How my business and websites work

I recently had a great comment/question on my blog:
http://www.jonasblog.com/2008/07/how-and-why-you-should-replace-yourself-with-someone-overseas.html/comment-page-2#comment-62563

In a nutshell, David asks “how many sites do your GUYS maintain, and how much are the sties making in order for them to pay for themselves?”

I thought the question and answer were informative enough to make a post out of it.
Here’s my response:

@David – this is a great observation.

I’ll tell you a little about my business so you can understand a bit about how I work.

I don’t know how many sites I currently have…maybe 50, maybe 100?
How many have I built over the past years? …hundreds maybe?

Here’s a quick breakdown of sites my team has 100% built for me:

• I have a site that makes me over $15,000/month that my team built.
• I have some sites that make between $1000-$5000/month that my team built.
• I have lots of sites that make between $100-$1000/month that my team built.
• I have even more sites that make me between $1-$100/month that my team built.
• Most of my sites that my team built don’t make me anything! $0.

Some of those $0 sites are new…at some point they’ll make me money.
Lots of them I’ve given up on because the model/market/niche/site failed. I lost money on those.

For me, I just know that the more sites I build, the better chance I have of finding winners.
I also know that some of them that I build are going to do really well. Every once in a while I’ll get an awesome one.

My team (of 3-5…depending on how you look at it) builds and maintains all these sites.
Once a site is built and established, it requires less and less maintenance.

The thing about all this is that I DIDN’T DO THE WORK!
If it were up to me to do the work, none of these sites would have been built or marketed.
Because other people are doing it, it got done, and I make money because of it.

To me, that’s the key to all this. For years I tried to do all the work myself. With that I think I had built 10 sites in a few years and only 1 of them was really successful.
With other people doing the work I’ve built hundreds of sites and lots of them are successful.

Frankly, I’m capable of doing better work than my GUYS do.
However, I DON’T DO THE WORK even though I’m capable. I don’t know…it’s just some problem I have. If it’s up to me to do the work, it’s just not going to get done.

For this reason I created my outsourcing system. So others can benefit from what I’ve done.

John