What I got out of the post was what happens to a person who spends a decade trying to make money instead of building value.
I'm not trying to make a judgment call but the emptiness of it almost hurt to read.
Make Money Online: Documenting 10 Years of Failure
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Re: Make Money Online: Documenting 10 Years of Failure
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
I felt like if he stuck with this original tech review site, his income would have grown more steadily, and while he may have missed out on some "rich" years, the overall results would be a website/company with value.
Absolutely, might be running a whole network of blogs by now.
Looking back now I think I would try to not make money via ads on my blogs and instead create some info product that I could have sold to that audience. A complement to the information that they were already coming to the site to get.
Re: Make Money Online: Documenting 10 Years of Failure
#33I visit forums like Wickedfire from time-to-time. Most of the people there want short-term riches with little to no effort. In fact, the business I started 4 years ago, which is still profitable today, came from an idea I saw in Wickedfire. Only, all of the people in the forum that tried it got banned because they wanted to do it the scammy way..and I built it like a real business and gave people real value (and stil…
Author was also a young 20-something, hardly the age in which we all make the best decisions.
Re: Make Money Online: Documenting 10 Years of Failure
#34Like many, I was tempted into these same areas - driven by success stories and my own technical knowledge which fooled me into thinking it would be "easy". What I found is there's lot of money to be made in... telling people how to make money! Those guys like Shoemaker who have an almost cult following end up making an empire on those in the "pyramid" below them. Not to say this is shady, just that the real "riches"…
This always disturbs me that only a handful people make it big such as Shoemaker while the rest of the population sample barely make ends meet.
I don't know if this has anything to do with some obscure physical law like these phenomenons that best described by a normal/Gaussian distribution or just explained by the probability theory (read: sheer luck) and the success ratio of this magnitude in these "games" or life in general is very slim and thus people should not get that excited to imitate them or feel down and dejected if they don't.
Certainly, wealth and power distribution on Earth is one of these life mysteries that kept and will keep puzzling humans for a long time to come.
Re: Make Money Online: Documenting 10 Years of Failure
#35Like many, I was tempted into these same areas - driven by success stories and my own technical knowledge which fooled me into thinking it would be "easy". What I found is there's lot of money to be made in... telling people how to make money! Those guys like Shoemaker who have an almost cult following end up making an empire on those in the "pyramid" below them. Not to say this is shady, just that the real "riches"…
To be honest, HN is full of this stuff too
- Double your freelancing
- Guys who create a not-very-well-known startup and then start pushing guides on how to be successful
- Email marketing, write 3 tutorials on topic X to build your list and then spam your ebook.
Don't get me wrong, things are better targeted and less shady. It just feels like people spend more time selling their systems than they do using them. It looks like 'snake oil'.
Re: Make Money Online: Documenting 10 Years of Failure
#36The general online audience has matured over the past 10 years, and most people have an excellent filter to avoid clicking ads, which includes affiliate links. You can still monetize a site these days, and make some money while not being sketchy, but it requires approaching it as a service to your users, not as an exploit of your users. What I mean by this is that whatever your site is, if your audience has a legit i…
>I'm somewhat surprised that anyone would have spent 10 years flailing in this arena and not learned that. "I’ve always had some type of entrepreneur trapped inside me. [...] I decided I’ll start a blog and make money via AdSense ads." This is not the thought process of someone with the competence to know how to learn effectively. It sounds like someone who just wants to be a cog in a money wheel, both learning as li…
Yep. This guy takes "get rich quick" to the next level.
In that same time period he could have founded real startups with real products. Instead, he got 10 years of putting his blood, sweat, and tears into bullshit money making schemes.
Re: Make Money Online: Documenting 10 Years of Failure
#37Frankly, this stuff was really shady and sketchtastic. I guess I suggest finding a pastor-type and talking about right behaviors.
How come you never tried to make something people wanted?
Re: Make Money Online: Documenting 10 Years of Failure
#38I like the end. Create a product that people want. I feel the same way. I've hit the SEO lottery before, earning $20-100k/month, and it didn't last long enough. Being an affiliate site is a hard gig and I have a lot of respect for people who can keep it up year after year.
Re: Make Money Online: Documenting 10 Years of Failure
#39I'm not sure I'd regard making 100's of thousands of dollars complete failure. Now, it's obvious that he made money in ways that aren't overly useful to society, and promoted products that were less than stellar in spammy ways, but just having the goal of "Making Money Online" I'd consider that money to be pretty dang successful.
The fact that he blew it all after the fact just makes him bad with money. It doesn't mean that the attempts to make money online were failures, just that his personal finances were.
P.S. Not in any way condoning the things he did, and you can definitely argue it's a failure in that it didn't build a sustainable business. I don't feel like I'd call it complete failure though. Lots of people try to do the same thing and make dozens of dollars :-)
Re: Make Money Online: Documenting 10 Years of Failure
#40I visit forums like Wickedfire from time-to-time. Most of the people there want short-term riches with little to no effort. In fact, the business I started 4 years ago, which is still profitable today, came from an idea I saw in Wickedfire. Only, all of the people in the forum that tried it got banned because they wanted to do it the scammy way..and I built it like a real business and gave people real value (and stil…
To be fair I did point out that blowing the money was an obvious mistake on my part. Those numbers don't include expenses either. Actually most of the money was lost to testing new ideas.
I found it odd that even after some success, you had to borrow money and look for credit limit increases. Or did you have the money and it was just that CC was the method of payment?