How to become rich even if nobody is following you on Twitter • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by jacquesm » Mon, Feb 08, 2010, 1:15 AM UTC

davi wrote: post #160

jacquesm wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're absolutely correct. Note that in that list there are several sites that have millions of pageviews per month (a success by most standards), and in spite of that the monetization simply sucks. If you were to spread those millions of pageviews across many smaller sites the maintenance headache would be a multiple of what it is right now and you'd still not make more than roughly $1000 / month. If I lost all the…

I remember Noah Everett talked about transitioning from AdSense to other options in his Mixergy interview. This from the transcript: "Andrew: When did you have that big leap, from making just a few hundred or a few thousand dollars to actually making substantial money? Was there a month that you actually took that big leap? Interviewee: Yeah, so when we moved away from Google AdSense to other ad partners, because I j…

I'll give it a shot, and I'll report on what that did.

The thing that has held me back to date is the number of ad networks that are used to serve up malware, or that redirect the traffic or serve unauthorized pop-ups that's something that I'm fairly sure would never happen with google.

edit: Ok, I'm going to do this a bit more structurally, if you have an advertising network you want benchmarked please add it to this thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1108677

thanks!

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

#162

Post by ErrantX » Mon, Feb 08, 2010, 1:34 AM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #161

davi wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember Noah Everett talked about transitioning from AdSense to other options in his Mixergy interview. This from the transcript: "Andrew: When did you have that big leap, from making just a few hundred or a few thousand dollars to actually making substantial money? Was there a month that you actually took that big leap? Interviewee: Yeah, so when we moved away from Google AdSense to other ad partners, because I j…

I'll give it a shot, and I'll report on what that did. The thing that has held me back to date is the number of ad networks that are used to serve up malware, or that redirect the traffic or serve unauthorized pop-ups that's something that I'm fairly sure would never happen with google. edit: Ok, I'm going to do this a bit more structurally, if you have an advertising network you want benchmarked please add it to thi…

If you've got a million views a month page for a keywordyou should be able to sell an indvidual ad for big money.

I run maintain a blog for a friend for whom one page ranks highly for a particular keyword gaining her about 100 thousand pv's a month. We sold an ad on that page for about £150 a month. Yes they over pay. But with a million page views you could easily make more.

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

#163

Post by prawn » Mon, Feb 08, 2010, 1:36 AM UTC

enriketuned wrote: post #159

prawn wrote: post #145

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…

Would you mind pointing out how your domains are hosted and registered? Thanks

I either register domains based on keyword research and bulk searches to see what's still available, or I try to grab expired domains at auction (via drop.com.au). Vast majority of my domains are .com.au - smaller audience obviously, but also less competition when it comes to SEO.

I register through TPP (wholesale account) and host them with CrystalTech. On a base ColdFusion plan ($11.90ish/mo reseller rate) I can host 26 domains and then split out the requests either via ColdFusion or Mod-Rewrite. Some sites are standalone, while a few others use a quick publishing engine I built that takes articles from the database and outputs them with nav, AdSense blocks, etc ready to go.

Given content and a domain pointed to the right nameservers, I can have a multipage site up and running in a few minutes.

I have tried having content written by someone cheaply ($6/300 words) but it's quite obviously MFA, the content isn't massively helpful to those arriving from Google and the sites are rightfully struggling because they're uninspiring.

Another example is a six-page site targeting 2-3 word keyphrases. Content was written by my partner after she had to look into the topic herself and realised there was a bit of a gap in the market. Took her an afternoon to write six pages of content a couple of years back. Took me a couple of hours to put together. Makes about $3-4k/yr from AdSense and I haven't really touched it since I put it together.

If I were to make any recommendations to people hopeful of trying this sort of thing, I'd say:

  - have patience, domain age and so on will stop anything from raking in cash immediately
  - if you have another side-project with decent pagerank, use that to help out the new project
  - don't go for a single keyword as you'll struggle with competition; pick a keyphrase niche
  - make sure you pick something that will have advertising in the space and where the clicks will pay (Google the phrase you're considering, and if no ads show, avoid that phrase)
  - use Google's keyword research tool to find a niche with some traffic
  - try to pick a space where you have some passion/interest and write decent, useful content yourself. If you do use a dodgy paid-writer, take what they've created and try to polish it a bit yourself. I think if you're just looking for a cash-cow, it'll show.

I looked at opening comments through Disqus to try and get some longtail content, but comments are just a waste of time and kill you on maintenance. You want something that will stay relevant and if it needs any maintenance, it's just an hour a month or so to tweak.

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

#164

Post by jacquesm » Mon, Feb 08, 2010, 1:41 AM UTC

ErrantX wrote: post #162

jacquesm wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll give it a shot, and I'll report on what that did. The thing that has held me back to date is the number of ad networks that are used to serve up malware, or that redirect the traffic or serve unauthorized pop-ups that's something that I'm fairly sure would never happen with google. edit: Ok, I'm going to do this a bit more structurally, if you have an advertising network you want benchmarked please add it to thi…

If you've got a million views a month page for a keywordyou should be able to sell an indvidual ad for big money. I run maintain a blog for a friend for whom one page ranks highly for a particular keyword gaining her about 100 thousand pv's a month. We sold an ad on that page for about £150 a month. Yes they over pay. But with a million page views you could easily make more.

They're not for any individual keyword, they're for an enormous range.

For one single keyword it would be worth selling ads direct, selling inventory for a large range of keywords direct is a major headache. That sounds like real work ;)

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

#165

Post by prawn » Mon, Feb 08, 2010, 1:45 AM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #142

ellyagg wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hope…

This is a standard guy with no real experience and no programming experience getting to $72k/yr after investing some time. Not quite living the dream, but it's not awful either given that he may not have had some outrageous education or experience and is now getting passive income that he can gradually build on.

I think anyone here with some general startup knowledge/ability (e.g., can buy a domain, set up hosting, write HTML, write content, etc) could probably build up a passive $50/day source to give them a bit of a buffer to create bigger projects. Or they should at least be trying it to see if they can pull it off.

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

#166

Post by sfk » Mon, Feb 08, 2010, 1:47 AM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #133

sabat wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* I didn't want to go the 'mfa' route for obvious reasons* Sorry, but what's "the 'mfa' route"? Couldn't find anything on this.

'Made For Adsense', sites that add no value other than to get google traffic in order to sell the clicks back to google. Google is heavily cracking down on these nowadays, so it's less of a problem than it used to be, but the sheer number of RSS feed regurgitators made searching for something very hard for a while (end of 2008). MFA is a predatory strategy, it just takes without giving back. Remember all those wikipe…

Do you have evidence that Google is cracking down on those? Because I frequently get both Wikipedia clones and various Usenet "archives" ranking very high in my search results.

Since they are always the same sites, they should be be easy to remove from the index.

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

#167

Post by prawn » Mon, Feb 08, 2010, 1:53 AM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #133

sabat wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* I didn't want to go the 'mfa' route for obvious reasons* Sorry, but what's "the 'mfa' route"? Couldn't find anything on this.

'Made For Adsense', sites that add no value other than to get google traffic in order to sell the clicks back to google. Google is heavily cracking down on these nowadays, so it's less of a problem than it used to be, but the sheer number of RSS feed regurgitators made searching for something very hard for a while (end of 2008). MFA is a predatory strategy, it just takes without giving back. Remember all those wikipe…

And, unfortunately, MFA sites will bring in more money if they solve fewer problems. e.g., you want your content to be good enough that it brings in traffic, but not so good that it solves problems (leaving visitors not needing to click your ads).

The concept of "ideas" and inspiration has proved effective for me on a couple of sites. The ideas and inspiration help people get a vision of what they could do, but they'll still need to click ads to execute that (e.g., give them ideas for bathroom tiling, but leave them to click on to tiler's website to get quotes).

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

#168

Post by jacquesm » Mon, Feb 08, 2010, 2:12 AM UTC

sfk wrote: post #166

jacquesm wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Made For Adsense', sites that add no value other than to get google traffic in order to sell the clicks back to google. Google is heavily cracking down on these nowadays, so it's less of a problem than it used to be, but the sheer number of RSS feed regurgitators made searching for something very hard for a while (end of 2008). MFA is a predatory strategy, it just takes without giving back. Remember all those wikipe…

Do you have evidence that Google is cracking down on those? Because I frequently get both Wikipedia clones and various Usenet "archives" ranking very high in my search results. Since they are always the same sites, they should be be easy to remove from the index.

I've seen a whole pile of them simply drop off the radar, I'm sure there are still plenty left but there seems to be a concerted effort by google to control this.

The first real crackdown was somewhere in 2007, since then the situation definitely has improved.

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

#169

Post by maneesh » Mon, Feb 08, 2010, 3:03 AM UTC

Making $1 400 times is exactly my business model. I've been building websites that hire excellent writers to write excellent content about specific keywords, targeted for SEO, and every article brings in about $1.50/day. Each article costs me about $10 to make (so I make back my investment in 7 months, purely passive). I write about 100-200 articles/month.

I wrote software and hired assistants to do everything, so my actual work is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1merER1zVFg .

I find targeted keywords, use SEM to get my article into the top 4 results and sit back and wait for passive income. It's not as hard as you'd think.

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

#170

Post by vijayr » Mon, Feb 08, 2010, 3:45 AM UTC

joelhaus wrote: post #120

vijayr wrote: post #98

Interesting article. I guess there is definitely some money to be made, if the site is useful ("tool" based). Some examples: http://selfmademinds.com/200811/mini-site-case-study-update/ http://www.calendarsquick.com/printables/index.html (don't know how much this site makes, I'd assume more than $1 per day)

Curious, how important do you feel a good domain name is for these mini-sites? Imagine that a highly relevant name could significantly reduce your marketing investment and get you more traffic.

not sure if domain name is that important, for such tiny sites. Most of your traffic is going to be from search engines, so I guess you'll need to worry more about SEO than coming up with a memorable name (as people aren't going to remember it). From SEO point of view, keyword rich domain names are important, not sure how much though.