How to become rich even if nobody is following you on Twitter

A better approach:

Get a job at at a startup run by those MIT elite. Kick ass and make yourself invaluable. The next time one of the founders starts their own thing, they'll bring you along at the very beginning. Use that role to get more involved with the business and network like crazy.

Wash, rinse, and repeat.

Depending on your effort, by the third time around you should have the connections and experience necessary to do your own startup - get VC funding - and make the deals necessary to give it a good chance at success.

> A project that makes $1 a day but is impossible to modify to make new projects is not a valid project.

Ok, this reduces the number of 'possible projects' considerably.

> A project that requires an hour of maintainance everyday is not a valid project.

Obviously, because at 1 hour of maintenance every day you'd be doing less than 15 projects total if you need some sleep.

But even the most trivial piece of software requires some maintenance. And at 400 projects you can spend no more than half a day per year building and maintaining, and that includes saturdays and sundays. Better hope you're single, if you're not you will be by the end of that year.

> For this, you have to automate - it is the first step of time optimisation. If you are not automating, or automation was not built into your plan before you started, you are doing it wrong.

This more or less limits you to very superficial sites that do nothing but aggregate other content or that are extremly thin variations on a theme.

Which is possible, but then it becomes hard to make that 1$ / day.

> What you have is the first iteration - my method would take all the ones above $1, then optimise the time spent maintaining it till it became minimal.

That sounds very theoretical, I think instead of keeping in the theoretical realm that you should actually do this, and write about how well it works. That would make for some very interesting reading.

> If it were not possible to optimise it in that method, then someone external can be brought in, who maintains it for half the income, giving you absolute free time to make the next project.

Why would they maintain it for half the income, if it was trivial to build they could build it themselves and keep 100%?

> I did not speak about bad performers yet - the projects who do not make the required $1. It's not possible to follow this system without hitting some duds.

Count on the majority, not just 'some'.

> You spend a reasonable amount of time trying to bring it up,

What's a reasonably amount of time here? A day ? There goes at $50 / hour one year of your income, assuming this is not a dud!

Again, I've been trying to do this, yes, using adsense, that old and so 2006 method of making money on small sites.

But I've yet to find something that works better, in spite of trying several different ad networks. And other monetization schemes are a lot more labour intensive.

This is a great idea in theory, but trust me it is very hard to execute in practice.

Could you find time to spend on 400 things, though?

I would be pretty interested in seeing quantified results as well.

I agree completely, $1 a day times 400 sites is simply not feasible. This article is terrible advice, the kind that will probably lead you to failure. I have a fairly successful affiliate marketing business (I make more than I would if I had a day job), and it seems like every day I talk to people who are taking this approach and making $1-$2 a day. The article's logic is flawed- if it were that easy to make projects that do $1 a day on autopilot, your competitors(and big corporations) would already be scaling that model. The truth of the matter is that nothing runs on autopilot for long. Even with SEO, you constantly need to be producing fresh content, building links, and keeping abreast of ranking changes. And most of the time, these kinds of small-time efforts will still fail and lead to making $0 a day.

On the other hand, every millionaire Internet marketer I've ever talked to (and I've connected with many of the big ones) has succeeded by focusing on a single market/product and scaling it up instead of running around from one failed project to the next like a chicken with its head cut off. Oh, and most of these people are "normals"- they don't have popular blogs or lots of Twitter followers, they're quietly grinding every day and making a killing online.

Trust me, taking one project and not giving up until you MAKE IT WORK will be much more profitable in the long run.

Oh, and I've just gotten into AdWords a couple months ago( most of my previous experience has been with social traffic like Facebook) and am doing very well with it, so anyone who tells you it's too late to get in is either a competitor who doesn't want more competition on a traffic source, or doesn't know what he's talking about.

Talk to people who are actually succeeding online about their strategy, and you'll quickly see a pattern emerge. I bet very few of them got rich by making 400 AdSense sites.