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Ask HN: Fastest way to make $300-400 a month online?

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Re: Ask HN: Fastest way to make $300-400 a month online?

#51

Post by ambiate »

antidaily wrote: post #42
petercooper wrote: post #14

First, a Web service that "meets an unmet need." Back in 2005 I built a "code snippets" site using the then-nascent Rails in just over 24 hours. I then spent a second day making the design more "Web 2.0" a few months later, but otherwise did little except mention it here and there and add my own code into it. It made ~$800 a month from Adsense for a couple of years and then I sold it to DZone for $30,000. Perhaps the…

How many pages do you need for an e-book typically?

There really isn't a straight answer to this. I can tell you the typical is $0.25-$1.50/page rate for ebooks. I see some 100~ page ebooks from past affiliates that go for 50cents/page, but then some diet book sneaks in at $1.25/pg with 40 pages.

Its really not quantity! This is a market of quality. Just look through clickbank's affiliates for ideas for crap landing pages and crap ebooks (for the most part, spare maybe ~10).

Good sample pages, good outline, no boring plain black and white text, and connect with what your clients really need. Create a wiki/forum or something for registered users to access. The book isn't the only part... you want to build a community (elo adsense!)

Re: Ask HN: Fastest way to make $300-400 a month online?

#52

Post by al_ »

ambiate wrote: post #43

Oh, forgot the most important part. Stay white hat. If you ever venture into the dark side of online ads, you will probably get caught and have a wasted investment. Offline affiliate marketing is win-win, but in a cheap country it might be hard to pull off. I know there are some issues with getting accepted for adsense in other countries. If you have problems, email me (profile link) and I'll give you one of the solu…

Any concrete example of one of those adsense niche sites ? I have a hard time picturing what you're talking about.

Re: Ask HN: Fastest way to make $300-400 a month online?

#53

Post by jasonlbaptiste »

mikeyur wrote: post #32

I used to do a lot of offline marketing of online products and made some good money. What I mean by this is selling sites/hosting/newsletter hosting to small, local businesses. I did this when I was tight on cash, since it can usually be done in a weekend: research a local group of businesses (ie. dentists or furniture stores) using Google Maps and grab all of their info. See which businesses don't have websites - an…

I posted an article from SAI the other day. Only 25% of local businesses are advertising online. Mostly because it's complicated and scary as shit to them. Of those 25%, 60-80% churn. That's because the companies doing this are so bloated that they only spend 50-60% on the actual ad buy and the rest on admin expenses. So yeah, the performance sucks.

I also read 91% of local businesses are unhappy with their online marketing efforts (i NEED to find the link for this again). If 91% of a population is unhappy with something, you probably have an opportunity. Go fuck shit up. You can do it, and you'll make your money.

Re: Ask HN: Fastest way to make $300-400 a month online?

#54

Post by ambiate »

al_ wrote: post #52
ambiate wrote: post #43

Oh, forgot the most important part. Stay white hat. If you ever venture into the dark side of online ads, you will probably get caught and have a wasted investment. Offline affiliate marketing is win-win, but in a cheap country it might be hard to pull off. I know there are some issues with getting accepted for adsense in other countries. If you have problems, email me (profile link) and I'll give you one of the solu…

Any concrete example of one of those adsense niche sites ? I have a hard time picturing what you're talking about.

http://www.mesotheliomalawyerssandiego.org/

First result in google for some micro niche. Notice how the articles are over on the right, the page is filled with content relating to the keyword, and adsense is splattered everywhere.

It is a generic site, probably spun articles (used a program to rewrite someone else's articles), but its still in the top of the search engine.

Once I got into SEO, I realized that 90% of the sites I access from random google searches are just there to make adsense money. No upkeep is involved. None of the content is original.

I was searching for "Ford Escort ZX2 2002 install intake" and the first 3 links were all spun articles... BUT I actually found the information I needed in these spun articles. So, how evil is this? Iono.

Re: Ask HN: Fastest way to make $300-400 a month online?

#55

Post by needmoney »

switch wrote: post #44

how many hours a month are you willing to work for $300-$400 a month. Or do you want to do x amount of work and expect to get $400 a month for life?

I'm not expecting $400 for life, I'm more interested in trading time for money. How much time? Theoretically that should depend on how good I am.

Some of the opportunities people (such as patio11) have posted are what I'm interested in. I will be following up on some of those.

On the other hand, I also find some of the longer-term infrastructure-building advice (e.g. SEO, e-book stuff) useful, provided it's got a high probability of generating some cash within a month or two.

Re: Ask HN: Fastest way to make $300-400 a month online?

#56

Post by benatkin »

needmoney wrote: post #3
Concours wrote: post #2

try some freelance boards, like elance.com, create a blog(no fast money here) , try meacanical turk...what language do you programm? offer your services for free to build some referals, and set a portfolio with those referals.

Python, ruby, php, scheme, c, c++, java. Any ideas how quickly I could make the money off of something like elance (or how quickly you could, since we don't know our relative coding speeds)? Likewise for Mechanical Turk?

Here's an account of someone using the Mechanical Turk:

http://www.thesimpledollar.com/2009/07/05/can-you-actually-e...

If it's like it was back then, I think you might be able to make $400 on it in a month. Not the quickest or most fun way to do it, though. I like the eBook idea.

Re: Ask HN: Fastest way to make $300-400 a month online?

#57

Post by tome »

_bfhp wrote: post #46

You could try Amazon Turk as a side-job. In a few hours you could make 5 to 10 dollars or more.. It wouldn't serve as a main source of income, but at least you'll have money to spend on commodities that you won't have to take out of whatever actual main source you find. Tip: If you try this, when searching for HITs, only look for 5-cent HITS or above, and don't bother with $5 stuff, which no one ever gets.

Sorry, downvoted by accident.

Re: Ask HN: Fastest way to make $300-400 a month online?

#58

Post by kalid »

joshkaufman wrote: post #4

- Build a product worth $97 in value (I like teaching, so information products works best for me), then sell 3-4 a month. - Find other people who want to know what you know, then charge $97-497 a month to coach them. - Do NOT start a blog for advertising dollars or do mechanical turk - your ROI will be extremely low vs. the time and energy you spend. Instead, use a website to sell your products or services, whatever…

Agreed. Mechanical turk is a waste of time for someone tech-savvy enough to ask HN.

Re: Ask HN: Fastest way to make $300-400 a month online?

#59

Post by acgourley »

jasonlbaptiste wrote: post #53
mikeyur wrote: post #32

I used to do a lot of offline marketing of online products and made some good money. What I mean by this is selling sites/hosting/newsletter hosting to small, local businesses. I did this when I was tight on cash, since it can usually be done in a weekend: research a local group of businesses (ie. dentists or furniture stores) using Google Maps and grab all of their info. See which businesses don't have websites - an…

I posted an article from SAI the other day. Only 25% of local businesses are advertising online. Mostly because it's complicated and scary as shit to them. Of those 25%, 60-80% churn. That's because the companies doing this are so bloated that they only spend 50-60% on the actual ad buy and the rest on admin expenses. So yeah, the performance sucks. I also read 91% of local businesses are unhappy with their online ma…

From time to time I see this as a real market need and wonder how to generalize and scale such a service oriented business. Seems like you could throw a lot of tech at it but still need a lot of feet on the ground at the end of the day.
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