Do Simple Websites Make More Money?

I was going over my day-to-day routine last week, and thought about how it compared to previous years. In 2018, I spent a lot more time managing. This was my goal for 2018, so I was a success in that.

However, my income did not increase exponentially as I thought. In my mind, if I spend more time thinking and had other people do the work, then I could figure out a system which would make me rich in no time.

Well, things didn't turn out that way.

I'm making money money than last year, but my daily tasks are significantly more complicated than back in 2010/2011.

Back in the day, all I did was writing articles.

I pounded them out, key by key, for many hours each day. That was basically it. Every once in a while I'd spend a couple hours trying to figure out things like how to upload a plugin, or how to embed a video, but mostly I was just researching and writing.

These days, I'm doing more writer management, and try to invent strategies to leverage my traffic to its fullest. Plus, I have to deal with things like bookeeping, taxes, and other business related tasks.

Since I'm hiring out a lot of the work I previously did myself, I have to spend money to pay people do to it!

So although I am making more money, I'm also spending more money too! That of course cuts into profits, so now I have to balance my income/expenses to ensure I get a net profit I'm happy with.

Well, the grass is always greener.

I thought back to the simpler days when I just kept 100% of what I earned.

I didn't hire any writers. I didn't have any complex plugins. I didn't have an email list or an autoresponder. It was a simpler time!

Do Simpler Website Make More Money?

Yes and no.

Yes, in the sense that you keep everything you earn. You don't have to think about much other than writing good content for your audience, and then insert some affiliate links when appropriate.

It's a simple business model. It works. You can make hundreds of thousands of dollars per year just doing this (I've done it myself, and seen it done over and over again over the past 8 years).

However, it also means you have to do everything yourself. Just trying to add some Schema stars to your review could take you two weeks to figure things out! You may hit a ceiling this way, because you only have so much time in the day.

In other words, simple websites can make a ton of money, but you may hit a wall at some point.

On the other hand, with bigger websites, especially those where you employ multiple freelancers to help you do writing, coding, advertising, and other general content creation tasks, you can leverage other people's time.

Hire people to work while you sleep, and then you can gain a 24-hour work day. Better yet, get more people and fit more than 24 hours of work into a day.

You can grow much bigger this way, and much faster! However, you also have to pay for this work to be done, so your net income might not follow all this growth. It's real easy to waste money of frivilous projects that produce no income for you.

And guess what - your freelancers still get paid, even if you don't!

Final Thoughts

Lots of newbies have the impression that they need to look like the competitors to make money. They want flashy sliders, interactive widgets, and cool graphics. The think that the "big guys" make the most money, so they want to imitate them.

What they don't realize is that very often there's a staff of people doing all that in the background, and you don't know for sure how much those websites are earning. They look nice, but after everything is said and done, are they really that more profitable than a simple blog?

You can make awesome money with just a simple website with interesting articles to read. You don't need to make it super complicated for flashy to be successful and make money online.

$200,000 GROSS - $80,000 EXPENSES = $120,000 NET

$130,000 GROSS - $10,000 EXPENSES - $120,000 NET

$130,000 GROSS - $500 EXPENSES - $129,500 NET

So who's "making" the most money in these examples? It depends on what your goals are!

You could potentially sell the #1 website for more, but the #3 website has the most net profit for the owner.