyway, we digress… place this high quality NASA 50x40cm art print of a shuttle leaving the NASA launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center on your wall with pride and show the world (universe) that you’re the biggest, baddest space buff around.”
Basically pad out your descriptions with relevant keywords and don’t be afraid to link to related products** with relevant anchor text. It can be so much fun trying to think of something witty for your 500th product description rewrite :-)
Maybe the eccomerce package has the option to show related products or products that were bought at the same time. If not try to find products with similar keywords, in the case of the text I copied above the obvious would be other products related to the Kennedy Space Center.
Bit late now, but the ideal format for filenames (including images) is separate keywords with hypens -. So a good filename would be kennedy-space-center-print.aspx and kennedy-space-center-print.jpg. Keep it in mind for new products and pages.
My eldest son created a site about conspiracy theories (he’s not a believer in conspiracies) and the first conspiracy he busted was the Moon Landing hoax conspiracy http://www.conspiracy-theories-hoax.com/category/apollo generates a lot of comments (must have 300 comments just on the Moon Landing Hoax)! Not bad for a 13 year old (he’s 19 now and at University).
Good luck with the SEO
David Law
Free SEO Tips
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Wow… I didn’t realize just how inexperienced I was until just now. I honestly don’t know how to make any of the changes that you have pointed out so I think it best to hire an expert. In which case, would you be interested in conducting SEO on my website? If it interests you of course. :)
Took a look at your sons conspiracy theory… AH PHUEY! :P The Russians would have been the first to point out that the Americans faked it, they had the technology after all ;) (impressive though!).
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