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It’s OK to make an extra $2k per month if you’re a programmer. Here’s how.

markmaunder.com

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Re: It’s OK to make an extra $2k per month if you’re a programmer. Here’s how.

#131

Post by lurker19 »

swombat wrote: post #13

So, basically, create a demand-media site but without even paying writers the $3/hour to create crap articles? Just scrape them from the government? :-) I'm all for the lifestyle business thing, but there are more fulfilling ways to make $2k/month, imho... As the cost of creating businesses drops, the number of viable niches literally explodes.

The article does recommend buying freelance writing for $10 per page, which is more than $3/hr for the low-complexity writing presumably required. For example, he kind of writing on DMV.org, that just puts some chatty flow between steps in a workflow and around the data.

Re: It’s OK to make an extra $2k per month if you’re a programmer. Here’s how.

#132

Post by chopsueyar »

barisme wrote: post #102
chopsueyar wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you find clients willing to pay $100/hr for sidework?

I demo'd some apps I made at a local group and before I knew it they were beating the doors down. Job offers too, but I turn those down.

Are you in a metropolitan area?

Care to describe what type of apps you demo'ed? Language(s) used?

Re: It’s OK to make an extra $2k per month if you’re a programmer. Here’s how.

#133

Post by getsat »

jshen wrote: post #95
getsat wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've done no link building You have 1,211 backlinks. You have no meta descriptions on any of your pages. The links to your content pages (e.g., http://yakkstr.com/posts/3635-Cute-Friday ) aren't inside a H1/H2 tag on your index pages. You are letting Google crawl/index your tag pages (pointless/bad). Your robots.txt isn't pointing to a sitemap. Are you using Google webmaster tools? Get rid of the /posts/N-title and…

Most of those back links are from ubuntu forums, my profile, which seems to show up on a ton of pages. They are nofollow. I think I have 2 back links that are follow, both on friends blogroll, which I believe google discounts. How much of a difference do you think those changes will make? I'm willing to do them as an experiment, except for the /title because that has caused me a lot of problems in past experiences.

It's difficult to say exactly since SEO isn't really an exact science. Some of them will definitely be an improvement. For example, it's not really valuable for someone to land on one of your tag pages.

Putting all your links to your content pages inside H2 tags tells search engines that they're more important that other links on the page.

The /title one is big. Google likes short URLs without a lot of extra cruft. You're using rails from what I can see, so the change is trivial. :) Add a route, throw an index on your slug field, and have requests to the old URLs do a 301 redirect to the short version.

Page load time is also a SEO factor now. http://yakkstr.com/tags/7-Politics takes 4.25s to load according to your X-Runtime header. That's really bad. You're not paginating, and you're only loading a few entries, so I think you're missing an index. :) Here's some tips: http://madhatted.com/2009/8/12/faster-sites-done-faster

Check this out: http://www.google.com/search?q=site:yakkstr.com Lots of empty/valueless results. Maybe you can noindex blogs that have no posts in them so they don't pollute the search results?

Your slug generator is generating bad slugs: http://yakkstr.com/posts/1793-Climate-Change--- You should look at using String#to_url from https://github.com/rubypanther/stringex instead of whatever you're using currently.

Google text ads may convert better than the image-based ads since they're usually more relevant to the topic at hand. Try experimenting with them.

Re: It’s OK to make an extra $2k per month if you’re a programmer. Here’s how.

#134

Post by jeffreyrusso »

This kind of idea might be new to a lot of HN readers, but it's a tired old game that doesn't work all that well anymore. Working with the limited data that Google provides on keywords/search volume/CPCs, you'll be crowded into the same niches that are already hyper competitive with hundreds of other people playing the same game.

Also, this is advocating the creation of classic webspam. Creating thousands of autogenerated pages using data thats already publicly available doesn't "help" anyone.

Puzzles me when I think back to the righteous outcries on HN a couple of months ago about the declining quality of Google's search results.

Re: It’s OK to make an extra $2k per month if you’re a programmer. Here’s how.

#136

Post by jshen »

getsat wrote: post #133
jshen wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of those back links are from ubuntu forums, my profile, which seems to show up on a ton of pages. They are nofollow. I think I have 2 back links that are follow, both on friends blogroll, which I believe google discounts. How much of a difference do you think those changes will make? I'm willing to do them as an experiment, except for the /title because that has caused me a lot of problems in past experiences.

It's difficult to say exactly since SEO isn't really an exact science. Some of them will definitely be an improvement. For example, it's not really valuable for someone to land on one of your tag pages. Putting all your links to your content pages inside H2 tags tells search engines that they're more important that other links on the page. The /title one is big. Google likes short URLs without a lot of extra cruft. Y…

You didn't really answer the question. I can do all of that work, how much do you think it will increase organic google traffic? 10%? 20%?

This is an experiment I'm trying to do ;) My hypothesis is that these things won't make a significant difference.

Re: It’s OK to make an extra $2k per month if you’re a programmer. Here’s how.

#137

Post by dpcan »

jeffreyrusso wrote: post #134

This kind of idea might be new to a lot of HN readers, but it's a tired old game that doesn't work all that well anymore. Working with the limited data that Google provides on keywords/search volume/CPCs, you'll be crowded into the same niches that are already hyper competitive with hundreds of other people playing the same game. Also, this is advocating the creation of classic webspam. Creating thousands of autogene…

I agree and disagree.

There is a lot of information out there that is terribly hard for your common searcher to find still, and if that information can be extracted from government data farms and displayed and organized in such a way that it is easy to read and navigate, this could be a really great thing.

That being said, this article does come across as: Here's how to create some Google spam for profit.

Re: It’s OK to make an extra $2k per month if you’re a programmer. Here’s how.

#138

Post by slouch »

bobbywilson0 wrote: post #46

This to me is classic linkbait, how it is on the front page is beyond me. The "made for google adwords" sites are the bottom of the barrel when it comes to online income. I am surprised this guy doesn't have a bunch of ads on his blog so he can make $2,000 a month telling other people how to make $2,000 a month.

There is much less work involved in maintenance if you setup sites in a way such that users create the content

Re: It’s OK to make an extra $2k per month if you’re a programmer. Here’s how.

#139

Post by aterimperator »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #86
ck2 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, the amount of paperwork and hassle to apply for foodstamps is crazy. It can be embarrassing because you have to provide so many details about your life and give them legal permission to dig into all kinds of records. I realize the need to prevent fraud but there has to be some kind of balance to allowing someone in a bad situation to keep a little dignity. Then there is the craziness that you can buy things…

I realize the need to prevent fraud but there has to be some kind of balance to allowing someone in a bad situation to keep a little dignity. On the contrary, that would be counterproductive. At low levels of income, there is virtually no relationship between earnings and consumption. So if a person's utility function is proportional to consumption, with a slight disutility for working, they will choose not to work.…

That link makes the unfounded assumption that the poor choose to be poor. If you assume that the poor choose to be poor, then it is easy to see that there are situations in which it's rational to choose to try to live off welfare. From that perspective it makes perfect sense to want to make the lives of poor people even more miserable so they'll choose to stop being so poor...

Also, don't forget that Clinton ended welfare as we know it, resulting in fixed periods of welfare anyway. It also resulted in some evils, like single mothers working 6 hours a day (with their kids in a daycare) making less money and spending less time raising their children.

I think the final line (heavily edited) "it is rational not to work as long as work opportunities pay less than $30k/year" is what we should focus on: let's try to make their work opportunities better through extra services (maybe mandatory without a waiver of disability or insanity) that give training and education.

Re: It’s OK to make an extra $2k per month if you’re a programmer. Here’s how.

#140

Post by slouch »

jshen wrote: post #136
getsat wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's difficult to say exactly since SEO isn't really an exact science. Some of them will definitely be an improvement. For example, it's not really valuable for someone to land on one of your tag pages. Putting all your links to your content pages inside H2 tags tells search engines that they're more important that other links on the page. The /title one is big. Google likes short URLs without a lot of extra cruft. Y…

You didn't really answer the question. I can do all of that work, how much do you think it will increase organic google traffic? 10%? 20%? This is an experiment I'm trying to do ;) My hypothesis is that these things won't make a significant difference.

Your question wasn't very good. The changes suggested need to be made one time in order to affect your site's traffic many times. The changes might make the site more attractive in search results based on improved snippets. The H tags change could help google better understand the content and rank it for more appropriate searches. If you want hard numbers, it might take years of data collection and analysis to find them. If the end result is 10%, how do you know it wasn't because your users started writing more popular content 4 months after you made the changes?
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