One of the dumbest things you can do with your online business is to tell someone about a website you own that is making money. So am I an idiot for telling you about websites I’ve made money from on my blog in the past? Well, let me explain:

Why I Show Off Websites I Own That Make Money

The reason why I share websites that I’ve made money with is because people won’t believe what I say and keep reading my blog unless I show proof. So there’s no better way to show people they should listen to my advice than to show them specific real life examples of websites I’ve made money with. I think after showing everyone how I’ve sold well over a million dollars worth of products for Amazon, sold a website in a deal worth six figures, bought a website and with a little effort turned it into an income stream that may break $1,000 this month (more than quadrupling the monthly earnings from when I bought in in July) people have probably seen enough to know that I’m speaking from actual experience.

I share these examples because it makes for compelling content, builds credibility for me and in turn more people read my blog and participate in the stuff I’m working on (On that topic – can we get some more donations?). But now I’m straying away from the reason why I wrote this blog post in the first place so let me get back to the point:

How I Found Every Website You Own:

I have a subscription to the website WhoRush.com and with a very simple search using my blog as an example I can find the following websites that I own:

There are additional tools that allow you to search by IP address, Google Analytics ID, Google Adsense ID, Whois search etc. as well.

If you tell me a website you own and you have even one website on your server with an Adsense ID I can use that to find every other website you own that uses the same Adsense ID!

Thanks for telling me about that one website you own and are trying to sell on Flippa – now I know every single other website you own, can look through each of them to see how you’re getting traffic from Google using another tool like SEMRushย and can copy the niches you’re in if it looks like there is enough value there for me to compete.

Now I don’t explicitly seek out people that share their websites to do the above, but there are a lot of savvy people that do. WhoRush and SEMRush are two amazing research tools (I love SEMRush the most though) The point I’m trying to get across is that you should never tell people about your websites that make money. Now some of you might be thinking – ‘Sweet now I can use these tools to go check out all the websites Chris uses to fund his lavish lifestyle’ (joking of course) – well it’s too late to do that because I’ve set up safeguards to prevent this that you can employ to protect yourself as well.

How To Prevent People From Seeing All Of Your Websites:

The only surefire way to prevent people from finding all of your websites is to have doubles of everything:

1. I have two Adsense accounts.

One Adsense account is a personal account and tied to my SSN# and another is for my LLC which is tied to my business. (completely ok for you to do)

I never tell anyone about the websites I own and run under my second Adsense account. I also don’t host any of those websites on the server that this blog is on so there isn’t anyway to find those websites that way either.

2. I have four hosting accounts.

I have two dedicated servers with HostGator and a couple shared hosting accounts for some smaller niche websites I run.

You only really need to have two hosting accounts if you want to protect yourself, but I use a dedicated server for this blog and a few other websites I’m hosting here for stability purposes. I have a second dedicated server for some larger websites I run under my second Adsense ID. In any case, the point being that you don’t want anything that links the websites in one hosting account to a website in another hosting account. So don’t use the same Google Adsense ID, Google Analytics ID etc.

3. I use domain privacy on every domain name I own.

This helps to prevent people from using the Whois tool that can search for your name, address etc. and find you that way as well.

Overall Summary:

There are tons of bloggers in this space talking about their earnings each month from niche websites (without disclosing URL’s) and in less than 5 minutes I can find out every website they own, how much money each one is probably making based on the traffic and keywords I see they rank for and just about everything else about their business. If I can find out this information then you can bet other people can too.

Now because of this added privacy I have to pay an extra few hundred dollars a month for another dedicated server just to prevent some savvy unscrupulous blog visitors that may stop by, read about some of the successes I’ve had and want to find what other things I’m running that are currently successful. So you can save yourself a lot of trouble by simply not telling anyone about your successful websites. I could go into more detail about how to protect yourself but the above tips will help you out quite a bit.

I am curious though – how many of you knew that tools like this even existed – where people can find basically every website you own very easily? Let me know in the comments below.

Disclaimer: The following was not a paid review post, but I do have a free comped subscription to WhoRush and SEMRush. I’d gladly pay for SEMRush.com and probably WhoRush.com as well (SEMRush is definitely my favorite though).