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Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website

howacarworks.com

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Re: Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website

#71

Post by jessepollak »

AlexMuir wrote: post #30
jessepollak wrote: post #10

Just a thought: I might consider a different monetization strategy than AdSense. The ads really look awful and make the site seem significantly less 'quality' than it actually is. I might experiment with some sort of freemium model; maybe for free you could get the first half of sections for every chapter and then you can pay ~$5 to get access to everything. Or, as someone above mentioned, compile it into an ebook an…

You are right, the ads look absolutely shit - I could perhaps go with Buysellads when traffic picks up. Interesting idea - I'm a huge admirer of things that follow that model - Michael Hartl's Rails Tutorial and Avdi Grimm's Object's On Rails. I am hoping that people fixing cars are more transactional (read likely to click an ad) than people looking for coding tutorials. I might leave it as ads for six months and the…

I like the idea of A/B testing the ad v. freemium models, but make sure to take into account the growth in traffic that will happen in the first 6 months etc.

Re: Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website

#72

Post by AlexMuir »

jessepollak wrote: post #70
ChuckMcM wrote: post #60

"I can only imagine that going up as Google starts to recognise this as quality content and not just content farm rubbish." Uh, no. It will go up as a function of traffic volume, so as your site starts to rank higher organically you'll see more revenue but the amount paid isn't a function of the 'quality' of the web site, its a function of what people bid to be there and what they pay per click. Note that if it goes…

I think you're misinterpreting what the OP means when he says that quote. The way I read it, the OP was not saying that his AdSense payments would increase because he got higher bids for the ads due to higher quality content, but rather that as Google started to recognize that it was quality content, the PageRank of his site would go up, display it more prominently and generating more views and uniques. I could be mi…

Yeah that was my meaning. Adsense income once you're in a certain vertical (car repairs in my case) is just a factor of traffic. Traffic comes from Google Pagerank for this sort of site. So to be clearer, I'm hoping that Google's algorithms decide this is quality content and give me a bit of a boost - at least that was my understanding of the Panda update (admittedly ages ago).

Re: Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website

#73

Post by AlexMuir »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #60

"I can only imagine that going up as Google starts to recognise this as quality content and not just content farm rubbish." Uh, no. It will go up as a function of traffic volume, so as your site starts to rank higher organically you'll see more revenue but the amount paid isn't a function of the 'quality' of the web site, its a function of what people bid to be there and what they pay per click. Note that if it goes…

Sorry I wasn't clear - I meant that traffic to the site would only go up as Google recognises meaningful content.

Re: Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website

#74

Post by lukevdp »

jessepollak wrote: post #70
ChuckMcM wrote: post #60

"I can only imagine that going up as Google starts to recognise this as quality content and not just content farm rubbish." Uh, no. It will go up as a function of traffic volume, so as your site starts to rank higher organically you'll see more revenue but the amount paid isn't a function of the 'quality' of the web site, its a function of what people bid to be there and what they pay per click. Note that if it goes…

I think you're misinterpreting what the OP means when he says that quote. The way I read it, the OP was not saying that his AdSense payments would increase because he got higher bids for the ads due to higher quality content, but rather that as Google started to recognize that it was quality content, the PageRank of his site would go up, display it more prominently and generating more views and uniques. I could be mi…

PageRank is based on links, not on content. His PageRank will only go up if he gets more inbound links to the site.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

Re: Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website

#75

Post by AlexMuir »

lessnonymous wrote: post #69
AlexMuir wrote: post #2

I'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.

This can be a really useful website that could potentially earn you _interesting_ money. I'd take your first few $15 and reinvest it by getting someone on oDesk to go through and fix stuff. * First section I looked at was 'Brakes'. First article is about the windscreen washer. Then there's two articles called "Adjusting the Brakes /1" and "... /2". Why two? * In the first there's one massive unreadable paragraph. In…

Thanks that's a great idea. It's a little more work than putting the job up on oDesk though, as I'd need to implement some mechanism for people to edit and update, and for me to vet it.

The truth is, having scanned and OCRed it all, I'm sick of the sight of it for the time being so I haven't proofread it. I will get onto this. And your suggestion about moving the images around is a great one - I'm conscious that these pictures are lovely but I'm not displaying them well at all.

Re: Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website

#76

Post by AlexMuir »

ivix wrote: post #44

I'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?

I'm not sure on the illustrations - I'd have to ask. He wrote some of the content, but also ran the company that owned the copyright on the work. They are wonderful and I have to emphasise them some more.

Re: Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website

#77

Post by AlexMuir »

Xavi wrote: post #47
AlexMuir wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

He's not bothered - it's an experiment for both of us. If it works out then I'll see him right, but there's no point in hashing out some lengthy agreement if it doesn't bring in the bucks.

Re: Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website

#79

Post by geon »

lukevdp wrote: post #74
jessepollak wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're misinterpreting what the OP means when he says that quote. The way I read it, the OP was not saying that his AdSense payments would increase because he got higher bids for the ads due to higher quality content, but rather that as Google started to recognize that it was quality content, the PageRank of his site would go up, display it more prominently and generating more views and uniques. I could be mi…

PageRank is based on links, not on content. His PageRank will only go up if he gets more inbound links to the site. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

I think the point was that Google spend a lot of effort to identify quality content vs. link farms, auto-generated content and low quality adsense-optimized content.

Re: Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website

#80

Post by AlexMuir »

phaus wrote: post #78

Thanks for showing us. While my father can fix / build nearly anything, I overspecialized in computers and electronics, so I know almost nothing about cars. I've been looking for a way to remedy this and your site looks perfect.

Buy a wreck and take it to pieces and try to understand it. Then just sell it for scrap and recoup most of your money. You could even sell the parts individually and make some profit. Then try a project car - I'm surprised more hackers aren't into cars really. Sadly I'm in an apartment at the moment without the space.
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