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Make Money Online: Documenting 10 Years of Failure

johnathanward.com

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Re: Make Money Online: Documenting 10 Years of Failure

#101

Post by johnward »

x0x0 wrote: post #90
johnward wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With some startups it's hard to distinguish between the two to be honest. I almost feel like the way the media covers startups they are a "get rich quick scheme". What percentage have a successful exit? I don't know. I did hit the startup lottery once as a late hire and got about $8k from the acquisition. However, I do agree I would have better spent those years thinking about how I could solve people's problems inst…

Not all non-get rich quick schemes are startups. I think what people here are saying is that given the obvious level of effort you (I assume you're the author) put into this, you could have put serious dents in a few patio11/rob walling style saas or other small product businesses. I understand there's money to be made chasing various arbitrages in online advertising, but those get plugged over time. Plus a product b…

Maybe you're right. I really don't think I have the skills pull off something like that.

Re: Make Money Online: Documenting 10 Years of Failure

#102

Post by AznHisoka »

softdev12 wrote: post #30

I enjoyed reading this because it's not something you usually see publicized. And as a single data point leads me to believe that there are some people really doing well with these sort of tactics - just not talking about. It's like the blackjack card counters in 1980's and 90's. They were successfully employing a system to pull money from casinos - but weren't talking about it. It was only when the MIT Team started…

Oh man, I first learned about affiliate marketing at around 2005, but started seriously doing it in 2006. I made close to $50,000 a month for a good 2.5 years promoting various colon cleansing products. I considered myself lucky because this was actually the first product I chose to promote, and colon cleansing just was about to become "hot". I found out that ranking for terms like "X review" or "X coupon codes" were the money keywords.

In 2008, I then decided to create a coupon site (think RetailMeNot) and scale this thing, and promote all sorts of products by ranking for coupon keywords. I quit my job, but couldn't reproduce that success so turned it into a content farm.

In 2011-2012, I decided to create an online gamification calorie counter, thinking stupidly some big player would acquire it. After a year of muddling success, I just turned it into a glamarous, well designed affiliate site :(... which ironically turned the site into a profitable venture.

Now I'm building a very successful, profitable product in the SEO/content marketing industry. So in a way I'm building the shovel for the gold industry instead of digging for gold like I used to :)

Re: Make Money Online: Documenting 10 Years of Failure

#103

Post by smacktoward »

FilterJoe wrote: post #70
codingdave wrote: post #2

The 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 one of those people who has approached content creation strictly "as a service to your users, not as an exploit of your users." All of my blog posts are very carefully researched, in-depth guides, sometimes literally taking over 100 hours of research and writing for a single post. I made very little money for years and had just about given up until Panda 4.1 and Penguin 3.0. Since then, when I write well, Google…

I've had the opposite experience with my blog; as I've increased the amount of original research and writing in my posts, I've seen traffic steadily decline over roughly the same period.

The conventional wisdom with blogs has always been that the way to success is more frequent short posts rather than less frequent long ones, and that still seems to be the case. I don't really care much, since I don't run ads and my goal for my blog has never been to capture a large audience anyway, but more readers would always feel better than less.

Re: Make Money Online: Documenting 10 Years of Failure

#104

Post by smacktoward »

mootothemax wrote: post #42
hackerboos wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

To be honest, HN is full of this stuff too Agreed, and some of it (as you mention) is quite ingeniously marketed as well, e.g. pushing a load of free content that occasionally suggests using a certain SaaS app as part of the success strategy. It just feels like people spend more time selling their systems than they do using them. It looks like 'snake oil'. I'm not sure that it's always snake oil exactly, more that it…

There will always be a market for selling people messages that they desperately want to hear.

Re: Make Money Online: Documenting 10 Years of Failure

#105

Post by smacktoward »

clarky07 wrote: post #39

I'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 me…

Over ten years, though? If you made $100,000 over ten years that's only $10K a year. That's not even enough to get you over the U.S. poverty line (https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/federal-poverty-level-FP...).

Re: Make Money Online: Documenting 10 Years of Failure

#106

Post by x0x0 »

johnward wrote: post #101
x0x0 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all non-get rich quick schemes are startups. I think what people here are saying is that given the obvious level of effort you (I assume you're the author) put into this, you could have put serious dents in a few patio11/rob walling style saas or other small product businesses. I understand there's money to be made chasing various arbitrages in online advertising, but those get plugged over time. Plus a product b…

Maybe you're right. I really don't think I have the skills pull off something like that.

Walling's book start small, stay small may help you get started. Amy Hoy talks about this a bunch; she runs a paid course but also has a ton of free content. You should check them out.

I've also read about people making serious money from advertising; it seems like the time investment to understand all that stuff is big enough that it could help you understand a small business instead.

Re: Make Money Online: Documenting 10 Years of Failure

#107

Post by nbouscal »

smacktoward wrote: post #105
clarky07 wrote: post #39

I'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 me…

Over ten years, though? If you made $100,000 over ten years that's only $10K a year. That's not even enough to get you over the U.S. poverty line ( https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/federal-poverty-level-FP... ).

Did you read the article? He made $90,000 in one month, and almost $10,000 per month for most months after that.

Re: Make Money Online: Documenting 10 Years of Failure

#108

Post by coliveira »

You have to see it this way: making money with ads has to be hard, because there is very little benefit for any person who clicks on ads, while at the same time there is a very low barrier to entry. So contrary to what the make-money-quick salesmen want you to believe, you have to work a lot to maintain this type of income.

Things get a little better if you sell an ebook, for example, although most money spent on ebooks is money lost. Progressing on the benefit curve you will see that things get very different when you create new technology (think of Apple or IBM) or invest your capital in something that people need to survive (food, oil, housing, etc). My philosophy is that you should work on anything that you like, but the money you make you should invest on things that have real value.

Re: Make Money Online: Documenting 10 Years of Failure

#109

Post by mgkimsal »

coliveira wrote: post #108

You have to see it this way: making money with ads has to be hard, because there is very little benefit for any person who clicks on ads, while at the same time there is a very low barrier to entry. So contrary to what the make-money-quick salesmen want you to believe, you have to work a lot to maintain this type of income. Things get a little better if you sell an ebook, for example, although most money spent on ebo…

".... you have to work a lot to maintain this type of income."

If you love what you do, it's not work...

Re: Make Money Online: Documenting 10 Years of Failure

#110

Post by FilterJoe »

smacktoward wrote: post #103
FilterJoe wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm one of those people who has approached content creation strictly "as a service to your users, not as an exploit of your users." All of my blog posts are very carefully researched, in-depth guides, sometimes literally taking over 100 hours of research and writing for a single post. I made very little money for years and had just about given up until Panda 4.1 and Penguin 3.0. Since then, when I write well, Google…

I've had the opposite experience with my blog; as I've increased the amount of original research and writing in my posts, I've seen traffic steadily decline over roughly the same period. The conventional wisdom with blogs has always been that the way to success is more frequent short posts rather than less frequent long ones, and that still seems to be the case. I don't really care much, since I don't run ads and my…

Out of curiosity I poked around on your site and did some test searches using words similar but not identical to some of your titles. I did this just on articles I thought people might actually be looking for and that are over 1500 words. For example:

heartbleed bug what you need to know

Your post (http://jasonlefkowitz.net/2014/04/the-heartbleed-bug-what-no...) was buried. I gave up looking for it after the first 6 pages of google results.

I'm not sure why you're ranking so badly for this article. The only idea I have off the top of my head is that you have a very wide variety of content. Google tends to prefer sites focused on one topic, or perhaps just a few.

I never wrote about youth baseball on my blog until last year. The first 2 articles I wrote got virtually no traffic from Google for 8 months. A couple months ago I started writing more in depth articles about baseball. I'm now getting a significant amount of Google traffic for those same two articles - one of them is over 10 visits a day. That's still pretty small compared to my blockbuster posts (my top post on best browsers gets hundreds of visits per day). But baseball is growing, because Google is (algorithmically) beginning to believe that I'm some kind of authority on youth baseball, based on a growing concentration of quality content.

So - my guess is that you would get more traffic if you wrote about fewer topics - or perhaps split into several blogs, each with different topics. I should probably do that as my various tech topics have nothing to do with baseball.

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