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Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website
41–50 of 109 posts
Re: Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website
#42This may have been a lucky break. Google keyword tool suggests that "how a car works" is 1) low competition 2) 135,000 global 3) 60,500 local. This is an amazing and rare find, most keywords like this are already well picked over by niche site creators - also from the looks of it you were the first registrant in 2011.
Re: Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website
#43I'd welcome any suggestions on where to go next - it's a bit of a fire-and-forget side project, but I'd still like to get it as good as possible before I leave it to stew for 2013.
Since there are so many articles, I think a search box on the left side under the introduction content would be handy.
Something that shows suggestions/auto-completions by matching the input against article titles.
Re: Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website
#44I'd make more of a feature of the awesome cut away drawings - I always loved them as a kid in Usborne books. Did your friend do the drawings?
Re: Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wikipedia is a perfect storm of pagerank so unless google have specifically made an exception for it, links from there must be pretty valuable. IANASEO.
For exactly this reason Wikipedia adds "nofollow" attributes to all external links on Wikipedia. You will get no SEO / page rank link juice from adding links to Wikipedia. You will probably get organic traffic though.
Duh. Can't believe I forgot about that. Not really on the ball today. What am I even doing here? This is meant to be my holiday...
Re: Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website
#46this is great, actual useful content with great illustrations. It's refreshing to see something with some practical use. Growing up I remember being obsessed with this: DK The Way Things Work. it was an amazing mac CD ROM with illustrations of everyday things broken down, with moving parts and all... Probably one of the reason i became an engineer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_Things_Work http://www.amazon.co…
The Way Things Work (the book) is amazing; the new version also includes chapters on computers and electronics. Not sure about that dated "multimedia experience," but the book itself definitely holds up fantastically well.
Re: Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website
#47what did/do you count as your expenses? surely you do not pay 60$/month for hosting. did you add the work you had to do?
Hosting is on a $20/month Linode along with a bunch of other projects/sites/bits of code fluff. The actual bandwidth used by this site will be virtually nothing I imagine. I haven't valued my time at all. In that respect it is already earning me around $40 a month - a meal out.
Are you paying any money to the original author?
Re: Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website
#48Questions: Why are there comments on the page? How difficult would it be to compile it into an ebook and make it available on kindle/itunes/wherever else? Seems like you'd only need to make a couple of sales for it to compete with the adsense income. Maybe have it so if the visitor has read 3 or more consecutive pages it shows up with an ebook splash page, "advert free and easy to read blah blah blah"
I put in the comments because I thought it'd be an easy way of adding some content for free as people add to the information already there, and also to let people moan about errors so that I can then go in and fix them. Comments are a fairly low-maintenance feedback system, especially with Disqus dealing with the spam filtering for me. An eBook is a great idea. I just worry that the information is slightly out of dat…
> I know virtually nothing about ebook formats so this would be quite a learning curve for me.
Pandoc can convert markdown into epub. Put it on Amazon's KDP, Barnes and Noble's PubIt, and then use Smashwords to target the other markets.
Re: Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wikipedia is a perfect storm of pagerank so unless google have specifically made an exception for it, links from there must be pretty valuable. IANASEO.
For exactly this reason Wikipedia adds "nofollow" attributes to all external links on Wikipedia. You will get no SEO / page rank link juice from adding links to Wikipedia. You will probably get organic traffic though.
Just because a link is "nofollow" does not mean you get no juice. Being linked to from wikipedia definitely helps a site's rankings...
Re: Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had a look at the Schema stuff - I actually use it on another site of mine ( http://thebigeat.com ) for listings of takeaways, but it has made no difference SEO-wise and it tends to make my markup look like shit. But nevermind A/B testing, I am doing A-Z testing here - throw everything and see what sticks. I'm hesitant to go adding my site as a citation - it's a good idea but it just seems a bit black-hat for me. H…
Marching in and adding links to your site to WP is certainly a bad idea, as well as being plain ethically wrong. I was thinking more of turning up to the talk page for the car article and just offering them the content, but even that probably contravenes wiki-core directive #5749327. I mentioned it because your site seems like a genuinely good source that WP would be happy to use, making it a win-win. Don't try and u…
I've always had the impression that actually being linked from wikipedia isn't necessarily a good thing SEO wise. That is I think that a long time ago google decided to penalise sites being linked from major wiki's to stop them being spammed to death.
But I'm basing that only rumour and supposition so certainly don't take it as truth.