How This Family Guy Made $1,250,226 Building and Selling Blogs

This is an interview with Marc from VitalDollar.

Hey Marc. Tell us about yourself and what you do.

I’m 40 years old and I live in Pennsylvania with my wife and our two kids (we have a daughter who is 6, and a son who is 3). 

I’ve been self-employed as a blogger and internet marketer since 2008. For more than 10 years now, I’ve been blessed to be able to work from home and earn a living working on my own websites. 

Over the years I’ve had websites/blogs in several different industries, including web design, photography, travel, and finance. The main reason I’ve had a lot of different sites is because I’ve sold several of them, and after selling a site I move on to something else. 

My current project is a personal finance blog, VitalDollar.com, where I cover topics related to managing your money, different ways to save money, and different ways to make money. There are a lot of posts on the blog about side hustles and ways to make extra money, even if you have a full-time job. 

What was your first side hustle and how did that go?

My first side hustle started in late 2006 while I was working full-time as an auditor. 

I wanted to make some extra money, so I started designing and coding websites for small businesses. I had taken a web design course my last semester of college. It was really basic, but it got me interested in web design and I learned more after graduation by reading books and following online tutorials.

My first few clients were family and friends. In 2007, I decided to take it more seriously and look for clients aside from just people that I knew, so I created a portfolio site. 

I added a blog to the site in an attempt to get traffic and exposure. I didn’t even know what a blog was, so I was just learning as I went.

The blog actually took off pretty quickly and as soon as I started to get traffic I got hooked. That’s really what I consider to be the start of my business, because up until that point my effort was very sporadic. 

Once I saw traffic coming to the blog I knew it was possible and I started putting time into the blog every day.

The blog actually did help me with my goal of getting clients for my web design services, but I found that I really didn’t enjoy that work. 

I was having a lot more fun working on the blog, so I decided to focus on growing the blog instead of getting clients. I did take clients here and there when it was a good fit, but I put a lot more time and effort into growing the blog.

Since I wasn’t going to be making much money from client work, I decided to monetize the blog in other ways. For a while that was mostly just banner ads and AdSense.

Thanks to that side hustle I was able to quit my job in 2008, and since then I’ve been working on my own blogs and websites full-time.

How many sites have you sold and how much did you earn from that?

Here are the details of my blog sales:

• In 2010 I sold a web design blog for $50,000 (that blog launched in 2008)
• In 2013 I sold a web design blog for $500,000 (this was my first blog that I launched in 2007)
• In 2016 I sold two photography blogs together for $500,000 (launched in 2012 and 2014)
• In 2018 I sold another photography blog for $216,000 (launched in 2015)

The sale in 2018 was done through a broker, so after broker fees I got $194,400. 

My wife and I also had a separate Amazon FBA business that we ran from 2015 – 2017. We sold that in 2017 for $225,000.

At what point in your blogging journey did you leave your 9 to 5 job to do this full-time?

I launched my first blog in the spring of 2007. The first few months I only published articles here and there without much effort being put in. 

July of 2007 was when I really started dedicating time to it. And I quit my job in November of 2008, so it was about 1.5 years.

One of the things that made it possible for me to leave my job at that point was freelance writing. 

I was making some money from my own blog by then, but I also wrote for several other blogs on a freelance basis. That income helped to bridge the gap and allowed me to replace the income from my job. 

As the income from my own blog grew, I scaled back on the freelance writing until I eventually stopped it altogether. 

I’ve also done freelance writing a few other times throughout the past 10 years. Usually it’s been after I’ve sold one of my sites and I’m trying to work my income back up.

What has been your most successful website so far and why?

Honestly, I would probably consider my very first blog to be the most successful (the one I sold in 2013 for $500,000). 

I had a higher monthly income from that site at its peak ($20,000+ profit) than from any of my other sites. It also had the highest traffic.

But that blog also got a lot more of my time and attention than any other project. It was my full-time focus for about 5 years. Most of my other projects have had to share my time and attention with other things.

I also consider one of my photography blogs to be very successful because it did well with limited effort from me. The site only made $3,000 – $5,000 per month, but I didn’t put much time into the site. 

It grew an email list and sold digital products with only minimal effort on my part. It was the closest thing I’ve had to a significant passive income.

Why did you sell websites that were earning you money every month?

That’s a good question. The situation was a little bit different with each sale, but the one constant that was a major factor in each case was the ability to free up my time to do something else.

I usually have a few different websites or projects that I’m managing, and if I want to dedicate more time to something, I need to free up that time somehow. One easy way to free up time is to sell one of the other websites/blogs that is taking up my time.

With the blog that I sold for $500,000 in 2013 (my first blog), another major factor was that I wanted to cash out while I knew the site had some value. 

I had worked hard on the site for 6 years at that point, and I had made a pretty decent income during that time. But being able to get $500,000 for it was huge for our family. 

I was mentally ready to move on to something else. I could have held on to the site and outsourced everything, but there’s a good chance the income would have slowly declined if I wasn’t actively engaged with the site. 

I decided to sell while the profit was still growing and while the value was up.

I have a few friends who have held on to sites too long and lost hundreds of thousands of dollars compared to what they could have sold for a few years earlier. I’ve learned that if your heart is not in it anymore, it’s usually better to sell and be done.

I really didn’t want to sell the photography blogs in 2016, but I felt like I needed to. 

My wife and I were running an Amazon FBA business t