How Expert Enough Makes Money

If you’ve followed the guys at Think Traffic you would have heard about their Million Dollar Blog Project.

Basically, a challenge to everyone to create a blog/website from scratch and earn money from it.  The hosts of this challenge, themselves chose to create a site that looks at sharing info on how to be an expert at all types of things, from running a marathon to personal productivity.

Prior to confirming this choice, they had chosen to create a site onwebsite/blog design for non-design people, which would have done 10 times better I think.  But since this topic caused a bit of an uproar within the comments section, as people argued this was just another website about making money online (or at least overlapped too much), they had to ditch it.

With Expert Enough I think we have an interesting passive income case study, because here you have a site where 90% of the content is done by guest posters (nice and passive) and most of the earnings come from affiliate links (also pretty passive).

But what we learn from here on in is most interesting.

The site gets a ton of traffic – I’m talking 30,000 uniques a month – from both Google, from the authors themselves referring their readers onto their guest posts on EE and of course from returning visitors.

But it has only made about $4,000 over the space of roughly 12 months.  We’ve seen this before!

The problem is the niche they chose (were forced into choosing).  It sucks! What do you sell? 

Experts who write about something then link to their product, and you get the affiliate fee, is the main answer.  But the conversion rate is terrible. 

You get the feeling people see EE as more of a general news site, and we all know how news sites go when it comes to turning eyeballs into millions.

The major takeaway; create a blog that focuses on a specific topic, where visitors who come by are all after similar products, and where you can thus convert visitors into Benjamins to pay for your expensive Ethiopian twice-brewed coffee habit.

The fact that Corbett and team rarely ever talk about EE anymore, would indicate it’s a great cautionary case study on how to choose the right passive income idea.

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