A few days ago a member on WickedFire who uses the moniker PFNetwork posted a thread about How She Made over $30,000 in 1 Month from Her Sites and is a pretty inspirational story about how to make money online.

I asked her if I could reprint her story on DomainingTips.com and she was kind enough to allow me to do so. Read on to learn how she did it and my own commentary on her story.

Early 2005, I got involved with freeipods.com. I went to forums, did my research, blah blah — I ended up getting about 3 ipods, over $3k in cash, and some other toys for “free” from this site and similar sites.

I’m sure most of you know how these “free” sites work — they’re not really free, they require you to complete a bunch of affiliate offers or refer friends to complete offers.

After doing my research I knew who was legit and who wasn’t so it enabled me to get a lot of free stuff. (PS — don’t use freeipods.com or any of their sister sites now — the company has turned into crap and will only give you headaches.)

So that started it. I bought my first free-ipod-esque script for $125 and set that baby up. Had 3-4 websites the first year, I think I earned about 40k. Not too shabby for my first real online venture. 2007 exploded for me though.

In the first 5 months my revenue was about $80k, with over $30k coming from the month of February alone. All from affiliate earnings.

Most of the revenue was from a new GPT website I’d opened. I’m pretty good at taking existing ideas and making them better — so people got wind of this new site I’d created and started to really go hard with my site.

Soon after I came out with this site, the copycats came out. I came across over 20 similar websites within the year, all of them promising better and faster. I think I lost my footing around this time because the revenue just wasn’t the same anymore after April.

Plus I admit — I got freaking LAZY, this is the WORST THING TO DO when you’re going up! You need to step it up even more and ENSURE your top position. I thought I’d be pretty set for life but it didn’t even last a year.

The copycats were just the beginning. There were a lot of factors but that was the beginning of the end. With a lot of stupid factors in place, my profits continued to slide down.

Right now I don’t think these types of sites will be making that kind of money for anybody… Maybe the top players but the field is pretty full right now. I have a guy working for customer support related stuff but I’m seriously thinking about just selling the whole shebang (got about 6 sites in our network) and just using that money for funding future ventures.

First of all, I have to commend her for being extremely candid with this post. It takes a lot of guts to confess that you screwed up — especially by being lazy. You can check out one of the sites she runs — Rapid Loot.

Here are Three Lessons that you can learn from her experience —

1. You Don’t Have to Invent. Now when you are starting a site — especially for the purpose of flipping — do not try to be perfect and completely original. Steal Ideas from others — and be proud of it.

Even Sam Walton wrote in his book “Made in America” that he would routinely go to other stores to find out what new ideas they had come up with and then come back and copy them at WalMart.

You don’t have to start with a flawless design — you can keep improving it while the site is working. And no, you do not have to create the next Google or YouTube. You have to create what your users want now and scale it up.

2. Keep Walking. You do not have a monopoly over ideas. If your idea is good, someone will copy it. The only thing that you can do is to stay ahead of your crowd by consistently innovating and improving your product or service.

Be on a lookout for new trends and what your target audience is up to. Ask them for feedback and what you can do to improve their experience. And, as the Johnny Walker tagline says, “Keep Walking”.

And yes, don’t be put-down by naysayers and other negative voices. Develop a thick skin and stick to your convictions. However, this is a matter for another post.

3. Don’t Be a Lazy Arse. Even if you are on the top, you have to work hard to stay there or someone will overthrow you. Consistently keep promoting your site and building new features.

Remember — there is a difference between thinking that you are working hard and actually working hard. The easy way to differentiate between the two is to watch your stats — if they are going up, you are working hard else you are not. Simple.

All the best!