(Note: This article was originally published to JamieMcSloy.co.uk on June 12th, 2019. I’m going through an old backup of the site, which has hundreds of posts that aren’t currently uploaded. As I’m working hard on updating the site – and releasing The Vault, letting these old posts be the daily posts for a while. We’re getting very close now, so bear with me. Soon I’ll resume regular posting and then just upload these archives in one go.)
I got a Paypal notification as I woke up this morning that said “You’ve Got Money.”
Now, some people say that eventually everything gets normalised, but let me tell you; years on in this internet business journey thing, I’ve never gotten over the fact that I get money sent to me while I’m asleep and not working. It’s like magic every time.
So that was my first thought.
But then I opened it up, and it wasn’t from a company, or an amount, that I was expected. Normally, it’ll be say, a payment for $47 or $247 and from so-and-so, and I’ll think, “OK, that’s a commission on such-and-such a program.”
This was for something weird like $69.72 and I didn’t recognise the name.
So my automatic second thought was that I was about to be robbed by some hacker hooligans.
Now, this has never happened to me ever, but I’m being honest here.
I did a little digging, and it turns out, that it was a legitimate payment from somewhere I wasn’t expecting.
And that, folks, is the start of today’s article.
Magic Money Machines
I know people say, “There’s no such thing as passive income” and they’re mostly correct. You have to work to build something that’s worth something to somebody, and that’s anything but passive.
But it used to be the case back in the internet days that people would get cute little experiments going that netted them beer money and that all added up to the occasional check of $100 or so. Those things add up.
The money I mentioned above is one of those examples.
Back in 2013(!), so before I even started the copywriting thing at all, I tried my hand at affiliate marketing, started creating a bunch of Web 2.0 accounts and simply writing and linking to affiliate offers. Simple things like this made me pocket money, but I didn’t really have a clue what I was doing.
One thing I did during that experiment phase was to create Tumblr accounts and put advertising banners on them.
I then wrote a few dozen posts, and promptly forgot about them.
And today I delved into the affiliate tracking from the company I advertised with, and amazingly, the traffic stayed stable for years afterwards.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I made a couple of dollars a day at most. But I essentially had twenty web properties that, over the course of five years, brought in millions of impressions, and converted at a couple of times a day.
Essentially, a magic money machine. And it would have been a ton better if I’d a) had kept going or b) known what I was doing.
Check out this picture before we move on:
Tumblr’s Bad Business Moves
Undoubtedly, you’re going to point out some bad business moves I made:
- Why didn’t you keep pushing for more views on that account?
- How come the click through rate is so pitifully low?
- Why didn’t you sell anything to these people yourself?
- And why, oh why, Mr, “Keep everything on your own platform!” didn’t you move them off Tumblr?
And those are all valid questions, to be honest. The 1,000 viewers per day per Tumblr blog is a hefty figure, and I made a ton of mistakes (and to be honest, I only just realised the extent of that today.)
Let’s move on though, to Tumblr’s big mistakes.
As you’ll see in the rightmost section; that’s the impressions I have received after Tumblr’s adult content ban.
Now, before you lynch me as an immoral porn producer, let me say this: none of those Tumblr’s I ran were actually adult content.
But Tumblr decided to ban adult content back in December 2018 and it has decimated site traffic since. They’re claiming 20% reduction in users using the platform, but that doesn’t take into account a) that many used to browse Tumblr without an account, and b) the SEO and other metrics have bombed outside of the users in their apps and dashboards.
Hence I went from having 1,000 visitors a day to practically 0, despite not running any adult content.
“But Jamie… why haven’t you logged in and rectified this?”
This is another Tumblr blunder; I can’t get into these accounts, as I used burner email addresses to set them up. Big mistake? Sure… but the logins worked fine and I had a spreadsheet of the passwords and usernames.
But Yahoo (who own Tumblr) messed up before the adult content ban. They got hacked, and millions of emails were leaked.
Not a problem, I thought, because I’ve used burners and I don’t care if anyone has access to my empty account.
Except Tumblr decided to simply lock everyone out of Tumblr accounts older than a certain point.
Which, OK, and I tried to get their customer support to help, but to no avail.
So, for about two or three years, I couldn’t access my Tumblr accounts, and so I just collected the advertising checks until they inevitably ground to a halt last year.
On Magic Money And Not Relying On Social Media
So, two things to mention that are useful:
- Magic Money Pockets
It turns out that I had several million impressions and tens of thousands of click-throughs on my little Tumblr blogs over the years. Bear in mind, these were mostly stock images (like on meme Instagram pages) and some captions, and sometimes an affiliate link… and there were maybe a few dozen at most and I left these sites for years.
It’s a huge return on time investment and I put zero money into these little projects.
The point is, this is a little pocket of low-effort, mostly-low reward stuff that you could probably automate. The keys are a) finding something that nobody is doing or a platform they aren’t using, b) make some web properties that are evergreen and c) find some easy way to monetise it.
And obviously, d) when you’ve got something good going, like a way to bring thousands of people to a site for free, make sure to capitalise on it.
- Social Media isn’t your friend
By “Capitalise on it” I mean a) don’t just make $0.15-0.3 CPM and leave it like that. If you can get clicks, then you can funnel them to offers that will net you far more money. Make a cheap product, send them to a site, etc.
And secondly… don’t let that traffic you’ve created belong to a social media giant that can’t keep its books in order. I should have looked at those traffic sites, had a link on every post to a simple WordPress blog or whatever, and by now I’d possibly have a huge network of sites I own doing the same thing but under my control.
Don’t make my mistakes, but try and find the same little pockets I find.
See you in the next one.