Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to become rich even if nobody is following you on Twitter

blog.cubeofm.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 192 posts

Re: How to become rich even if nobody is following you on Twitter

#141

Post by ellyagg »

il wrote: post #119
jacquesm wrote: post #79

Interesting, I've been doing just that for the last couple of years. It's been a mix of partial successes and total failures, mostly failures. I didn't want to go the 'mfa' route for obvious reasons, so I try to make these sites in to something that actually is useful, and that have a sense of community about them. Here is a breakdown of what you can make this way in a month based on adsense alone after several years…

I agree completely, $1 a day times 400 sites is simply not feasible. This article is terrible advice, the kind that will probably lead you to failure. I have a fairly successful affiliate marketing business (I make more than I would if I had a day job), and it seems like every day I talk to people who are taking this approach and making $1-$2 a day. The article's logic is flawed- if it were that easy to make projects…

Hmmmm. As it happens, you're wrong and to the extent your parent supports your thesis, he's wrong, too. I work for an SEO marketing firm and one of my coworkers built up a portfolio of $1/day projects exactly in the mold of this article over the course of 2 or 3 years, and once he got to about $6000/month, he quit to do it full time. And he was no genius and had very little technical skill--he hired out all his programming.

I would do it myself, but I have no desire to work on projects like that full time, even for only 2 years.

Re: How to become rich even if nobody is following you on Twitter

#142

Post by jacquesm »

ellyagg wrote: post #141
il wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree completely, $1 a day times 400 sites is simply not feasible. This article is terrible advice, the kind that will probably lead you to failure. I have a fairly successful affiliate marketing business (I make more than I would if I had a day job), and it seems like every day I talk to people who are taking this approach and making $1-$2 a day. The article's logic is flawed- if it were that easy to make projects…

Hmmmm. As it happens, you're wrong and to the extent your parent supports your thesis, he's wrong, too. I work for an SEO marketing firm and one of my coworkers built up a portfolio of $1/day projects exactly in the mold of this article over the course of 2 or 3 years, and once he got to about $6000/month, he quit to do it full time. And he was no genius and had very little technical skill--he hired out all his progr…

Interesting! So, what's the state now, has he been able to continue that trend? Does he have maintenance issues yet? Or does it seem like his model will scale forever?

My 'little projects' make about 800 euros or 1200 dollars per month, so that's about 1/5th of what your friend is doing, or rather was doing when he quit to start working full time.

I'm not saying it's a total failure, but it's not the success I'd hoped for either. And, to be honest at $6,000 per month I'd probably still not be too happy about it, but that's simply because I figured I'd be doing much better when I started out. (I already had a $10,000 per month project with 0 maintenance to tide me over while doing this, if it weren't for that I wouldn't have made it this far).

If he's managed to take $1 / day with 0 input from now forward then he's done very well, but from a business point of view investing 2 to 3 years and getting to $6000 (or $1200 as in my case) still does not count as time well spent.

For instance, if I had spent that time consulting it would have brought a multiple of that (but I'd have to continue to consult, which is of course the whole point of this exercise).

Re: How to become rich even if nobody is following you on Twitter

#143

Post by maxklein »

sabat wrote: post #130
maxklein wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really know how ads work, so I've never actually used them. A tax search engine seems to me like an ideal place for affiliate selling of books on tax, and ebooks that other people are selling. You have the terms people are searching for, just match a book to the term and offer to sell to them. Something like that, but I have no idea about the market.

From your article: I once made a video hosting website and put 30 ninja videos on it. Adsense money was about $1 a day. From your post above: I don't really know how ads work, so I've never actually used them. Huh? Which one is true?

Use as in optimised for them and actually made an effort to learn how to make things work with adsense. What I did on the video site was embed the code google gave and that's it. That does not mean I know anything about adsense.

Re: How to become rich even if nobody is following you on Twitter

#144

Post by maxklein »

jacquesm wrote: post #122
maxklein wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not going to build this because I looked up asthma search count a while back and didn't like what I saw. There is another chronic disease with far more searches and a lot more competing software. I'll be building for that soon, and though I won't explicitely say the name anyone who is interesting in pursuing the niche should feel free to.

But following on your own theory, if it is trivial to clone the concept on to something related then you'd have to do both anyway. After all, changing the concept and marketing it for two or more different diseases is exactly what you are advocating, and doing it only for a single disease would be the opposite!

Yeah, but I'm not going to waste my time on an area with no market, even if it just a little time. I start off with the high market thing, if it works I can modify to enter the smaller markets, but I test on the most likely first.

Re: How to become rich even if nobody is following you on Twitter

#145

Post by prawn »

I do something roughly like this on the side, but trending more towards MFA stuff (not that ninja videos with ads isn't the same). Rather than $1/day, I look to cover the base cost of the domains as a starting point (4c/day at least). Some sites absolutely struggle because they're half-arsed with poor content, no pagerank and few backlinks while others rank really well for reasonable 2-3 word keyphrases.

Of the sites, 5-10 have some traction, took a few hours to set up (total) and make $3-4k/mo, passively.

It's definitely possible and can ease pressure enough to give you time to work on more serious side-project pursuits because your living costs are already taken care of.

Re: How to become rich even if nobody is following you on Twitter

#146

Post by maxklein »

dabeeeenster wrote: post #140
sabat wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it racist?

Just because someone comes "from a distant country" doesn't mean you can make any sort of preconception about them...

A bulgarian with bad english is very distant from the silicon valley connections.

Re: How to become rich even if nobody is following you on Twitter

#147

Post by codexon »

awolf wrote: post #102
aw3c2 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

care to tell us what kind of projects those are?

iPhone apps. 2 of 3 of them use the standard free+ads, paid+features model. The other, my most successful, is strictly paid at $1.99. They were a lot of work up front and some have required minimal maintenance- but supporting them hasn't even taken up even 2% of my coding time in the past year.

How many hours did you spend making them?

Re: How to become rich even if nobody is following you on Twitter

#148

Post by il »

richcollins wrote: post #134
il wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree completely, $1 a day times 400 sites is simply not feasible. This article is terrible advice, the kind that will probably lead you to failure. I have a fairly successful affiliate marketing business (I make more than I would if I had a day job), and it seems like every day I talk to people who are taking this approach and making $1-$2 a day. The article's logic is flawed- if it were that easy to make projects…

Trust me, taking one project and not giving up until you MAKE IT WORK will be much more profitable in the long run. This sounds like it could be recipe for burnout and a waste of your life. Some businesses won't work no matter how hard you try. It seems like the best strategy would be one that is good at finding a reasonably scalable business model. If you don't find one after a few iterations, it might be a good ide…

Maybe I should have added a corollary. I'm assuming you already have a solid business model, or at least a well-defined market. "Adsense" is not a business model.

Also, monetization is NOT hard if you're selling something people want. Getting traffic is hard. Monetizing is trivial if you're running an actual business and not a hobby.

Re: How to become rich even if nobody is following you on Twitter

#149

Post by jacquesm »

thibaut_barrere wrote: post #75
tjogin wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be really interesting if you could describe some of these projects briefly.

Those I know revolve around affiliation, alternate search engines, porn/erotic stuff, niche technological forums and such topics :) Not by him but in the same kind of idea, here's an example: http://fastpowertools.com/ A while back I know the owner of this site did a few hundreds $ per month. It was really an eye-opener to me :) Of course this requires SEO skills to earn more than a few bucks, that need to be learn o…

What I wouldn't give for a way to filter all sites like that from search engine results ;)

Re: How to become rich even if nobody is following you on Twitter

#150

Post by GFischer »

jacquesm wrote: post #79

Interesting, I've been doing just that for the last couple of years. It's been a mix of partial successes and total failures, mostly failures. I didn't want to go the 'mfa' route for obvious reasons, so I try to make these sites in to something that actually is useful, and that have a sense of community about them. Here is a breakdown of what you can make this way in a month based on adsense alone after several years…

Thanks for sharing those figures. For someone EU-based it might not be much... but for me (South America-based) it would be more than my day job :) .

I hope I'll have the strength of will to follow through and do this :)

Post reply on HN