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It’s OK to make an extra $2k per month if you’re a programmer. Here’s how.

markmaunder.com

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Re: It’s OK to make an extra $2k per month if you’re a programmer. Here’s how.

#31

Post by patio11 »

tptacek wrote: post #16

How to make an extra $10,000 per month: Find 12 people who conduct significant business online, tell them this story, and set your bill rate accordingly.

Thomas is, if anything, undershooting what this is worth if you're capable of pulling it off with a data set adjacent to a liquid affiliate market.

I think this specific article sort of underestimates the amount of effort involved ("Now that you have a site, just add marketing"), but if you're totally skeptical about it ever working, a) take a look at BCC's sales and b) think of what they would be in a niche with $50 CPA affiliate payouts which are 10x easier to achieve than purchases. BCC levels of traffic are not an unachievable goal for a programmer's first web project, for obvious reasons.

Re: It’s OK to make an extra $2k per month if you’re a programmer. Here’s how.

#33

Post by mmaunder »

MatthewB wrote: post #18

This is nothing new and Google is well aware of this tactic. Years ago I use to buy pre-populated databases (such as all the veterinarians in the US) and create SEO-perfect websites with one piece of information on each page. It was highly crawlable and did well. I threw adsense on it and made good money for a while. A lot of other people figured it out and Google started dinging sites like this. I don't think this w…

I'd say you're doing exactly what Google wants and needs by putting the world's information online and making it indexable by them. It's a symbiotic relationship and searchers are grateful to both you and Google for helping them find what they need (that vet database you bought for example) online.

Not only that but Google profits directly through ads that appear in search results showing your data. And indirectly keeping 32% of revenue if you're running adsense.

Now if it's covered in ads that destroy the content or if the site uses cloaking or tries to trick you into signing up or thinking you have to sign up the way stackoverflow's competitor did, then that's worth a penalty.

Information that is unique and useful, presented in an honest and timely fashion is exactly what Google wants and desperately needs more of.

Don't confuse what I'm describing here or in the blog entry with duplicate content or content that has been scraped and remixed to look unique.

Re: It’s OK to make an extra $2k per month if you’re a programmer. Here’s how.

#35

Post by k33l0r »

augustflanagan wrote: post #32

On 150,000 pageviews a month I make about $50.00 from adsense. "1.6% CTR with 0.85c CPC" seems pretty unrealistic to me.

I'd agree, I recently tested out an AdWords campaign and the CTR has averaged about 0.05% (the maximum was 0.22%).

Re: It’s OK to make an extra $2k per month if you’re a programmer. Here’s how.

#36

Post by diamondhead »

Before making a opinion about getting rich by making money online, coders need to think about the differences between real world and the software world first. How hard is to access information of building software? How much money do you pay for your production tools? Is there any production means that we should share? Think about the wars, also.

Re: It’s OK to make an extra $2k per month if you’re a programmer. Here’s how.

#37

Post by jshen »

MatthewB wrote: post #24
wtn wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ??? part of his profit formula—the blogging and marketing—is a part-time job on its own. Regardless, 150,000 hits per month is unrealistic.

Exactly. A website like this won't just start getting a ton of search traffic overnight. It takes a lot of effort building links before the site will see any traffic. This is definitely not a part-time gig.

This is true. I run a community/blogging site for fun, not profit called yakkstr.com. There are about 50 regular users and it currently has around 5k posts. I mention it because it's a good counter example. I've done no link building, and I get very little search traffic. Maybe 50 visits per day. Occasionally someone will post about a product, instead of their relationship drama, and one girl posted about "mio liquid". That post gets about 2 hits a day from google. We can extrapolate from this, 1000 pages like this would get around 2000 hits a day and from my expeience that would earn about $1.50 a day from ads.

Re: It’s OK to make an extra $2k per month if you’re a programmer. Here’s how.

#38

Post by Homunculiheaded »

swombat wrote: post #13

So, basically, create a demand-media site but without even paying writers the $3/hour to create crap articles? Just scrape them from the government? :-) I'm all for the lifestyle business thing, but there are more fulfilling ways to make $2k/month, imho... As the cost of creating businesses drops, the number of viable niches literally explodes.

additionally if you're going to be pulling down public data sets there are probably more interesting and useful ways that you can restructure/reorganize that data. There's a lot of useful data out there that is a real mess that I'm sure some niche would actually pay decently to presented in a more usable fashion

Re: It’s OK to make an extra $2k per month if you’re a programmer. Here’s how.

#39

Post by joshz »

I don't want to promote the site; it's #88 on quantcast right now and it looks like it does roughly what is described in the article at least with regard to gov data. The parent company, which has a bunch of other similar aggregator sites, not too long ago was hiring programmers for $70 in Poland, a pretty high number over here. It seems they made good money with this.

Re: It’s OK to make an extra $2k per month if you’re a programmer. Here’s how.

#40

Post by MatthewB »

mmaunder wrote: post #33
MatthewB wrote: post #18

This is nothing new and Google is well aware of this tactic. Years ago I use to buy pre-populated databases (such as all the veterinarians in the US) and create SEO-perfect websites with one piece of information on each page. It was highly crawlable and did well. I threw adsense on it and made good money for a while. A lot of other people figured it out and Google started dinging sites like this. I don't think this w…

I'd say you're doing exactly what Google wants and needs by putting the world's information online and making it indexable by them. It's a symbiotic relationship and searchers are grateful to both you and Google for helping them find what they need (that vet database you bought for example) online. Not only that but Google profits directly through ads that appear in search results showing your data. And indirectly ke…

I think the biggest issue with the way I was operating the database-driven sites was that the content was paper thin. One piece of information on each page is not what Google wants. They want rich information from authorities on the subject. All I was doing was automatically building out sites from a large databases of information, it wasn't high quality reviews or reports.
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