Publisher: Wheel of Fortune Solutions

Brief History or Making Money on the Internet is Not as Easy as You’ve Heard In 2005 I was out of work and look­ing for a means to earn income dur­ing my search for a job. Already hav­ing a con­sid­er­a­ble set of skills in Com­pu­ter Pro­gram­ming, I decided to attempt to earn money the way that so many others were: using the inter­net. To keep this his­tory brief, my attempts focused on 3 areas: sel­ling my skills, sel­ling prod­ucts pro­duced by others on com­mis­sion, and earn­ing money using inter­net adver­tis­ing. All 3 failed to gen­er­ate income imme­di­ately to a degree that astounded me. The Wheel of For­tune Solu­tions web site was my first attempt at earn­ing money purely through adver­tis­ing. It was also intended to adver­tise my other inter­net money-earn­ing efforts. As a “niche” web site that had (at the time) only one com­pet­i­tor on the inter­net, it was bound to gain vis­i­tors. With every vis­i­tor, I earn about 1/6th of one cent in adver­tis­ing rev­e­nue and those vis­i­tors would see links to the other web pages that offered my ser­vices and prod­ucts. I con­cen­trated on offer­ing a web site supe­rior to that of my sole com­pet­i­tor. At first, I sim­ply offered a supe­rior (much eas­ier to read and pret­tier) pres­en­ta­tion, a much smal­ler (faster load­ing) web page and a very organ­ized inter­face. Shortly after, I offered the Spin I.D. page, which allows vis­i­tors to see the win­ning Spin I.D. before the end of the show (and ahead of my com­pet­i­tor). It also allows the vis­i­tor to easily see if their Spin I.D. has won in the past. At the same time I began pro­vid­ing descrip­tions and links to the prizes won. I hoped this would inter­est adver­tis­ers (it didn’t) and also my vis­i­tors who, I thought, might like to read about the places these lucky win­ners were going. That first year I earned less than $20 from the web site, did not get a sin­gle inquiry regard­ing my offered ser­vices, and con­tin­ued main­tain­ing the web site out of a com­bi­na­tion of des­per­a­tion, hope and the real­i­za­tion that there were peo­ple who were rely­ing on it. Since that time, the num­ber of vis­i­tors to my site has grown by 400% every year. In 2008, I earned enough to pay for the web site host­ing. Now (April 2010) I aver­age over 6,000 vis­i­tors every day, and I earn just about what a web devel­oper should expect to earn for the time spent main­tain­ing this web site — which means that I should be mak­ing an actual profit by the begin­ning of 2011. The moral to the story: if you’re try­ing to make money on the inter­net by pro­vid­ing infor­ma­tion, it takes a long time and a lot of patience and per­sis­tence. With 12 mil­lion people watch­ing Wheel of Fortune every week­day, I’ve man­aged to reach only about 1/5,000th of them after nearly five years.

wheeloffortunesolutions.com,jimpettis.com