Laptop Gamer Case Study

written by John Chow on January 20th, 2006

I’ve decided to use Laptop Gamers as a case study on how to start a money making website. There are many ways to make money on the internet. My specialty is the content site with advertising model. This model isn’t necessarily better or worst than any other internet business models - it’s just the model that I am most experienced with and it’s the model that works for me.

Laptop Gamers was started with a budget of zero. That’s right, ZERO! The domain name was registered a long time ago when I was “stocking up” on domains and parking them. The site is powered by the Joomla CMS, which is open source software and available for free. The same goes for the template. The only change I made to the template was to redo the header with a laptop image and change the link colors. The site was started last Saturday and officially launched on Sunday. It made zero money from Saturday to Monday because I didn’t place any advertising on the site. On Tuesday, I loaded the site with some Google AdSense ads and by the end of the day it had made $1.04!

Now true entrepreneurs should get very excited after reading that last paragraph. Why? Because the site is now profitable! Here is the Google income from the site since the Google ads were placed.

Jan 17: $1.04 - 294 page views
Jan 18: $2.97 - 818 page views
Jan 19: $9.93 - 1,685 page views

As I write this post, the site is at about $10 with Google and there’s still 3 hours left in the day. I expect the site to finish with $12.00 with Google AdSense. In addition to AdSense, the site also makes income by serving shopping links from the TTZ Media Network. That should bring the daily total to $20. If we assume the site stays at this $20 a day level and doesn’t grow (highly unlike), then it will make about $250 this month.

There aren’t many things where you can spend a few hours creating that can make you a profit right out of the gate. I will post more about how Laptop Gamers is doing as the weeks and months go by. Maybe this will provide inspiration to others who want to start a site or have started a site already, but don’t think it can make any money.

Srirangan said on January 20th, 2006 at 10:58 pm

Well, it is profitable and will most likely break even even if you’ve invested on an advertizing campaign to get the site some traffic.

How much are you paying for traffic? Google Adwords, how much is it costing you?

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John Chow said on January 21st, 2006 at 12:08 am

I don’t pay anything for traffic. The object is to start this site with zero investment. I’m not using Google Adwords or any other types of paid advertising to promote Laptop Gamers.

Traffic to Laptop Gamers was all created by having network sites link to it in their news.

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Joe said on January 21st, 2006 at 5:11 pm

So doesn’t that mean your taking money away from your other sites? Is it all a wash?!?!

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Cooper said on January 22nd, 2006 at 11:59 pm

Looks very good your website. How did you get all the content. People wrote it for you ? Beside google what advertising you use on your website.

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John Chow said on January 23rd, 2006 at 12:01 am

No, those other sites are still doing their same traffic level. Posting tech news is a feature many sites offer and many readers visit some sites just for news only.

Without news, slashdot wouldn’t be here.

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John Chow said on January 23rd, 2006 at 5:47 am

Cooper, the content was created either by editors who work for one of my other sites or they were submitted by freelance writers. Currently Laptop Gamers runs Google and TTZ Media Network ads. I will add Vibrant ads later and once the site is big enough, I will try to sell a direct buy.

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