Every coder dreams of the ‘million dollar baby’. Never having to work again. Just by coding in your notepad on your refurbished laptop on a 2.50/mo shared hosting account.
No paid services with credit cards and subscriptions with payment providers and customer help desks, no halls with thousands of GPUS and Bitcoin mining machines to maintain, enormous elecricity bills. No hassle. Just code.
And where most would settle for a any million dollar baby, imagine “a million dollars per hour…” 86.400 hours per year, 86.4 billion dollars per year. Fully automated, on auto pilot. You’d make more money than Elon Musk. Sitting back and doing nothing, but counting the dollars.
I accidentally managed to do so. Well, accidentally, as Seneca said, luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. I have my education as business economist and experience as coder, and had been digging into PHP and WordPress and SEO for a few years, just for fun. That is the preparation, that just waits to meet (any of many) opportunities.
It was a seemingly rather hopeless and harmless venture.
I had made a Google Trends tracker. It started as tutorial, to show other coders how to code ‘seo friendly pretty urls’. I made a quick Google Trends tracker with them. It downloaded the hot Trends from the Google Trends site and then made a page per Trend. With Youtube video’s, Flickr pictures, some news headlines, and three articles. No ads. Sleak “industrial” layout. Clean interface.
That tutorial being finished, for myself, I added a Google Pagerank checker to the website and a trackback linker.
Per trend I got the top results on [trend keywords + ‘trackback’] from Google Search. Per result page, I retrieved the Google Pagerank and the outbound ‘dofollow’ linkcount per page. Because the ‘linkjuice’ Google will assign to me, is the Pagerank divided by that link count. Pagerank 1 with 10 OBL OutBoundLinks is better than Pagerank 3 with 50 OBL.
Trackbacks were standard ‘on’ with new WordPress installs, and most sites automatically accepted trackbacks. As long as you stuck to the official protocol.
I had tested the app and it was close to being finished. I had wanted to ‘drip’ the links, maybe 100 links per day. Slowly build it up. I had tested the main routine and it all worked. I had to go sailing that weekend and I left, and forgot to turn off my PC. At 2 o’ clock at night it started creating backlinks all over the web and created 10.000 backlinks in an hour, Pagerank 1-2-3 links. Then the host server collapsed under the traffic.
With all these juicy trendy links to my domain, my pages were ranking top spots for all trends, and were on the Trend pages of Google Trends itself, as one of their selection of ‘best sources on the web’. My articles got a nice load of traffic from Google Trends.
Sites with Pr1/2/3 article pages are P3/4/5 on the homepage, and these are business sites, professionals, authors, small business, publishers, bookshops, online stores, and for them these links are worth 50 to 150 dollars a piece. That is the normal price on the market.
If these sites get 100 targetted visitors on the link, they convert 5%, selling 5 eBooks about ‘Peggy the Pink Pet Parrot of Taylor Swift’ for 12.95, with 10 dollars margin. So they make 50 dollars margin (and hopefully more) on the link and hence that is the ‘value’ of the link.
Normally they will scrap trackbacks, as most of it is spam, but if they get a juicy link (as my domain was also quite fast PR6) on their keywords, and some traffic from Trends, these people are elated, so everyone kept these links.
With 10.000 of these nice juicy high quality professional Trendy business links, valued at 50 to 150 dollar, I created a million dollars worth of my backlinks to my site per hour.
I didn’t monetize it.
I worked for the Brotherhood back then. That means my intent was on _ksb-‘lamb’ works and not on _ksp-‘silver(pennies)’. I didn’t want to loose time having it out with the IRS. I had more important things to do. So I let the domain expire. For me it was more like a ‘master thesis’, asserting in public I master the subject. I passed the exam, I think.
If you love and enjoy your work, like I loved SEO and linkbuilding, and you invest enough time to dig into the market, the people, the processes, the protocols, and make things, or make things happen that these people love, and value, then you can also make your own ‘million dollar baby’. But to my experience, it is about the love you put in it, not so much the greed.
