Million Dollar Business Ideas When Disabled!

I watch TV programs like the Apprentice and Dragon’s Den and it is quite interesting to see some of the money making ideas that almost anyone with hard work could put into practice.

I unfortunately have a disability that prevents me from doing a standard 9-5 type job and so many of the ways I could make a lot of money are just not an option.

My health problem is two degraded and one protruding disks in my lower spine that causes a LOT of pain especially when I sit or stand for any period of time (I take large doses of narcotic pain killers daily).

Sitting is the worst which is why I was unable to finish my BSC degree in genetics (planned on becoming a research geneticist), I literally couldn’t sit the final exams. That’s all that stopped me getting a degree and that was when it was just the 2 degraded disks, the protruding disk occurred about a year ago, though I think it’s been there a lot longer than that.

I’m waiting on a back operation to fuse at least one (I’d prefer they do all 3) of my vertebrae, which I hope will give much more freedom, (less pain when active) but for now I have severe limitations in what I can do work wise. I have an appointment next month for a discography that should determine which of the discs is causing pain so they can fuse it.

So at least for now whatever I do it can not involve any sitting (10 mins at a time is about it).

Making Money When Disabled

Despite my back problems I can work from home and currently run an SEO consulting business from my home office. I’m able to do this by rarely sitting down, have adapted my work area to allow me to work on a PC whilst lay down (not flat on my back, at about a 25 degree angle which is relatively comfortable, I always have some pain). Everything I’ve achieved online over the past 6+ years is due to this setup.

Interestingly since I’m not sat at a desk I don’t get tired from sitting at a desk all day and so tend to work on the PC for quite long periods of time. I’ll regularly fall to sleep in the early hours of the morning with the PCs keyboard on my legs: I rest the keyboard on my legs to type and have a raised area to my right for the mouse.

When I permanently dropped out of University on medical grounds I had to find a way to make money. Spent a couple of years claiming disability benefits (which wasn’t enough money to have a good life with a young family) before finding something I could do without working for an employer (no way I’d get a job without being able to sit/stand).

I Build An Online Store

I came to the conclusion I should sell something online and after a lot of research discovered lingerie/adult products had a decent markup, some items you can buy for £1 and sell for as much as £10, average markup over 100% and has a big market.

At that time (around 2001) I had ZERO web design/HTML abilities, but needed a website for sales, but couldn’t afford to pay anyone to make it. Bought a terrible ecommerce shopping cart called ShopFactory and began adding products one at a time from a company called Rimba (they sell really erotic/BDSM type adult products). After a few months had an adult store up and running with over 2,000 products and was in business (self employed).

At first it went quite slow, but after discovering SEO and a blackhat SEO technique for gaining links called comment spamming**, traffic to the site peaked at 8,000 visitors a day and I sold £80,000 worth of stock in a year (I personally made £25,000 that year).

** If you care about long term success do not use comment spamming or any other blackhat SEO technique, it will cost you long term.

However since I used a blackhat SEO technique Google eventually penalised the site and the traffic reduced significantly. I saw this coming in advance (I realised the SEO mistake too late) and despite the potential of opening retail shops etc…(if it wasn’t for my back problems) it was hard on me packing stock etc… (had to sit to pack orders and that hurt like hell) and so before the Google penalty hit I had been working towards offering SEO services*** so I could sell the adult store.

*** SEO techniques came really easy to me, with my scientific background it was second nature to test what worked with the search engines. In the year or so since registering my first domain I’d also learnt HTML and web design to a fair standard (very good at it now) and could SEO almost any type of site. Due to ShopFactory terrible coding from an SEO point of view (had frames and a lot of javascript) it really taught me the basics of SEO: ShopFactory was almost anti SEO ecommerce software, so I had to solve a lot of SEO problems.

Shit Hit The Fan!

With the Google penalty I had the choice of starting again with a new domain to sell adult products: I didn’t like selling adult products, returns are no fun and my suppliers (had 2 by then) was getting slower at delivering stock on time (at all for some items!) causing big customer services headaches for me. So another adult store wasn’t my first choice. Or I could put all my eggs in the SEO services basket and hope I did well.

I went with the latter and offered SEO services and quickly took on quite a lot of long term SEO clients (I’m VERY good at SEO) who paid a monthly retainer fee for SEO advice and in under 6 months was making more than the adult store business (which I’d put in moth balls, took no orders) without having to sit in a chair

So within the space of a couple of years had started a successful online adult products store, ruined it by using a blackhat SEO technique, but had a backup business far enough along to keep the money rolling in. Things were going quite well.

SEO Is My Bread And Butter

Over the last few years the SEO business has remained stable, though it’s getting harder to keep new clients happy due to how Google has adapted to the SEO services industry. Basically what would take an SEO consultant 3 months to get ranked well for pre 2004, now takes 6, 9 and even 12 months (it’s the Google sandbox)!

SEO clients still expect a lot for their money and since I don’t lie to potential clients about what to expect I was spending more time dealing with SEO quotes from potential clients that rarely resulted in a long term client, (they don’t spend when you tell them it could take a year) than dealing with clients real SEO problems (I enjoy the thrill of solving SEO puzzles, don’t enjoy sending out pointless SEO quotes).

For this reason I’ve not been actively looking for new SEO clients for about 10 months and have disabled the quote forms.

Since I’m very good at what I do I’ve got clients who signed up in the first 6 months of offering SEO services that are still with me and so the SEO business gives a good steady income. Basically if I can convince a client to hold on a year (can take that long for success now) they tend to never leave.

As I’m not prepared to lie about SEO expectations which limits long term expansion (way too much effort to take on a new client) I don’t see this as my way to my first million and probably won’t take on new clients unless something goes wrong with other things I’m trying.

Good news is since I have this stable income I can devote a fair chunk of my time to trying different things.

Will AdSense Templates Make Me A Millionaire?

Currently seeing what I can do with selling AdSense templates. I had the idea late 2006 and registered google-adsense-templates.co.uk in October 2006, but didn’t add the first theme for sale until September 2007****.

**** The Google sandbox is the way Google determines if a site warrants good rankings. Basically if a site has some decent aged links (aged meaning live for about a year) it will do better than a brand new site with the same brand new links. For this reason when I get a site idea I’ll register the domain ASAP, add some basic content, add some links and forget about it for 6+ months. When I get around to starting the site for real, it’s already well on it’s way out of the sandbox due to the ageing links. The sandbox is also why it’s hard for an honest SEO to gain new clients.

I’m currently getting on average 2 theme orders a day, (I sell them for up to £20 each, so average around £35 a day) which considering how easy it is to maintain as a business is easy money (I also enjoy making the themes the best SEO themes online, it’s a challenge and I enjoy SEO challenges).

£35 a day isn’t going to make me a millionaire anytime soon ($25,000 a year) and realistically I don’t think the SEO/AdSense theme market is that big, so unlikely to get above 10 orders a day. At 10 orders a day I could make £350 a day or $60K) a year, still far short of my million dollar goal, but still it’s nice easy cash, so not complaining.

Affiliate Marketing

Over the years I’ve tried a few affiliate schemes and have made some extra money from them. Using Amazon’s XML datafeed I created around a dozen Amazon affiliate stores covering various niches.

I setup accounts with Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk, but the UK one didn’t make too much. The Amazon.com affiliate stores however did very well.

Between March 2005 and June 2008 I sold 21633 Amazon products for a total of $407,412.81 which equates to $32,767.49 in affiliate income.

That works out at around $10,000 a year, but the majority of it was in the first year-

Between March 2005 and March 2006 I sold 17195 Amazon products for a total of $299,477.44 which equates to $25,517.63 in affiliate income.

Between March 2006 and March 2007 I sold 3329 Amazon products for a total of $79,488.93 which equates to $5,421.91 in affiliate income.

Between March 2007 and March 2008 I sold 899 Amazon products for a total of $21,542.72 which equates to $1,405.82 in affiliate income.

As you can see started with a LOT of promise, I was planning a lot more Amazon stores long term, but Google penalised them all by the end of 2007 and now the money made is from click thru traffic from my own sites (the stores get hardly any search engine traffic now).

This sort of problem has repeated itself over all affiliate programs I tried that involved using the affiliates content. Google hates thin affiliate site, a thin affiliate site is like my Amazon stores that just copies content already supplied by the affiliates original site. Google’s approach is why list 20 versions of Amazon.com when there’s Amazon.com to list, so over time thin affiliate sites are dropped from the index.

I’ve also tried single affiliate products from Clickbank with mixed results, so far only found 3 products that actually sell! Those three products have made me roughly $2,500 over the last 12 months, this is from 3 product type pages (they review the products) and a few supporting pages.

If this could be repeated over 30 products I could make $25K a year, but so far not found any other products that sell! The 3 that sell it also helped that I understood the market, other areas I’ve tried I went in cold with little knowledge.

As you can see there’s potential in affiliate marketing, but you have to get the right products and using the affiliates content is doomed before you start if you rely on search engine traffic.

NO Million Dollar Ideas So Far

Unfortunately nothing I’ve tried so far has the potential in itself to make me a Millionaire, in combination I make a very nice living (90% of my current revenue is from my SEO business).

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining since in 6 or so years I’ve gone from claiming disability benefits with no chance of ever getting a 9-5 job to being able to purchase a large ex-guesthouse (in need of renovation) with a £36K deposit to convert to our family home: The 4 story ex-guest house has 6 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms on the top two floors, ground floor had 2 toilets, a medium kitchen with attached bedroom (used by previous owners), two TV type rooms and a large hallway, in the basement there’s a large kitchen, large dining room and large living room (was a bar) and toilet.

It’s a big house, but still needs quite a lot of work that I was trying to do a lot of it myself to keep fit (discussed with my doctor at the time and he saw no problem with the idea). The idea was to do a few hours work a day to keep fit, unfortunately it was too much for my back and the third disc popped putting me out of action for over 6 months (all I could do was lie down). My back is stable right now as long as I don’t do anything significant, can handle just under an hours light work a day, do more than that and can’t move the next day!

So looking for new things to try to make that first million.

David Law