How to become rich even if nobody is following you on Twitter • Hacker News Board

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

#131

Post by mattmaroon » Sun, Feb 07, 2010, 10:11 PM UTC

zaidf wrote: post #116

mattmaroon wrote: post #107

This article is silly, and just wrong in every way. It totally discounts time spent doing these projects, and totally fails to understand expected value. For instance: "I wrote a desktop software once, and priced it at $29.90. I sold one copy a month, which was terrible. That's $1 a day. It's really easy as a programmer to do something that makes $1 a day." I suppose if that desktop software took an hour to make it w…

Matt, a huge part that I think he has left out is the use of outsourcing stuff offshore. A lot of his projects seem to be content plays. You can get lots of content produced offshore for very cheap. The end result? You can have 5 people working full-time at $500/month each($2500/month), each producing content for 50 of your sites. Now you might wonder how one guy can write content for 50 sites. It's actually not that…

Is he advocating splogging? I didn't gather that at all from his post, and if so that's on par with advocating spamming.

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

#132

Post by sherl0ck » Sun, Feb 07, 2010, 10:12 PM UTC

sabat wrote: post #129

jacquesm wrote: post #79

Interesting, I've been doing just that for the last couple of years. It's been a mix of partial successes and total failures, mostly failures. I didn't want to go the 'mfa' route for obvious reasons, so I try to make these sites in to something that actually is useful, and that have a sense of community about them. Here is a breakdown of what you can make this way in a month based on adsense alone after several years…

* I didn't want to go the 'mfa' route for obvious reasons* Sorry, but what's "the 'mfa' route"? Couldn't find anything on this.

I believe it would be 'made for adsense'

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

#133

Post by jacquesm » Sun, Feb 07, 2010, 10:13 PM UTC

sabat wrote: post #129

jacquesm wrote: post #79

Interesting, I've been doing just that for the last couple of years. It's been a mix of partial successes and total failures, mostly failures. I didn't want to go the 'mfa' route for obvious reasons, so I try to make these sites in to something that actually is useful, and that have a sense of community about them. Here is a breakdown of what you can make this way in a month based on adsense alone after several years…

* I didn't want to go the 'mfa' route for obvious reasons* Sorry, but what's "the 'mfa' route"? Couldn't find anything on this.

'Made For Adsense', sites that add no value other than to get google traffic in order to sell the clicks back to google.

Google is heavily cracking down on these nowadays, so it's less of a problem than it used to be, but the sheer number of RSS feed regurgitators made searching for something very hard for a while (end of 2008).

MFA is a predatory strategy, it just takes without giving back.

Remember all those wikipedia clones with 6 adense ads per page? That's MFA, but there are lots of other examples.

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

#134

Post by richcollins » Sun, Feb 07, 2010, 10:14 PM UTC

il wrote: post #119

jacquesm wrote: post #79

Interesting, I've been doing just that for the last couple of years. It's been a mix of partial successes and total failures, mostly failures. I didn't want to go the 'mfa' route for obvious reasons, so I try to make these sites in to something that actually is useful, and that have a sense of community about them. Here is a breakdown of what you can make this way in a month based on adsense alone after several years…

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…

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

This sounds like it could be recipe for burnout and a waste of your life. Some businesses won't work no matter how hard you try. It seems like the best strategy would be one that is good at finding a reasonably scalable business model. If you don't find one after a few iterations, it might be a good idea to try something new.

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

#135

Post by jacquesm » Sun, Feb 07, 2010, 10:16 PM UTC

zaidf wrote: post #116

mattmaroon wrote: post #107

This article is silly, and just wrong in every way. It totally discounts time spent doing these projects, and totally fails to understand expected value. For instance: "I wrote a desktop software once, and priced it at $29.90. I sold one copy a month, which was terrible. That's $1 a day. It's really easy as a programmer to do something that makes $1 a day." I suppose if that desktop software took an hour to make it w…

Matt, a huge part that I think he has left out is the use of outsourcing stuff offshore. A lot of his projects seem to be content plays. You can get lots of content produced offshore for very cheap. The end result? You can have 5 people working full-time at $500/month each($2500/month), each producing content for 50 of your sites. Now you might wonder how one guy can write content for 50 sites. It's actually not that…

I'd still not give you odds on making more than $1 per 'project' per day though.

Factoring in all the costs you'd be very happy to be a bit above break even after a year with tons of 'content' ripped by mfa sites that don't do all the work and that don't invest the money. They'll be making your profit. And at $1 / day per project you're not going to spend any time suing the infringers either.

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

#136

Post by zaidf » Sun, Feb 07, 2010, 10:19 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #135

zaidf wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matt, a huge part that I think he has left out is the use of outsourcing stuff offshore. A lot of his projects seem to be content plays. You can get lots of content produced offshore for very cheap. The end result? You can have 5 people working full-time at $500/month each($2500/month), each producing content for 50 of your sites. Now you might wonder how one guy can write content for 50 sites. It's actually not that…

I'd still not give you odds on making more than $1 per 'project' per day though. Factoring in all the costs you'd be very happy to be a bit above break even after a year with tons of 'content' ripped by mfa sites that don't do all the work and that don't invest the money. They'll be making your profit. And at $1 / day per project you're not going to spend any time suing the infringers either.

It's totally doable IMO. A friend of mine who knows nothing more than how to setup a wordpress(answer: get her bf to do it) wrote 20 posts and forgot about the blog. She gets ~$50 check from google every month. She was laughing about it.

The life time value of her blog post is pretty cool!

I don't know if it scales(I'm presuming it does from posts like the OP). But hey I like the initial numbers.

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

#137

Post by jacquesm » Sun, Feb 07, 2010, 10:20 PM UTC

richcollins wrote: post #134

il wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Trust me, taking one project and not giving up until you MAKE IT WORK will be much more profitable in the long run. This sounds like it could be recipe for burnout and a waste of your life. Some businesses won't work no matter how hard you try. It seems like the best strategy would be one that is good at finding a reasonably scalable business model. If you don't find one after a few iterations, it might be a good ide…

That's absolutely true, which is why the 'throw it at a wall and see what sticks' method is really good to find out what works and what doesn't.

Making 400 sites that all work is undoable. But making say 10 sites that work and that all contribute a bit is definitely a workable scheme (see above), but it still won't make the kind of money that it potentially could because monetization is really hard.

Solve the monetization issues and the thing looks a whole lot better right away.

But reliable ad networks (both in not serving malware and in paying out on time (or at all)) are few and far between.

Sticking to one thing and doing it well has made me lots, trying the '400 different projects' (ok, a bit less, but still) worked to some extent but definitely not on the level that Max makes it seem should be trivial to achieve.

And that's with me being free to dedicate 100% of my time to this stuff.

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

#138

Post by zaidf » Sun, Feb 07, 2010, 10:20 PM UTC

mattmaroon wrote: post #131

zaidf wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matt, a huge part that I think he has left out is the use of outsourcing stuff offshore. A lot of his projects seem to be content plays. You can get lots of content produced offshore for very cheap. The end result? You can have 5 people working full-time at $500/month each($2500/month), each producing content for 50 of your sites. Now you might wonder how one guy can write content for 50 sites. It's actually not that…

Is he advocating splogging? I didn't gather that at all from his post, and if so that's on par with advocating spamming.

Depends what your definition of splogging is. I don't think its a black and white thing with lots of gray.

I don't think creating 500 blogs and getting UNIQUE content written for it is splogging.

I do think spamming other people's blogs in comments with your blog url is splogging.

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

#139

Post by jacquesm » Sun, Feb 07, 2010, 10:26 PM UTC

zaidf wrote: post #136

jacquesm wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd still not give you odds on making more than $1 per 'project' per day though. Factoring in all the costs you'd be very happy to be a bit above break even after a year with tons of 'content' ripped by mfa sites that don't do all the work and that don't invest the money. They'll be making your profit. And at $1 / day per project you're not going to spend any time suing the infringers either.

It's totally doable IMO. A friend of mine who knows nothing more than how to setup a wordpress(answer: get her bf to do it) wrote 20 posts and forgot about the blog. She gets ~$50 check from google every month. She was laughing about it. The life time value of her blog post is pretty cool! I don't know if it scales(I'm presuming it does from posts like the OP). But hey I like the initial numbers.

Cool!

But to prove it works you need to scale it, and that's where the hard part sits I think.

I fell for it in just that way.

This all started with http://www.clustercompute.com/

A small site about a project that I built years ago.

I rebuilt it using drupal, and the template had a nice spot for a google ad in it so I thought oh well, whatever, let's do that.

To my surprise it made some money! Hey I thought, that's easy, let's do that some more. And that's when I ran in to the statistics of the thing, when the numbers get larger the payout seems to drop considerably.

$50 per month is great as 'found' income, and as long as your site is small you'll be able to stay under the radar of the cloners, but as soon as you start getting significant traffic (as in show up on alexas 100,000 or so) then you're going to be cloned left right and center.

You'll be competing with your own content on 20 other sites.

Even on HN we get plenty of 'blogspam' submissions that are basically nothing but the original article quoted with a one line addition (if that).

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

#140

Post by dabeeeenster » Sun, Feb 07, 2010, 10:31 PM UTC

sabat wrote: post #128

dabeeeenster wrote: post #127

"The normals lack any of those attributes. They may be 50 years old, or have gone to community college, or may have learned programming on their own, or may come from Bulgaria or some other distant country." That is, frankly, racist.

Why is it racist?

Just because someone comes "from a distant country" doesn't mean you can make any sort of preconception about them...