121–130 of 173 posts
Heya, I have the opposite problem - I keep inventing physical products, and the people who buy them are happy with their quality, but I'm too shy to market them properly. Want to talk?
What type of products do you create?
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The credit limit was about fronting money to grow the business. Overall I think HN is being too harsh. This is a person taking a rather honest look at himself and giving us a glimpse into his life that also happens to capture an interesting history of the Internet.
I agree about the harshness here. I'm surprised and a bit disappointed. Affiliates are often very secretive because the barrier to entry is extremely low, and as such they don't want to reveal what they do or how. That he took that step, even in retrospect, to post it publicly is to be commended. Why not reveal the workings and the lessons he has learned? Let's value it for what it is.
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>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…
The credit limit was about fronting money to grow the business. Overall I think HN is being too harsh. This is a person taking a rather honest look at himself and giving us a glimpse into his life that also happens to capture an interesting history of the Internet.
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> 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 still do). What was that original idea?
haha
Fortunately, I decided it didn't make sense to jump straight into a real money-making idea until I knew what I was doing. So as a little project to learn the ropes, I'd make a site to help with something I was doing at the time - shopping for a used portable air conditioner on nearby craigslist sites.
So, I made a really simple little site that just generated links to craigslist results pages with criteria you specify. Using a mix of really ugly js and (iirc) Dreamweaver I even programmed some selection boxes that let you choose multiple states and cities in a more convenient way than a default multi-select. It was hideous, but I was kind of proud of it, and it cut my air conditioner search time considerably (although obviously by not nearly as much time as it took to make the site!)
When I signed up for $5/month GoDaddy hosting (which I've fortunately left far behind, but that's another story!) I got a $25 Adwords credit. So I used that, because why not. Also, earlier in my air conditioner search, before I'd even considered making the site, I had found a few forum threads while looking for a site like the one I ended up making. So I replied to those as well, in case it might be useful to anyone else.
A handful of people found the site those ways and started using it. (Like, probably double digits.) One day one of them posted on some other random forum to tell people about it, and a few more people trickled in. I certainly didn't have Adsense at that point, and wouldn't have made anything if I had. But gradually those people told more people, and I had a slow exponential growth curve going. They started requesting features, and so I made them. Once I got up to a few hundred users a day, I decided to try some adsense ads, and made maybe a few bucks a month. Then a few tens, then hundreds. I remember how exciting it was when it covered the rent for my basement suite. A little while after that, I looked into other ways to monetize, while hopefully adding to the user experience; the first really successful one was adding (optional) search results from eBay.
Eventually I contracted, and then hired, a designer/developer who helped make the site look halfway professional. Then I quit my day job to focus on it full time. Then hired another developer and built a spinoff site. We've got a team of 4 now, and are looking to add a couple more. It's been 9 years now since I started work on that first prototype, and about 6 since I quit my day job. Thankfully I never got the chance to try my "real" idea. (But seriously, HotOrNot for ads? How could that not make money?!)
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My only concern here is that anyone would be surprised that a thought process of "I want to make money -> Let's do whatever is popular" doesn't result in success or production of lasting value. (A) Everybody and their mothers will think the same thing and (B) that equation doesn't have any value production in it, and (C) what happens when the fad dies? It is a wholly selfish act, and I think it's worth the harshness.…
It's not coming across as a sob story to me, just more of a reflection and insight on experiences. > very old and common mistakes That's human nature and storytelling.
I was lucky enough to find one idea that let me make a fair amount of money, relatively easily. Back in the day, Google SEO was shockingly easy. Looking back, I probably could have made many times the amount of money that I did with SEO.
All things come to an end, and eventually SEO became much harder. Fortunately, by the time that happened, I had learned enough to be able to pivot my business.
I've ended up building a business that I'm proud of. I get emails all the time from people thanking me for the free services I provide.
The OP talks about a lot of marketing techniques that have worked very well for him in the past. I think what he may have missed is this: A marketing technique is not a business. A business is a set of activities that create a sustainable competitive advantage. A product is not a business, a marketing technique is not a business, any skill, no matter how well developed, is not a business. A business is a system -- a combination of activities that hopefully support and reinforce one another.
I'm always looking for new ways to add stability and strength to my business. In fact, I get pretty "terrified" at any hint of weakness. Sadly, there are lots of hints of weakness. But, I've managed to do this for ten years. Hopefully I'll be lucky enough to continue for many more.
I hate these picture gallery clickbaits sites on facebook. If you are visting mobile, almost every "next" click redirects you to some ad site and you "have to go back". And yes, I still click on them because i want to see funny/sexy stuff ;-) I will never understand though how people manage to just "burn" serveral thousands of dollars after they got them. I like to save and don't need any of this funky stuff. Why wou…
Yeah, well you made hundreds of thousands of people spend hundreds of hours cleaning up after automated bots turn a site to crap.
The underlying issue here is a lack of understanding on the difference between taking cash and creating value.
A reader of this might think that all this stuff is in the past, but it's getting bigger and more sophisticated by the day. The tools are all automated and the money is in the people who sell 'systems' which clip the ticket for all the wannabes who charge their credit cards for the latest 'make money online' schemes.
They all convince themselves that spamming out links is providing what their marks want. I'm not surprised to hear that depression is a common result.
Something like this could be worked into a decent movie script.