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

news.ycombinator.com

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

#91

Post by xiaoma »

patio11 wrote: post #23

If I said "I want the Wordpress theme from http://www.christmasbingocards.com done similarly except for St. Patrick's Day" and you were able to accomplish that without needing too much handholding, I'd be able to give you one project a month for $400 until you either got sick of doing them or decided to move upmarket. If this interests you, email me a link to your portfolio.

Like the OP, I'm also interested in building up a modest income with a side project. I have a question about it that you seem particularly likely to be able to answer:

How do you go about setting up an LLC from abroad (like you in Japan), and was it the sort of thing that could be done on a shoestring budget?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1161997

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

#92

Post by brianbreslin »

maneesh wrote: post #37

I earned about that much, completely passive, within 2 mos and it's been recurring with no extra work, doing some basic SEO and adsense work, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1merER1zVFg , skip to minute 2:40 to see my business model in work

maneesh! glad to see you're still wandering the world. we met in BsAs in dec 08. Do you know if there are wireless usb cards that work in multiple countries?

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

#93

Post by patio11 »

xiaoma wrote: post #91
patio11 wrote: post #23

If I said "I want the Wordpress theme from http://www.christmasbingocards.com done similarly except for St. Patrick's Day" and you were able to accomplish that without needing too much handholding, I'd be able to give you one project a month for $400 until you either got sick of doing them or decided to move upmarket. If this interests you, email me a link to your portfolio.

Like the OP, I'm also interested in building up a modest income with a side project. I have a question about it that you seem particularly likely to be able to answer: How do you go about setting up an LLC from abroad (like you in Japan), and was it the sort of thing that could be done on a shoestring budget? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1161997

Oh, I think you emailed me about this. Sorry -- I starred it but I've been very busy this week.

Short version: You can get an American LLC created while living on the far side of the moon for a few hundred bucks, but I'd suggest waiting until you have a compelling reason to create one. I have not yet had a compelling reason. That might change in the upcoming year, but for the last 3.5 years, I've used the US'/Japan's most common business structure: sole proprietorship.

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

#94

Post by needmoney »

patio11 wrote: post #23

If I said "I want the Wordpress theme from http://www.christmasbingocards.com done similarly except for St. Patrick's Day" and you were able to accomplish that without needing too much handholding, I'd be able to give you one project a month for $400 until you either got sick of doing them or decided to move upmarket. If this interests you, email me a link to your portfolio.

Hi Patrick, I've emailed you.

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

#95

Post by Kaizyn »

I was going to suggest Amazon's Mechanical Turk, but several others already did so. While this would take you some startup time and money, you could go the ebook sales route as suggested here:

http://www.cringely.com/2009/03/parrot-secrets/

I wish you the best of luck with trying to find a way to make a decent living.

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

#96

Post by bryanh »

chett wrote: post #79
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…

"Second, sell a killer screencast or e-book" Thanks for providing a spark of inpiration here! When I was in college I earned extra money teaching private guitar lessons. When I finally moved on a student of mine was kind enough to photo copy and hand me to a transcription of every_single_lesson I'd given them over three years. This stack of paper has been sitting on my shelf for nostalgic purposes only ... until now.

I run a simple little site that works as the middleman between PayPal "Buy It Now" buttons and shooting off an email with an expiring download link from a secure server. I'd be happy to give you a couple months free to dabble in ebooks!

Hit me up at contact[@]bitbuffet[.]com if you wanna give it a spin!

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

#97

Post by nfriedly »

eam wrote: post #45
needmoney wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Don't use elance, you have to pay to bid and usually you never get hire for a gig. Instead you might want to try oDesk, I go on there when I have nothing to do and I usually get gigs within hours.

Elance is free for the basic level these days. I think you get to bid on 3 jobs per month for free, after that you have to pay (weather your bids are accepted or not).

Where you really pay is that elance takes something like 5-10% of whatever you earn for the job.

That said, I created an account and scored relatively highly on a few of the tests a while back. I've gotten invited to submit proposals for jobs on a regular basis ever since. (For example, I received 7 invitations last month.)

I usually turn down the invitations, as I have plenty of work, but one of my favorite clients found me through elance.

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

#99

Post by Judson »

mpakes wrote: post #85
Judson wrote: post #64

Creating something that is viral is very ideal. I created http://AskJud.com in a week or so and the viral nature and mystery behind it encourages people to click on ads that generate around $500-$1000 a month.

Can you explain how this web-ified Magic 8 Ball is viral? I'm surprised not to see any Twitter / Facebook / Digg links anywhere.. Also, is this $500-1000 / mo sustained over a long period of time, or is it more like the flash-in-the-pan Facebook apps that briefly go viral, peak, and then collapse after a few weeks?

- 100k Uniques/mo sustained over 3 years.

- There is a "Share This" button at the bottom

- Things were viral before Twitter / FB / Digg - I believe its called "word of mouth".

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

#100

Post by roundsquare »

csomar wrote: post #38
ique wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you make money by writing articles, and what kind of articles? Are you talking tutorials on some tutorial site that buys them or are you writing journalistic reports for blogs/news industry? Or something else entirely?

Anything i can write about. I find jobs on forums, problogger, blogs that accept guest posts... Nettuts pays $150 if it's good enough

Do you know other good places to sell articles? Every now and then I come up with what I think is a nice easy to understand explanation of something and I'd love to write it up and sell it. Wouldn't need to be for a lot of money, but if I could make a decent amount to cover some expenses it would be nice.

Usually the topic are in math, statistics or philosophy. Nothing a professional (or smart undergrad) on these topics wouldn't already get, but something for other interested people.

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