You raise good questions, especially for someone considering striking out on their own.
Personally I'm laser focused on this question: "How do I match what I could earn in salary as a software engineer?" Beyond that - I can figure it out on my own. Until then - I'm burning savings and need to figure it out.
As far as I can tell, the safest fastest way to get from A (unemployed and without income) to B ("engineer salary") is as follows, assuming "engineer salary" is 150k/year.
1. Have enough savings to live for 1 year with $0 income and another year with reduced income - say, 50k/year. Having 40k on top of that in savings: half of that to get you started, half to buy businesses in the future and/or to buy services to do that then.
2. Buy an ad supported online business on Flippa. Budget: 20k. This can be for one or multiple businesses, though multiple is probably better for quicker growth & profit potential. (It doesn't have to be Flippa btw, but that's 'good enough' for our purposes).
3. Assume no income in year 1. In this year you add pages to your site(s) and continuously improve them, using Google search analytics to confirm what you're doing is working. Your traffic should be increasing.
4. Assume 50k/year income in year 2. This is either through ad revenue or selling one of those sites you bought (probably the latter). Continue doing what you did in year 1, but better.
5. By year 3 you've hit your goal. By year 4 you've exceeded it. Every year after that, you can expect your income to substantially grow, for at least the following 3 years.
Until a google algo update wipes you out and you are screwed. If you are going to go down this path it's better to sell the pick axes than go mining for gold. Learn how to mint the sites yourself and sell them on flippa to guys who think they can buy retirement $20K at a time with no sweat equity.
I read some of your comment history and I’m impressed: you’re an SEO expert. I’ll take your advice seriously.
What do you think about using AI to create a lot of niche websites - carefully, crafting a few dozen pages around search intent, w a real tool like SEMRush or Ahrefs - and then releasing them on the world, letting Google penalize some but making it up on volume?
To quote Matthew Mercer - You can certainly try. But in all seriousness, run a test. As far as tests go this one is about as low cost as they get. In general, I don't expect purely ai written content to do all that well - and that's probably a good thing for now. That said, nothing beats a practical test for this sort of thing.
Personally I'm laser focused on this question: "How do I match what I could earn in salary as a software engineer?" Beyond that - I can figure it out on my own. Until then - I'm burning savings and need to figure it out.
As far as I can tell, the safest fastest way to get from A (unemployed and without income) to B ("engineer salary") is as follows, assuming "engineer salary" is 150k/year.
1. Have enough savings to live for 1 year with $0 income and another year with reduced income - say, 50k/year. Having 40k on top of that in savings: half of that to get you started, half to buy businesses in the future and/or to buy services to do that then.
2. Buy an ad supported online business on Flippa. Budget: 20k. This can be for one or multiple businesses, though multiple is probably better for quicker growth & profit potential. (It doesn't have to be Flippa btw, but that's 'good enough' for our purposes).
3. Assume no income in year 1. In this year you add pages to your site(s) and continuously improve them, using Google search analytics to confirm what you're doing is working. Your traffic should be increasing.
4. Assume 50k/year income in year 2. This is either through ad revenue or selling one of those sites you bought (probably the latter). Continue doing what you did in year 1, but better.
5. By year 3 you've hit your goal. By year 4 you've exceeded it. Every year after that, you can expect your income to substantially grow, for at least the following 3 years.