Confession: I’m completely enamored with making money online. Especially the whole idea of making money following your passions. To take this a step further, I barely make any money online. I would actually love to make money online. I’m also extremely positive that many of you reading this would love to make money online as well.
This is the reason for my new Money Makers series. This series will have podcasts, stories, opinions, and videos.
Since readers love stories and my story isn’t complete yet, I’ll share the stories of others– successful internet entrepreneurs (hopefully me and all of you reading this one day).
Bryan Alvarez of F4WOnline.com (yes Bryan participated in my eBook project as well). Bryan writes a newsletter/runs a subscription site where he provides news and analysis on pro wrestling and MMA in the written and audio form.
Since subscription sites are rapidly on the rise and I love to follow MMA/Pro Wrestling, I reached out to Bryan. He agreed to participate in my project and he replied to all of my questions about the work involved in running a subscription site and the behind the scenes details. You’ll have to wait for the eBook to get all of the juicy information, but today you can check out his story and how he makes a killing online.
Bryan’s story:
Bryan Alvarez was an independent wrestler when he decided to start his own newsletter on Pro Wrestling and Mixed Martial Arts. The newsletter covers news, insights, analysis, results, and opinion– on a very specific niche.
In 2005, when print was beginning to fizzle out and readers were turning to the internet, Bryan joined in. F4W Online was launched. To add to the interaction that came with the internet, the site offered an exclusive forum for members.
Going full-time.
For the first few years of his newsletter, Bryan wrestled independent shows on the weekends and held a real job to get by financially. The whole Robert Kiyosaki- “quit-your-job” mentality is not the greatest strategy, especially if you want to do stuff like feed your family and pay the bills. Bryan informed me that he had to keep his current job for 5 years before he could quit to go full time with the newsletter. That’s 5 years of moonlighting. Five years of holding pretty much two jobs. For those of you (including myself) that get frustrated when their side hustle isn’t generating enough income, think of this scenario. Most of us would’ve given up after a few years. Heck I’ll admit that quitting has crossed my mind many times over the last 14 months.
Going online.
In 2005, it was becoming increasingly evident that print media was headed towards the internet. The newsletter was introduced to the website. For $6.99 a month subscribers were granted access to weekly newsletter, audio shows, a member exclusive forum, and breaking news updates.
In mid-2008, Bryan’s site merged with another site. This merger resulted in increased subscription sales and an increase in the price (from $6.99 to $9.99).
Other business opportunities.
When you establish yourself as an authority in a field, many other doors swing open. Running the newsletter led to a book deal for Bryan in 2005. The book was based on the pro wrestling world and seems like it was a fun book to put together (imagine getting paid to write a book about your favorite past-time).
Along with writing the book, many other sources of revenue have come along: Private advertising, sponsorship, and Google Adsense have been introduced into the mix with the subscription site.
A final perk is actually my favorite: covering MMA grants you media access to pretty much all UFC shows. I don’t know about you guys but I would love to go a UFC fight show, especially for free. Considering that cheap UFC seats go for upwards of $200, getting paid to cover the sport for your very own website doesn’t sound too bad.
Of course, like any inspiring story or way to make money online, there’s the bad part behind it and countless stories of failed attempts. This will be touched upon in future posts.
For now, I hope that this story gives you a sample of some the internet money makers I’ve spoken with and been speaking with for my upcoming project. If you like it then let me know. If not, then please let me know as well.
I’m really liking these Q & A’s with online entrepreneurs (maybe because I’m one of them) – I guess it’s just great to see that there are others like me out there who are able to make a living and build a successful business right out of high school or college thanks to the internet. When I was first starting out I would read a lot of the internet marketing blogs which at the time were run by people much older than myself, and it was hard to identify with many of them – which meant that building business relationships was much more difficult.
However that seems to be changing quite a bit as people are finding out (through interviews like this) about all of these young people who are making a killing doing what they love to do, without the daily grind of working a 9-5. Hopefully this inspires anyone out there that might be on the fence about starting their own thing to give it a shot, it was definitely the best decision I’ve ever made.