4 ms·

That'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 ago
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.
- MatthewB 15y ago
  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.
  - jshen 15y ago
    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.
    - 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. :)
      - tlrobinson 15y ago
        What resources do you recommend for learning more about SEO?
        getsat 15y ago
        I'm by no means an expert, though I've worked with experts and picked up some stuff from them. The rest I learned from Google and various forums: http://www.google.com/search?query=on-page+seo http://www.google.com/search?query=on-page+seo http://blogs.sitepoint.com/ultimate-seo-checklist/ http://blogs.sitepoint.com/ultimate-seo-checklist/ http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/search-engine-optimization-3/faq-search-engine-optimization-182915.html http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/search-engine-optimization-3... Basically, SEO comes down to having awesome content, identifying it properly on your site, and getting other people to link to it. What is proposed in the OP's link is NOT impossible as the various detractors in this thread would have you believe, but it IS a lot of work. The tech stuff is easy, consistently building out your backlinks is the hardest part. If you're lucky, they'll start to grow on their own and you have 100% passive income.
        jshen 15y ago
        I didn't mean to imply that it's impossible, but that it is a LOT of work. Becoming good at SEO and marketing, then executing a good plan, is a lot of work. My site was intended to be an example of not doing that. Doing that means trading a lot of time that could be spent learning ... I don't know, machine learning or something. Is that worth maybe 2k a month? Depends on the person. But the OP made it sound easy. It's not easy.
        getsat 15y ago
        As I stated here [1], It's definitely not easy, though I've found the only difficult part to be getting initial traffic and consistently building high quality backlinks. It's not something that can be automated, but it can be outsourced. [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2593650 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2593650
        15y ago

wtn 15y ago

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.

MatthewB 15y ago
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.
- jshen 15y ago
  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.
  - 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. :)
    - tlrobinson 15y ago
      What resources do you recommend for learning more about SEO?
      - getsat 15y ago
        I'm by no means an expert, though I've worked with experts and picked up some stuff from them. The rest I learned from Google and various forums: http://www.google.com/search?query=on-page+seo http://www.google.com/search?query=on-page+seo http://blogs.sitepoint.com/ultimate-seo-checklist/ http://blogs.sitepoint.com/ultimate-seo-checklist/ http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/search-engine-optimization-3/faq-search-engine-optimization-182915.html http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/search-engine-optimization-3... Basically, SEO comes down to having awesome content, identifying it properly on your site, and getting other people to link to it. What is proposed in the OP's link is NOT impossible as the various detractors in this thread would have you believe, but it IS a lot of work. The tech stuff is easy, consistently building out your backlinks is the hardest part. If you're lucky, they'll start to grow on their own and you have 100% passive income.
        jshen 15y ago
        I didn't mean to imply that it's impossible, but that it is a LOT of work. Becoming good at SEO and marketing, then executing a good plan, is a lot of work. My site was intended to be an example of not doing that. Doing that means trading a lot of time that could be spent learning ... I don't know, machine learning or something. Is that worth maybe 2k a month? Depends on the person. But the OP made it sound easy. It's not easy.
        getsat 15y ago
        As I stated here [1], It's definitely not easy, though I've found the only difficult part to be getting initial traffic and consistently building high quality backlinks. It's not something that can be automated, but it can be outsourced. [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2593650 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2593650
        15y ago