Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website
1–10 of 109 posts
Re: Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website
#2I'd welcome any suggestions on where to go next - it's a bit of a fire-and-forget side project, but I'd still like to get it as good as possible before I leave it to stew for 2013.
Re: Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website
#3I'd welcome any suggestions on where to go next - it's a bit of a fire-and-forget side project, but I'd still like to get it as good as possible before I leave it to stew for 2013.
I'd load it up with all the "semantic web" style things I could find. http://schema.org type of stuff.
You could also see if it would be good as a source for citations in the relevant wikipedia articles, but that's a whole project in itself probably.
Re: Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website
#4I'd welcome any suggestions on where to go next - it's a bit of a fire-and-forget side project, but I'd still like to get it as good as possible before I leave it to stew for 2013.
I'd load it up with all the "semantic web" style things I could find. http://schema.org type of stuff. You could also see if it would be good as a source for citations in the relevant wikipedia articles, but that's a whole project in itself probably.
I had a look at the Schema stuff - I actually use it on another site of mine ( http://thebigeat.com ) for listings of takeaways, but it has made no difference SEO-wise and it tends to make my markup look like shit. But nevermind A/B testing, I am doing A-Z testing here - throw everything and see what sticks.
I'm hesitant to go adding my site as a citation - it's a good idea but it just seems a bit black-hat for me. Hopefully it's something that might happen organically though.
Re: Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website
#5Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd load it up with all the "semantic web" style things I could find. http://schema.org type of stuff. You could also see if it would be good as a source for citations in the relevant wikipedia articles, but that's a whole project in itself probably.
I had a look at the Schema stuff - I actually use it on another site of mine ( http://thebigeat.com ) for listings of takeaways, but it has made no difference SEO-wise and it tends to make my markup look like shit. But nevermind A/B testing, I am doing A-Z testing here - throw everything and see what sticks. I'm hesitant to go adding my site as a citation - it's a good idea but it just seems a bit black-hat for me. H…
Marching in and adding links to your site to WP is certainly a bad idea, as well as being plain ethically wrong. I was thinking more of turning up to the talk page for the car article and just offering them the content, but even that probably contravenes wiki-core directive #5749327.
I mentioned it because your site seems like a genuinely good source that WP would be happy to use, making it a win-win. Don't try and use wikipedia for pagerank boys and girls.
Re: Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website
#6Questions:
Why are there comments on the page?
How difficult would it be to compile it into an ebook and make it available on kindle/itunes/wherever else? Seems like you'd only need to make a couple of sales for it to compete with the adsense income. Maybe have it so if the visitor has read 3 or more consecutive pages it shows up with an ebook splash page, "advert free and easy to read blah blah blah"
Re: Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website
#7Looks like your site is already number 3 on my google search for "how a car works".
The homepage is a bit boring. You have a lot of pretty pictures, you should some how use them on your homepage. Perhaps include a relevant picture with every chapter heading.
And for good measure, include all the social share buttons junk. Google+, FB, Twitter, etc... Especially for if you get popular on HN. You'll want those sharing karmas...
I would also drop another adsense text box into the side nav. Perhaps remove the one at the bottom of the page.
Re: Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website
#8I've always wanted to see the entire library of haynes manuals put online or even in an ipad/iphone app. This looks a bit like a proof of concept to it. Perhaps the OP could approach Haynes pitching the idea and showing this as an example?
Re: Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website
#9I've always wanted to see the entire library of haynes manuals put online or even in an ipad/iphone app. This looks a bit like a proof of concept to it. Perhaps the OP could approach Haynes pitching the idea and showing this as an example?
>approach Haynes pitching the idea and showing this as an example?
This is the correct answer. At least try and get a friend to do it, and take a cut.
The idea of being able to flick through all the haynes manuals on an ipad is brilliant. And I don't even like cars.
Re: Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website
#10Just a thought: I might consider a different monetization strategy than AdSense. The ads really look awful and make the site seem significantly less 'quality' than it actually is.
I might experiment with some sort of freemium model; maybe for free you could get the first half of sections for every chapter and then you can pay ~$5 to get access to everything.
Or, as someone above mentioned, compile it into an ebook and have that advertised on the site for ~$10, but make the entire website free.