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Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website

howacarworks.com

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Re: Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website

#31

Post by AlexMuir »

vinhboy wrote: post #7

Looks 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…

You're right about the pictures for sure, I need to add a few random pics and thumbnails for chapter headings. I focussed on SEO for starters and Googlebot doesn't see pictures, but now that I have people I need to think about actual aesthetics.

Re: Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website

#32

Post by rmc »

JonnieCache wrote: post #29
sixQuarks wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any evidence that this actually affects SEO or rankings?

Wikipedia is a perfect storm of pagerank so unless google have specifically made an exception for it, links from there must be pretty valuable. IANASEO.

For exactly this reason Wikipedia adds "nofollow" attributes to all external links on Wikipedia. You will get no SEO / page rank link juice from adding links to Wikipedia. You will probably get organic traffic though.

Re: Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website

#33

Post by jmatthew3 »

AlexMuir wrote: post #2

I'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 run a similar site on a different niche, which I have monetized to good effect.

1) get a few links. google will likely send you more traffic if they see others linking to you.

2) ask people to link to you on the site.

3) add some social buttons ("share this on facebook" and "+1 this"). Also, try to get it on pinterest. You might create a "5 car tips" image that could get shared as an image on pinterest, generating traffic and likely getting some blog links.

4) split test your adsense. use all three units, plus link units. then split test which ads work better when placed where. Think long term. 10% better RPM will add up. You probably want to add a skyscraper.

5) add links to amazon (through their affiliate program) where useful. need a tool for that? buy one here. I like to link to searches for products, rather than actual products. That way, the user sees all the available products rather than just the one you selected, and if that particular product goes away (which it might, because in a niche, you are probably linking to products sold through amazon by others - and they can change often - or be out of stock).

6) add content occasionally. google likes "fresh" content. changing things around, adding new articles, etc. will help you over the long term.

7) tailor your html titles to describe the content, and don't have "how a car works" in every page. It makes sense, but you really want to tell google what's there, and adding the site-wide keywords might dilute the message.

Re: Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website

#34

Post by AlexMuir »

hnriot wrote: post #11

And no mention of using Twitter Bootstrap? I like how the site looks/works, you did an awesome job, but some credit in the "how I ..." should go to the Bootstrap team.

You're right - and also credit should go to the excellent http://bootswatch.com/ which is where I got the themed Bootstrap from. I'm a lover of Bootstrap but I hope it doesn't define the site.

Re: Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website

#35

Post by Chico75 »

JonnieCache wrote: post #29
sixQuarks wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any evidence that this actually affects SEO or rankings?

Wikipedia is a perfect storm of pagerank so unless google have specifically made an exception for it, links from there must be pretty valuable. IANASEO.

All externals links on wikipedia use the no-follow tag to prevent that type of spamming (http://www.searchenginejournal.com/all-wikipedia-links-are-n...)

Re: Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website

#36

Post by AlexMuir »

darkxanthos wrote: post #19

The obvious next step to me would be for you to repeat this process with another out of print book now that you've established a market and proven its viability. Offer the copyright holder some share of the profit and scale like mad. Great stuff!

That was my initial thought but I have to see how the revenue scales. At the moment it's only profitable because my labour has had zero cost.

It might scale quite nicely though - I think finding the right material is probably key.

Re: Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website

#37

Post by AlexMuir »

aw3c2 wrote: post #20

what did/do you count as your expenses? surely you do not pay 60$/month for hosting. did you add the work you had to do?

Hosting is on a $20/month Linode along with a bunch of other projects/sites/bits of code fluff. The actual bandwidth used by this site will be virtually nothing I imagine. I haven't valued my time at all. In that respect it is already earning me around $40 a month - a meal out.

Re: Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website

#38

Post by OkGoDoIt »

This is nifty, and I feel like this could be pushed a lot further. Epub output is an obvious next step, and I'd imagine a better table of contents view would make the web version more inviting. As for generating money, maybe hotlink products to an Amazon/etc affiliate link so when a user reads the page about "Replacing engine mountings", you can suggest sites that sell engine mountings.

I'm curious about the intermediate "Horrible HTML" stage. Did it retain the book layout at the stage? The scanned book images look much more appealing than the blog-style version (in my opinion). Even though the HTML was horrible, did it still display properly in a modern browser? I wonder if you could write a script to clean up and modernize the HTML while still retaining the nice layout, rather than reformatting into a blog and dumping images to the sidebar.

It would be interesting to see how much the process can be streamlined so you can convert books en masse. I assume there are plenty of books of this style with really good content that would be useful to convert in this manner.

Re: Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website

#40

Post by jmatthew3 »

jmatthew3 wrote: post #33
AlexMuir wrote: post #2

I'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 run a similar site on a different niche, which I have monetized to good effect. 1) get a few links. google will likely send you more traffic if they see others linking to you. 2) ask people to link to you on the site. 3) add some social buttons ("share this on facebook" and "+1 this"). Also, try to get it on pinterest. You might create a "5 car tips" image that could get shared as an image on pinterest, generating…

Just to add - split testing your adsense can really be a big deal. For something this small, you probably don't need to split test the colors. But, the ad placement (and which ad units to use) can make a HUGE difference. I like to select a few different formats, make adsense "channels" and then weighted-randomly select one of my splits. In other words, keep testing, but display the combination of ad units that works the best, more often. Start off at even, then revisit things 6 months from now, tweak, revisit in another 6 months.
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