Laptop Gamer Case Study

By January 20th, 2006 Leave a response Uncategorized

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.