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Ask HN: Fastest way to make $300-400 a month online?

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Re: Ask HN: Fastest way to make $300-400 a month online?

#61

Post by petercooper »

antidaily wrote: post #42
petercooper wrote: post #14

First, a Web service that "meets an unmet need." Back in 2005 I built a "code snippets" site using the then-nascent Rails in just over 24 hours. I then spent a second day making the design more "Web 2.0" a few months later, but otherwise did little except mention it here and there and add my own code into it. It made ~$800 a month from Adsense for a couple of years and then I sold it to DZone for $30,000. Perhaps the…

How many pages do you need for an e-book typically?

Doesn't matter really. How you sell it and what's in it is far more important than the length. You need to nail the sales process and the content - everything else is of very minor importance.

This attitude is more obvious with screencasts. Even 30 minute screencasts can sell OK at $9.. and the amount of effort to put that together is far less than even a, say, 25 page e-book. You just need to hit the right stuff.

All that said, my basic investigations show that in the general programming world, books of $20. But this is all very arm-wavey.

Re: Ask HN: Fastest way to make $300-400 a month online?

#62

Post by nrao123 »

acgourley wrote: post #59
jasonlbaptiste wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I posted an article from SAI the other day. Only 25% of local businesses are advertising online. Mostly because it's complicated and scary as shit to them. Of those 25%, 60-80% churn. That's because the companies doing this are so bloated that they only spend 50-60% on the actual ad buy and the rest on admin expenses. So yeah, the performance sucks. I also read 91% of local businesses are unhappy with their online ma…

From time to time I see this as a real market need and wonder how to generalize and scale such a service oriented business. Seems like you could throw a lot of tech at it but still need a lot of feet on the ground at the end of the day.

Yes, scaling local businesses are not easy.

My research on this topic... http://www.nikhileshrao.com/post/9824/links-on-local-interne...

Re: Ask HN: Fastest way to make $300-400 a month online?

#63

Post by aaronblohowiak »

acgourley wrote: post #59
jasonlbaptiste wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I posted an article from SAI the other day. Only 25% of local businesses are advertising online. Mostly because it's complicated and scary as shit to them. Of those 25%, 60-80% churn. That's because the companies doing this are so bloated that they only spend 50-60% on the actual ad buy and the rest on admin expenses. So yeah, the performance sucks. I also read 91% of local businesses are unhappy with their online ma…

From time to time I see this as a real market need and wonder how to generalize and scale such a service oriented business. Seems like you could throw a lot of tech at it but still need a lot of feet on the ground at the end of the day.

Yelp

Re: Ask HN: Fastest way to make $300-400 a month online?

#65

Post by adamt »

needmoney wrote: post #3
Concours wrote: post #2

try some freelance boards, like elance.com, create a blog(no fast money here) , try meacanical turk...what language do you programm? offer your services for free to build some referals, and set a portfolio with those referals.

Python, ruby, php, scheme, c, c++, java. Any ideas how quickly I could make the money off of something like elance (or how quickly you could, since we don't know our relative coding speeds)? Likewise for Mechanical Turk?

I would recommend elance. From the other side of the fence - We hire a lot of people off elance (currently spending about $6k per week). I think it's a great way for people from lower-cost countries who are competent and with good english to be able to earn money. It also works pretty well for us with what we do.

From a supplier point of view, there's two options - either going for fixed price bids for projects, or for bidding for stuff on an hourly basis.

In terms of rates we average about $20 an hour for top quality C++ stuff, about $17 for good Django/Python and about $12 for web-design/HTML. You need to subtract elance fees. But if you're good - it wouldn't be hard to earn a lot more than your target without having to work too hard.

Re: Ask HN: Fastest way to make $300-400 a month online?

#66

Post by cloudkj »

Amazon Associates is a pretty good program that you can integrate into any consumer-facing site. When the Facebook app platform first came out a few years ago, I whipped up an app that integrated with Amazon associates in about a week's worth of time. Almost no maintenance since then (save for changes to reflect Facebook UI/platform upgrades), and it probably averages ~$40-50 a month, and makes several times higher during holiday season.

Amazon's Product Advertising API provides access to lots of their data, so if you so choose you can make mini niche shopping sites with significant dynamic data.

The only thing I'd be concerned about is receiving payments if you're not in one of the Amazon locales. Don't know if you need a valid tax ID or something. I think you can choose to get paid by checks though, if that works for you.

Re: Ask HN: Fastest way to make $300-400 a month online?

#67

Post by tcc619 »

needmoney wrote: post #3
Concours wrote: post #2

try some freelance boards, like elance.com, create a blog(no fast money here) , try meacanical turk...what language do you programm? offer your services for free to build some referals, and set a portfolio with those referals.

Python, ruby, php, scheme, c, c++, java. Any ideas how quickly I could make the money off of something like elance (or how quickly you could, since we don't know our relative coding speeds)? Likewise for Mechanical Turk?

Get paid for doing open source code. It'll give you good karma and internet points. Definitely give you the 400 a month you need.

We just started our open source task site but there are two notable tasks for the languages you listed: Fix Audio Sync against Video in live555.cpp, $500 http://nextsprocket.com/tasks/fix-audio-sync-against-video-i...

Nokogiri pure-Java version for JRuby, >$600 http://nextsprocket.com/tasks/nokogiri-pure-java-version-for...

the nokogiri problem's been around and people are dying for a good solution!

Re: Ask HN: Fastest way to make $300-400 a month online?

#69

Post by jasonlbaptiste »

acgourley wrote: post #59
jasonlbaptiste wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I posted an article from SAI the other day. Only 25% of local businesses are advertising online. Mostly because it's complicated and scary as shit to them. Of those 25%, 60-80% churn. That's because the companies doing this are so bloated that they only spend 50-60% on the actual ad buy and the rest on admin expenses. So yeah, the performance sucks. I also read 91% of local businesses are unhappy with their online ma…

From time to time I see this as a real market need and wonder how to generalize and scale such a service oriented business. Seems like you could throw a lot of tech at it but still need a lot of feet on the ground at the end of the day.

the BIGGEST problem is scaling it (at any scale). All these companies have enormous sales forces running around. That does two things: a) causes less % of media buy to go to actual media b) causes the companies to have to raise tons of capital.

If someone can figure out a unique way to scale sales without adding more human capital,they will do very well. On the flip side, most of these people don't want to "do it themselves". You can outsource most of the actual service work at a scaleable expense. I look at it this way, sure anyone can learn accounting, but you want an accountant to do your taxes. Same thing with local businesses and web advertising- yes they could learn it themselves, but they'd rather have a pro do it. They just want to run their business.

Re: Ask HN: Fastest way to make $300-400 a month online?

#70

Post by PostOnce »

tome wrote: post #57
_bfhp wrote: post #46

You could try Amazon Turk as a side-job. In a few hours you could make 5 to 10 dollars or more.. It wouldn't serve as a main source of income, but at least you'll have money to spend on commodities that you won't have to take out of whatever actual main source you find. Tip: If you try this, when searching for HITs, only look for 5-cent HITS or above, and don't bother with $5 stuff, which no one ever gets.

Sorry, downvoted by accident.

HN needs the ability to rescind an accidental misvote for at least a few minutes after a post, doesn't it? I've done that before as well.
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