Online Success Story:
Christian Fager BestMilitarySurplus.com

Hi, my name is Christian Fager. I started Best Military Surplus to give people a site that can talk in-depth about products that normally only have brief descriptions.

1. When did you set up your website?

Spent about 3 weeks getting the site and initial content ready, officially went live with it on January 1st of 2010.

2. What gave you the idea for this particular niche & website?

Being in the military actually had no weight in this decision. I wanted something with good keywords and products I could talk about. Out of the 10 ideas I wrote down, military surplus had the best keywords at the time.

3. Did you have any experience with online business prior to creating this website?

My first real site was KlingonWeapons.com. I set that site up and followed Lynns strategies to see if SEO and affiliate marketing would actually work. A couple months in I was surprised by the fact that if you do it the right way, it actually does. The niche for that site was very small, so I wanted something with more potential (which led to Best Military Surplus).

4. What did you do for work prior to setting up an online business?

Have been in the military since 2007. Which meant to continue my love of business, I had to do something that could be partially outsourced, and somewhat passive when I am gone (my brother Kerry now helps run the site when I am gone or busy).

5. How did you initially promote your website, and if different – how do you promote it now?

Initially I ran facebook ads to get ‘fans’, which provided good starting traffic and some sales. After a couple months the clicks from those fans tailed off to very small numbers. Thankfully the SEO was finally kicking in at that point. We have done SEO as the main source of traffic ever since.

6. Is your website profitable? Can you share some basic traffic & profit stats with us?

Yes, not a full-time income yet, but it is consistent.

Traffic avg over the last year has been:

11k visits per month

42k page views per month

Profit avg for the last year:

Adsense – $161/month

Amazon – $100/month

Other – $35/month (CJ, Chitika, Kindle, etc)

7. What are your plans for the site going forward?

• Getting key pages into the top 3 of oogle through high-quality link building.
• Making more use of a newsletter (giving people something they want to open and read).
• Creating some higher-converting pages and SEO’ing them like crazy.

8. What ONE piece of advice would you give someone interested in starting their own niche site or blog?

Start with something small, jump in, and make plenty of mistakes to learn.

Hope this helps you with your business.

P.S. – Lynn’s pretty good at this stuff, listen to her.

Christian Fager
http://bestmilitarysurplus.com

-Thank you, Christian and congratulations on your success!