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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

#91

Post by ChuckMcM »

AlexMuir wrote: post #73
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.

No worries, organic growth is a function of longevity. So to some extent you don't have much to do. Of course if you want, you can sign up for AdWords and get something like a free $100 credit just for signing up. Then you spend that by buying keywords that people might use for a query that your page would answer. That is called 'search engine marketing' (SEM) and once you burn through the free stuff you'll have to decide if its worth buying more ads or not.

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

#92

Post by quasque »

It's a lovely idea, but from a design point of view, the site looks really quite unpleasant: the green pastel background, ugly font choices, an uninviting table of links as the home page, and inlining the figures far too small to be useful.

I would recommend at least following some of the design choices of the original book, so the difference between text and figures is not so jarring. But better to extract drawings out of the scans and relabel using a consistent set of fonts, while creating a more interesting and captivating layout. It would be awesome to see this book brought to life by a more modern design with all the benefits of hyperlinking (both internal and external, e.g. wikipedia).

It's a real shame the presentation is so poor, as the information is actually really useful and interesting. A great start anyway.

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

#93

Post by fudged71 »

AlexMuir wrote: post #75
lessnonymous wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thes…

You could simply pay a bored technically-minded university student such as myself to do the work :)

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

#94

Post by toast0 »

rapind wrote: post #87
nollidge wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but comments will add load time and clutter to the page. Also I'll bet if this picks up any steam, the comments will devolve quickly without technically being spam.

Disqus loads in after page load, so it shouldn't add load time to the content. Also keep in mind that comments add SEO (and can be extremely valuable for this reason alone). Plus I don't think it's such a bad idea from a reader's perspective. Seems like the worse case scenario is that no one uses it, and the best case scenario people are able to contribute to improvements.

If the comments load in after the page loads, crawlers are unlikely to see them, so you're not getting much SEO benefit.

Worst case is off-topic comments that take time to remove, significantly worse than nobody using it.

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

#95

Post by AlexMuir »

toast0 wrote: post #94
rapind wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disqus loads in after page load, so it shouldn't add load time to the content. Also keep in mind that comments add SEO (and can be extremely valuable for this reason alone). Plus I don't think it's such a bad idea from a reader's perspective. Seems like the worse case scenario is that no one uses it, and the best case scenario people are able to contribute to improvements.

If the comments load in after the page loads, crawlers are unlikely to see them, so you're not getting much SEO benefit. Worst case is off-topic comments that take time to remove, significantly worse than nobody using it.

Google definitely indexes disqus comments.

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

#96

Post by AlexMuir »

Chico75 wrote: post #39

Questions: 1) How much time did it take after the scanning to get the site and content online? 2) Do you think you could automate the process and get a 2nd book done in a faster way?

After the scanning I took about 2 days to OCR everything. That was fairly mindnumbing.

Then it was a case of coding up a fairly simple Rails app and parsing that content - another two days. Some thinking time in the middle - I'd say a week. Spread over a year(!)

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

#97

Post by biot »

The biggest beef I have is that the site doesn't tell you how a car works. I clicked on "Transmission" hoping to see how an automatic transmission works, but the TOC only had information on checking, filling, and adjusting various things. Perhaps the fixingacar.com domain would be more appropriate for this content?

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

#98

Post by bemmu »

wtracy wrote: post #83
jmatthew3 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to add - split testing your adsense can really be a big deal. For something this small, you probably don't need to split test the colors. But, the ad placement (and which ad units to use) can make a HUGE difference. I like to select a few different formats, make adsense "channels" and then weighted-randomly select one of my splits. In other words, keep testing, but display the combination of ad units that works…

This is the first time I've seen someone suggest split testing the ads that run on their own site. Are there any particular resources that you would recommend for this?

It's not too difficult. Suppose you have a 728x90 and 300x250 and want to see if a 160x600 would be better than the 300x250 unit. Create four new ads. 728x90 channel a1, 728x90 channel b1, 300x250 channel a2 and 160x600 channel b2. On your website half the time show a1, a2. Half b1, b2. Later go to AdSense and view stats by channel and see which made more.

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

#99

Post by gregpilling »

antidoh wrote: post #22
JonnieCache wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>approach Haynes pitching the idea and showing this as an example? This is the correct answer. At least try and get a friend to do it, and take a cut. The idea of being able to flick through all the haynes manuals on an ipad is brilliant. And I don't even like cars.

Question to motorheads: Would you use a shop manual exclusively on an ( your ) ipad? Or would you prefer to have a paper copy, so that you don't get your ipad greasy and scratched while you're working on a car? Question to everyone: when are we going to have devices that are cheap and rugged enough that my first question doesn't matter? Edit: If that ever happens, they won't be sold by Apple, the company that made un…

see Alldata or Mitchell on Demand. Both are web based auto repair manuals. I sold Alldata in the 93-95 years and Mitchell OnDemand from 96-2002. Most auto repair shops have them. Typical use case is to print out the relevant parts, take the paper to the car and use it make notes, trace wiring, etc, then include the notes with the repair order.

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

#100

Post by vicks711 »

rmc wrote: post #32
JonnieCache wrote: post #29

Earlier 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.

Argument that "nofollow" = "no seo juice" is debatable. Many SEO believe that lots of links from Wikipedia does help.

I have no data of my own to support the above. Theory says that "nofollow" will not help is SEO.

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