How I Built a $1 Million+ Passive Income Business

I was standing in a queue when Google emailed to say it had suspended both my AdSense accounts. It was nearly midday, sometime in 2018 or 2019. I couldn’t tell you what errand I was running. I can tell you what was pending.

Roughly USD$12,000 in one account. USD$8,000 in the other. Google called the suspensions permanent.

01 /I thought his website was ugly. Then I found out what it earned.

Around 2009 or 2010, a friend of a friend ran a UK women’s online magazine called PinkFridge.com. It covered beauty, shopping, travel, that sort of thing. I was a web designer, and my professional opinion was that it was ugly. I felt pretty secure in that opinion until I found out how much money he was making from it.

He knew what a woman planning a holiday might type into Google and what an advertiser would pay for her next click. I’d spent years learning what to do once a visitor landed on a website. Here was somebody making a living because he understood how she got there and where she might go next. I wanted to try it. I needed the money.

I had no business plan or forecast. I looked up what advertisers paid for a click, which explains my sudden interest in loans and insurance. I put loan and insurance keywords in the domain names I registered in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and the UK. I built the sites in SilverStripe with freelance writers and cheap hosting. Twenty or thirty pages apiece. For someone with such strong opinions about PinkFridge, I put some fairly ugly websites into the world myself.

I still have a photograph of the AdSense code that came in the post. Once I had the adverts running, someone could search for a lender, find one of my pages and click an advert Google had placed on it. The advertiser paid Google. I got a share. Whether the visitor went on to borrow any money made no difference to what I earned from that click.

02 /The month the clicks matched my salary

Around 2010 I could get a page ranking in weeks with clear URLs, well-structured HTML, useful writing and a few links from other sites. The clicks paid very little, but a job I’d done once could pay me again tomorrow.

Regular earnings let me formalise the business and pay a small remote team for writing, email and data entry.

By 2014–15, the sites had grown to around 300 or 400 pages each. I cleaned up the code and made it easier to find a particular loan or insurer. A simple enquiry form helped me build a database of more than 50,000 leads.

In August 2015 I started emailing those people. An email address gave me another chance to put a reader in front of a page with adverts on it. The trick was writing a subject line they’d open. Some of those emails were pure clickbait. I wrote them that way because it worked.

September 2015 is the month I’d circle. I spent it doing my full-time job, and I knew exactly what that month of my time was worth. Then I looked at AdSense. People clicking adverts on websites I’d built on the side had earned me the same amount again.

By December, AdSense was a regular second income. That month it brought in nearly double my salary. If that’s just happened to you, I hope you’ve let yourself enjoy it. I enjoyed the hell out of it.

Between 2017 and 2019 I expanded the team to run what became about fifteen websites. Writers put the pages together and a data administrator kept the listings current. A developer who improved a form on one site had the others to go round and do. I had help with email and a team lead who kept track of it all with me.

Passive income was keeping quite a few people busy.

I think of 2017 to 2023 as the good years. In December 2017 alone, we brought in more than USD$20,000 with our costs still low. At our busiest, hundreds of enquiries came through the forms every day.

Over the life of the business, those sites brought in more than USD$1.75 million in total revenue. A lot of the profit went straight back into hiring and building. When I could see what the last batch of pages had earned, commissioning another batch felt like a sound use of the money.

03 /Coffee, clickbait and lawyers’ letters

There’s a photograph of my laptop at 3.45 am. My routine was to get up, put a Dolce Gusto pod in the coffee machine and sit down at what I called my command center. I’d change a title, tidy up a page, put an email campaign together and check how much I’d earned. Then I’d surf the internet for a bit and feel like a boss.

I’d love to put those early starts down to an exceptional work ethic. Plenty of mornings it was anxiety that got me out of bed. I’d be wondering when the next lawyer’s letter was due, what an AdSense penalty would cost me, or where my pages would turn up in search after the next Google update. It paid for a good life. I still found it hard to plan much beyond the next month.

I was piggybacking off brand names. Somebody went looking for a lender they’d heard of and landed on a site belonging to a bloke they hadn’t. The brands noticed. Roughly every other week, as I remember it, a lawyer representing one of them would ask me to take down a page.

Early on I went to a friend for advice. Should I fight it? Get my own lawyer? Was I going to jail? That last one’s funnier to me now than it was then. He advised me against replying. I ended up taking a lot of those pages down.

Losing one made so little difference to my income that I could barely see it in the figures. It stung all the same. I’d made a thing that earned easy cash, and somebody else got to tell me to switch it off.

When I counted what I owned, I counted fifteen websites. I rarely did the count the other way round. How many of those sites relied on Google to send visitors and on AdSense to pay most of the bills? Pretty much the lot.

04 /Why Google suspended both my AdSense accounts

That email I opened in the queue came down to what I’d done with a thank-you page. A visitor filled in my form. The next page thanked them. Underneath I’d put something along the lines of “Have you tried …” and immediately below that were the AdSense adverts. Read down the page and those ads looked an awful lot like my suggestions for what to click next. I was enticing clicks.

Once I understood the breach, I corrected the placement and asked Google to reconsider. Then I asked again. Savings from the previous months paid the bills. For roughly eight weeks I woke up wondering if today I’d hear back.

From that laptop I could change practically everything a visitor saw on my sites. Getting either of those accounts switched on again was somebody else’s decision.

Eventually Google reinstated the account with roughly USD$12,000 pending. The USD$8,000 account stayed closed.

05 /A good reason to lose a repeat visitor

After that eight-week wait, I wanted another way to earn from an enquiry. I signed up directly with lenders and insurers and connected my forms to their systems through their APIs. The enquiries went straight into the sales process each provider already used.

Much later I built LeadsPro. Brokers, lenders, insurers, debt counsellors and lawyers could sign up and receive relevant enquiries as they came in. I earned money from those referrals. AdSense still paid most of the bills.

My database eventually grew to more than 1,250,000 leads. For years I kept a much better count of how many people had left me an email address than of how many had actually found what they came for.

Suppose someone came to me because they were struggling with debt. Under my original setup, I did well if they came back for another click. If a referral helped them sort out what they owed, I’d given a perfectly good repeat visitor a reason to stay away. That felt like a decent day’s work.

06 /I kept fixing pages while my Google rankings fell

Early in 2023 I started seeing our pages slip down Google’s search results. For a while I thought we were having a bad patch. Google’s helpful content update ran from 14 to 28 September 2023. A spam update followed in October. By year-end the decline was clear across my sites. I suspected those updates had made an existing problem worse.

Reading back some of our reviews, I could see where we’d oversold a product or made a claim that deserved a better source. That changed what I look for in a credible finance review. It also gave me something to fix.

I could rewrite a review. I could push a site towards 100 on PageSpeed, the tool I used to check how fast it ran. We’d spent years making improvements like those and seeing more people arrive. I thought if we gave the changes time, the next update might turn the numbers green again.

I’d read accounts from affiliate publishers who said they’d lost six-figure monthly incomes almost overnight when their Google traffic dried up. I knew it could happen. When our own recovery failed to show up, I could still find enough things worth fixing to talk myself into one more go.

07 /How long could I keep paying everyone?

Meanwhile I was paying the team out of savings. I could still sit down with a coffee and look at the earnings on fifteen websites because other people had spent the day before writing the pages, maintaining the listings and keeping the sites running. They were good at it. I thought the sites were getting more useful. While I could still pay everyone, I wanted to give us a chance to see that work pay off.

I’d been delighted the first time I put my own salary next to what the sites had earned. Now I had other people’s salaries to think about. I knew what another month of their time would cost. I had no idea how many months we’d need. Each time I dipped into savings, we got a little longer to find out.

I kept them on until the savings were nearly gone. Then I had to let everyone go.

There was still work for them. I knew because so much of it came back to me. The old loan page that needed rewriting, the listing that needed updating, the decision about which one mattered more that day. A few years earlier I’d have done a great deal of that myself and taken pride in it. Sitting at the same laptop, doing it again because I could no longer afford the people who’d helped me build the business, took some getting used to.

08 /Why I still renew the domains

Working largely alone, I remember clearing the equivalent of roughly USD$2,500 to USD$2,800 after expenses for a while. Then it was closer to USD$1,100. Then less.

These days the sites broadly cover their running costs, including hosting. Occasionally there’s a bit of pocket money to buy an ice cream.

Ten years is a long time to spend on something and then just let the domains expire. Habit explains some of why I keep going. Hope explains a bit more. I’m experimenting with AI and turning old promotional pages into reviews I’d actually want to read if I were choosing a provider. People still come through who need help with debt. I can still put them in touch with a counsellor who can help them work out a plan.

I’d do it again. I liked having an idea, trying it cheaply and finding out that a web designer with a few ugly websites could make a living and employ other people.

I’d put more of the profits aside while the money was good. I’d spend some of those good years giving people ways to find me through brokers and counsellors, and a reason to remember my sites by name. I understood the value of a name people went looking for. I’d made a living off other people’s.

Mostly, I’d start with the person filling in the form. Suppose the adverts disappeared tomorrow. Someone worried about their debts could still use that page to reach a counsellor, sit down with them and work out what they could afford to pay.

I spent years thinking up subject lines to get that person back. These days I’d be quite happy to have been useful to them once.

To everyone who built those sites with me, thank you. When I say “my business”, you know how many of us that took.

“You’re only as strong as the team that supports you!”

My first bet was a few domain names, some writing and cheap hosting. Years later there were salaries riding on it. I read this last line a little differently now.

“Every man who has achieved anything has been a gambler!”