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It’s OK to make an extra $2k per month if you’re a programmer. Here’s how.
- bitwize 15y agoDidn't Hiro Protagonist do something like this? And didn't the gravy train stop because there were so many CIC stringers chasing so little good intel?
- satori99 15y agoIndeed he did!
- kevinherron 15y agoMy back button doesn't work in FF4 on your site but does work in Chrome.
- mmaunder 15y agoOK thanks Kevin. Will check it out.
- lovamova 15y agoIt must be your browser or some of the extensions. The WP theme works good in any browser since I'm the developer/designer that made it.
- guynamedloren 15y agoInteresting article. Have you done this successfully?
- mmaunder 15y agoYes, starting in 2004 with census.gov data. Then friends repro'd it in 2005-2006. Repro'd again in 2008. About to repro again in 2011. Current site launched 4 months ago on new domain that had never been registered before. Now passing 1000 uniques per day with 300,000 pages indexed and 3 million to go - and expect to easily hit the short-term traffic target in 2 to 3 months. The site is non-spam, genuinely useful and solves a real problem. The current (soon to be previous) top ranking site for the category is awful. It's filled with ads to make it unusable and functionality sucks. It was acquired a long time ago, the core dev team has probably left and the entire category needs a refresh and I'm happy to help. I should have added to the blog entry to look for categories where the competition is stale and has been acquired by a large publisher looking to cut costs and aggressively monetize.
- OstiaAntica 15y agoThat's a lot of work for $2,000, and the hard part is the blogging and marketing, which has nothing to do with programming.
- wtn 15y agoThe ??? 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.
- MatthewB 15y agoExactly. 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.
- jshen 15y agoThis 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.
- getsat 15y ago> I've done no link building You have 1,211 backlinks. You have no meta descriptions on any of your pages. The links to your content pages (e.g., http://yakkstr.com/posts/3635-Cute-Friday http://yakkstr.com/posts/3635-Cute-Friday) aren't inside a H1/H2 tag on your index pages. You are letting Google crawl/index your tag pages (pointless/bad). Your robots.txt isn't pointing to a sitemap. Are you using Google webmaster tools? Get rid of the /posts/N-title and just roll with /title, if possible. Set up a RSS feed and add OpenSearch. You have a lot of on-site SEO work to do. :)
- workhorse 15y agoPost a link to a site that you created following this that is making $2k a month.
- getsat 15y agoNo one will do this because their sites will be mirrored verbatim within 24 hours. It takes a couple minutes to write a scraper using Nokogiri. :P
- toumhi 15y agoA copy is just that, a copy in the eyes of Google. The copy will be penalized in rankings. Your community won't suddenly leave your website to go to the copycat. There are a million sites that copied Facebook but in the end everybody is on Facebook.
- getsat 15y agoThat is true, but if the penalties were severe, you wouldn't have Monster, Trovit, Juju, Indeed, SimplyHired, etc. all reposting the EXACT same job and all ranking nice and high. Autoblogs work entirely on copied content and do REALLY well for how little work they require to setup.
- toumhi 15y agoThat's true but it still doesn't hurt your own site IMHO. Copying site would be way below you in rankings (especially since Panda update it seems). Whether it's possible to make an autoblog work is a different matter.
- sledmonkey 15y agoGo take a look at webmasterworld if you believe that to be the case. Panda has severe issues with determining original source.
- swombat 15y agoSo, 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.
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- Homunculiheaded 15y agoadditionally 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
- palish 15y agoBut would they pay $2,000 per month?
- pash 15y agoI used to work at a firm that paid gobs of cash for just this sort of data. The trick, of course, is that you need to be well versed in the needs of potential clients before you can even think about staking your claim. But if you know what people need, and if you can collect and effectively present it to them, they will pay for it.
- cwp 15y agoMore, if you do it right. Take a look at instantdomainsearch.com. It provides a tiny amount of information, all of which is readily available from other sources. It's still quite profitable.
- leon_ 15y agoHmm, I always assumed you could earn way more with spam.
- orijing 15y agoIf you aren't putting in the requisite time to make a quality content-based website, you can probably generate many more websites of lower quality. Perhaps the profits from having more websites (albeit of lower quality) exceed that of fewer (higher quality) websites.
- tptacek 15y agoHow 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.
- patio11 15y agoThomas 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.
- reedlaw 15y agoWhat does BCC stand for?
- zitterbewegung 15y agoBingo Card Creator his website. See http://www.bingocardcreator.com/ http://www.bingocardcreator.com/
- lurker19 15y agoPatio is SEO incarnate. I can't even say he "struck again" with this organic link, because he doesn't strike, he just exudes SEO with every fiber of being and press on his keyboard.
- rmc 15y agopatio11 also has a blog ( http://www.kalzumeus.com/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/ ) about how he ran this sort of business.
- chopsueyar 15y ago
- MatthewB 15y agoThis 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 would work anymore.
- mmaunder 15y agoI'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.
- MatthewB 15y agoI 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.
- jhpriestley 15y agoAs a searcher, no I am not grateful to content farms, "directories", and other pseudo-content. In fact I find it quite frustrating that searches for common maintenance problems, housekeeping, medical topics, etc., now turn up page after page of superficial, ad-ridden content. I have the sense that the actual act of finding information on the internet has become quite a bit harder since, say, 2004.
- MikeCapone 15y ago"500 Internal Server Error"
- jonknee 15y agoI somewhat do this, but with crossword puzzle data. I'm sure there are more spammy ways to do it, but there is money to be made if you can genuinely provide data people are actively looking for and can't find.
- martingordon 15y agoThe title of the post confused me at first. I don't think I've ever seen "OK" used as a measure of difficulty. The "Here's how" gave it away, but I originally thought the article was an argument against people feeling bad that they do development work on the side. I've clearly been spending too much time reading English.SE...
- statictype 15y agoHad the same thought. I thought the post was about encouraging programmers to start side projects that make money and not feel bad about it.
- caf 15y agoIt's not using "OK" as a measure of difficulty. It's saying "don't feel like you're wasting your time on a project just because it isn't going to make you Ferrari money". I guess it's a restatement of the programmer's adage "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.".
- hxf148 15y agoIn principle it can work, maybe not as well as it used to if the site is too generic but it can in theory be done. But there is one black hole in this plan: "Tell the right people about your site and tell them regularly via great blog entries, insightful tweets, and networking in your site’s category." That being only a single line item in this plan underplays how difficult it can be to get good targeted traffic.
- tropin 15y agoIt's the second time in a week some one gives numbers like that. Is it true you can do four figures with just 150.000 page views? Two orders of magnitude better than I do!
- thinkalone 15y agoReminds me of a reddit "Ask Me Anything" thread from someone making made-for-AdSense sites: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/a74ba/not_an_adsense_millionaire_but_i_make_upwards_of/ http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/a74ba/not_an_adsense_m... (This was pre Google's content farm algorithm changes, however.) It's an insightful read regarding the amount of work required and it seems the person was actually producing/aggregating useful content.
- augustflanagan 15y agoOn 150,000 pageviews a month I make about $50.00 from adsense. "1.6% CTR with 0.85c CPC" seems pretty unrealistic to me.
- k33l0r 15y agoI'd agree, I recently tested out an AdWords campaign and the CTR has averaged about 0.05% (the maximum was 0.22%).
- melvinram 15y agoI've seen client sites that get 10-30% CTR w/ $4 CPC and I've seen 1% at $0.20-$0.80 CPC. It really depends on a number of factors including the audience, their intent, how they find your site, the site layout, etc. It may not be common but I wouldn't say it's unrealistic. PS: If you're making $50 from 150,000 page views per month, are you open to selling the site?
- augustflanagan 15y agoYou're right, unrealistic is not the right way to describe it. I don't doubt that quite a few people are able to make a couple thousand off adsense and 150,000 pageviews or less per month. However, the article is saying it is incredibly easy to do this. On that point I disagree. I think if you spend a lot of time working on finding the right niche and developing the site that you can definitely pull it off, but I don't think it's easy. And, as someone else pointed out there are a lot more interesting ways to make $2000/mo building a niche web app.
- danneu 15y agoJust for fun, I'll throw in my own stats: I make $650/mo from 4,000,000 pageviews. However, the low rate is easily understood because I run a forum.
- _delirium 15y agoI get about 1% CTR with $1.50 CPC. Not unreachable in the financial space, if you have a site with relevant information. I make about the same as you do, on many fewer pageviews a month.
- diamondhead 15y agoBefore 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.
- joshz 15y agoI 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.
- seeingfurther 15y agoThis is exactly what findthebest is up to
- bobbywilson0 15y agoThis to me is classic linkbait, how it is on the front page is beyond me. The "made for google adwords" sites are the bottom of the barrel when it comes to online income. I am surprised this guy doesn't have a bunch of ads on his blog so he can make $2,000 a month telling other people how to make $2,000 a month.
- slouch 15y agoThere is much less work involved in maintenance if you setup sites in a way such that users create the content
- hugh3 15y agoTheoretically, perhaps, though the initial uphill battle for traffic is harder, and if you're not careful there's always the chance you're going to get stuck policing and removing your users' content. It strikes me that there must be huge and quiet money in some forums. One forum in particular I use a lot is Better Bidding, where people discuss how to get cheap rates on hotwire and priceline and share information on what the unnamed mystery hotels are (so far I've had a 100% success rate in finding out the name of a hotwire hotel before booking it). But every time the words "priceline" or "hotwire" show up on the site they're converted into a (presumably) affiliate link, so the owners of the site must be making one metric shirtload from those. If you can find a way to combine user-generated content with affiliate links to stuff that the users were about to buy anyway, that's gotta be some great passive income. Oh well. If this story did nothing else it at least inspired me to dust off a blog project I've had in the back of my mind for a while (http://projectomniscience.blogspot.com http://projectomniscience.blogspot.com) and experiment with adsense. I doubt it'll be a big money-spinner, but at least now I know how to use adsense (and besides, I got to learn interesting facts about zebras, pants, and governors of North Dakota).
- slouch 15y agoI agree with what you have said, here. There is definitely money in forums, and this is surely why I have seen motorcycle.com buy up lots of forums over the passed couple years. You describe my biggest hit; people searching for something, finding my site and writing a post or a reply that helps generate more search traffic. I don't have to police much since the sites are very focused (not forums).
- MenaMena123 15y agoYou make it sound so easy, I know it is not and I can do all that you have stated, but that will take sometime. If it was that easy you can keep that process going and make alot. I know a site that has a good amount of traffic and makes nothing from Google Ads. Not saying its not all possible, but just not as easy as you stated and somethings you left out on doing it all correctly.
- ck2 15y agoI love that quote about "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" because it's so true. Sometimes I see people who refuse to use coupons in stores because they think it's beneath them (even if the coupon is right in front of them in a display for what they are buying).
- sliverstorm 15y agoThe people I've known who were eligible to but refused to use food stamps did not feel it was "beneath them"- I'm pretty sure they felt that they didn't truly need them, and that there was someone worse off who needed them more than they did.
- Jach 15y agoOn the other hand, I had a roommate who spent his time criticizing "government handouts" while at the same time using food stamps himself.
- hoprocker 15y agoSounds similar to the 65+ year-olds out in the rural US where I grew up that complain about big government while defending their Medicare payments, sometimes in adjacent sentences.
- crocowhile 15y agoare the food stamps really limited in number??
- sliverstorm 15y agoI do not believe the stamps themselves are, but government resources are certainly finite.
- ck2 15y agoYup, there is a limited budget and if things get bad enough in a state they will even limit them to only people who have disabilities. It's rare but has happened. Then there is the craziness that you are immediately ineligible for foodstamps the very day you get a job, regardless if you do not get a paycheck for a couple more weeks.
- anto1ne 15y ago1. do all of this 2. realize that point 15. is by far the most difficult and time consuming of all steps 3. ... 4. no profit
- getsat 15y agoYou are correct in that #15 is the hardest part. The rest is trivial. Here's a starting point: http://www.google.com/search?q=build+initial+backlinks http://www.google.com/search?q=build+initial+backlinks I like paid directory submissions, doing guest posts on blogs, building high quality Squidoo lenses (which include a link to your site), and paid reviews. If you want the passive income badly enough, you will figure it out. If you don't want it badly enough, you don't deserve it.
- kungfooey 15y agoIt is much more straightforward to take on a little side work. Set your rate to $100/hr and work an extra 20 hours a month. In today's market this isn't terribly difficult to do.
- nostrademons 15y agoCan be hard with the IP restrictions that go with most employers. The nice thing about something that's pure marketing & writing is that for software developers, it probably does not fall under your employer's umbrella.
- canadiancreed 15y agoOne good reason to seek out employers that dont' have all encompassing NDA/IP restrictions as part of their hiring contracts. They're hard to find but they do exist, and they're worth their weight in gold.
- nostrademons 15y agoIt's much easier to get the negotiating leverage to strike out IP restrictions on your contract if you've previously worked at a name-brand company, and name-brand companies are the ones that tend to have the most all-encompassing IP restrictions.
- chopsueyar 15y agoWhere do you find clients willing to pay $100/hr for sidework?
- gitah 15y agoI've been lurking HN for awhile. This article have finally made me create an account and post here. I recently made a website that scrapes a popular message board and displays the archived posts. My goal wasn't to make money, but rather scratch an itch for the users of the board myself included (the message board deletes old posts and does not allow users search for posts based on user handles). I was thinking of putting on Google ads to pay for hosting costs. I haven't bothered to do any SEO (I'm absolutely clueless in this area), but this month I have around 120k page views and 40k uniques. Most of the visits (over 80%) is from Google keywords. Is the return high enough, like this article implies, to deface my site with Google ads? I heard that Google doesn't like content farms and my site could be considered a content farm, so would I even be allowed to put Google ads on? I would be happy to make $80 dollars a month so I can finally move from my free-tier EC2 micro-instance to a small instance... Any advice would be cool.
- patja 15y agoI'm not that crazy about the approach the author lays out to building traffic -- regurgitating public datasets -- but it is a fact that good content will probably surprise you with how it can pay off with AdSense. $2 - $7 Page RPM is totally do-able. Don't take the author's advice verbatim. Just think of whether you can build a site that will draw those volumes of page views, preferably a site with good content people want to see that will supported context-targeted ads.
- edward 15y agoI made sites that list British post offices and post boxes: http://edwardbetts.com/postoffices/ http://edwardbetts.com/postoffices/ and http://edwardbetts.com/postboxes/ http://edwardbetts.com/postboxes/ I think both these sites went live in 2008. Here are the AdSense figures for this month so far (May 1st to May 27th): * $52.94 earnings * 21,708 Page views * 147 Clicks * 0.68% Page CTR * $0.36 CPC * $2.44 Page RPM
- a5seo 15y agoYou do realize the Adsense tos bars you from disclosing this data, right? Not that I care (I think the TOS is b.s. on that point), I'm just saying...
- barisme 15y agoI guess the real money comes when you help marketing people find spend-happy people's mailboxes ;) Or connect conmen with heiresses, vacuum cleaner salesmen with Persian cat owners, horny teenagers with lonely centerfold models... I can come up with these all day, now get busy!
- aw3c2 15y agoHow did you get those sites known?
- getsat 15y agoEither this program (Market Samurai) is shitting the bed or he has 291,557 backlinks to his domain. That's a pretty serious number of backlinks for a personal site.
- chopsueyar 15y agoWhat about arbitrage between Facebook ads and Adsense? Has anyone successfully sent Facebook traffic via paid ads to their adsense site profitably?
- michael_dorfman 15y agoMy experience is that it is very difficult to send traffic via Facebook ads to anywhere outside of Facebook.
- mleonhard 15y agoIt's fishy that his blog doesn't even link to his business. The sidebar reads: whoami I write code and run a Seattle based Web startup. I'm interested in ...
- neworbit 15y agoFeedjit http://www.techstars.org/mentors/mmaunder/ http://www.techstars.org/mentors/mmaunder/
- SeoxyS 15y agoThis article disgusts me. The internet really doesn't need its brightest minds spending their free time creating spam. How can you even suggest that's a good thing?
- leon_ 15y agodon't worry. you don't need to be a bright mind to do this - you only need to know hot to lie to convince people to link to your spam site. the technical difficulties of such a site are somewhere between hello world and an irc bot.
- cowkingdeluxe 15y agoDo an extra 20 hours of work per month?
- jeffreyrusso 15y agoThis kind of idea might be new to a lot of HN readers, but it's a tired old game that doesn't work all that well anymore. Working with the limited data that Google provides on keywords/search volume/CPCs, you'll be crowded into the same niches that are already hyper competitive with hundreds of other people playing the same game. Also, this is advocating the creation of classic webspam. Creating thousands of autogenerated pages using data thats already publicly available doesn't "help" anyone. Puzzles me when I think back to the righteous outcries on HN a couple of months ago about the declining quality of Google's search results.
- dpcan 15y agoI agree and disagree. There is a lot of information out there that is terribly hard for your common searcher to find still, and if that information can be extracted from government data farms and displayed and organized in such a way that it is easy to read and navigate, this could be a really great thing. That being said, this article does come across as: Here's how to create some Google spam for profit.
- tluyben2 15y agoNice, tell more people how to make total shit sites that really don't make 2k anymore as Google already 'fixed' this bug. How did this get on the frontpage?
- antirez 15y agoDudes I lived two years out of this, with the Italian adsense market that is for sure poorer than US market (and has possibly more relative competition, as free-money here is something people pay really a lot attention to...). I was just using NNTP to fetch news and publish them on the web (now this does not work anymore, but there are tons of other stuff you can do). So in short, yes, that works very well in my experience, and is ideal to fund your work for your startup without external help.
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- rs 15y ago>> Tell the right people about your site and tell them regularly via great blog entries, insightful tweets, and networking in your site’s category. This, is the one big important step separating $0 per month and $2k per month.
- SatvikBeri 15y agoThis is a completely viable concept-www.freepatentsonline.com makes at least $150k/month through taking patent information and putting it online in a searchable format. When you take useful information and put it up like this, that also creates a lot of value for people-trying to search the USPTO for patent information is a nightmare when you don't know what you're doing.
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