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

http://blog.cubeofm.com/how-to-become-rich-even-if-nobody-is-followin

by maxklein • 16 years ago

248 188 16 years ago

blog.cubeofm.com

icey4• 16 years ago

I think the bigger hurdle for most people is getting from $0 a day to $1 a day. Replicating success isn't as hard as finding success.

sabat9• 16 years ago

Max is proposing that it isn't that difficult for a programmer to find a way to make $1/day. Max -- care to elucidate?

maxklein18• 16 years ago

If you want to make $1 a day, go search for a keyword. Like Owls. Then find a bunch of videos of owls in YouTube, put them on the site and call the site OwlVideo.com. In a week you will be making $1 a day.

Or if you prefer to program for the desktop - go wrap ffmpeg and make an AVI to MP4 converter. Def make $30 in sales in a month.

Or if you prefer to program for the web, make something that parses Apples XML of new iPhone apps, put all that text on your website, slap adverts on it. There is $1 a day.

Or you can copy the bible and allow people to annote it. Put on web. There ya go.

Find a commonly done task like file uploading. Write a wrapper script for this in PHP. Sell it on a scripting site. $1 a day.

Make a wordpress theme and target a specific group. "Theme for Doctors". Make it premium and put it for sale. $1 a day.

It's easy, you just need to think in the right mode.

gcheong3• 16 years ago

Well, I have 2 apps on the app store right now. One of them makes nothing, it's not free, just does not make any sales and one makes just about $1 a day (after I raised the price from .99 to 1.99). Both apps are pretty simple, are in the same category (healthcare and fitness) and I've done nothing to promote them.

ja27• 16 years ago

I refer anyone that's interested to Ed Dale's 30 Day Challenge. It's a free online course to learn to make your first $1 online. It's mostly about niche selection, test marketing, and beginning SEO, but it's great for beginners. It's not overwhelmingly awesome, but it's free and targeted to people that aren't ubergeeks like us.

http://www.thirtydaychallenge.com

dbz4• 16 years ago

Sounds like a great strategy if one only cares about making money and doesn't care about working on any projects, startups, software for companies, ect.

icey4• 16 years ago

The other side of that is that if you don't have to work, you can work on anything you'd like.

dbz4• 16 years ago

It will take years to make 400 projects. Looks like a full time job to me. Allow me to explain....

You make a project today. 1 buck. Another project tomorrow. 2 bucks. Wait a minute. I can't like off of two bucks.....

You will need another job to provide that needed income to live off of. Especially to pay bills. It will take years

chime2• 16 years ago

If you take his definitions of in-crowd vs. normals to be true, the in-crowd has the prerogative to choose energizing startups and work on exciting projects without putting much thought into making money early-on. The normals have bills to pay, kids to send to school, and sick family members to take care. For us normals, money is always a large (though not the only) factor in making decisions that relate to our career, projects, and products.

I would love to leave everything and work on some of my ideas but too many people rely on me to have a stable income at this point for me to just abandon them midstream. This doesn't mean I'm doing nothing. I'm slowly changing my life around so I can get to where I want to be. But at every project I look into, I have to consider how much money I can potentially make and how soon would I see a cash flow. The normals aren't all dreaming of being the next MS/Google. Just like the in-crowd, we want to make good products that users would love. We just have a lot more baggage and need to make sure our dreams don't get in the way of our loved ones' care.

dbz4• 16 years ago

I guess I should have said sounds like a "strategy." It dislike the strategy because it's not why I program. I don't program a million things to make a million dollars. I program because it's a passion, and unless I misinterpreted the meaning of the post, this strategy is...heartless.

I take into account that "in-crowd" has it easy and "normal" doesn't. I could image myself writing a similar article; however, instead of the goal being "make 12,000 a month", the goal would have been "Find followers so that one can make a reputation which will allow one to find a well-liked job (could be continuing to make small apps)" And hell. I'd sure as hell point out that if one attempts to make money from those apps, then one can help subsidize his living costs and manage to raise enough money to send his or her kids to private school!

Sukotto• 16 years ago

There's a third option not mentioned in the article. That's creating a $1/day project, then working to make it a $2/day, then $3/day.

Either through improving the thing you're selling, or by finding better ways to sell it. Take, for example, Patrick@bingocardcreator.com . He seems do have done pretty well following that method.

I don't know if that's any more or less work than building 400 projects, each selling for $1/day though.

maxklein18• 16 years ago

I think that's the first option. Which is focusing on one thing and making it better and making more money from it.

patio112• 16 years ago

I'm confused then, because it seems from your post that you say the first option is difficult unless you're a US-based MIT-educated elite startup founder Twitter-chasing wunderkid with VC money coming out your ears and good writing ability.

At the risk of stating the obvious, I am not a US-based MIT-educated elite startup founder Twitter-chasing wunderkid with VC money coming out my ears. Nor do I think any of these are pre-requisites or, well, even all that helpful in terms of building successful businesses. Some of them even contribute to the pathologies in our industry, like obsessive focus on building products to be used by ourselves rather than reaching out to more diverse groups of customers with desirable properties such as "pays money for software."

levesque• 16 years ago

And being followed on twitter will help you a big deal in growing.

tiffani• 16 years ago

Not necessarily. If you're being followed by 7,000 "people" who really turn out to be just Twitterfeed dumps and folks trying to sell you something, that's a useless set of followers. If you have 1,000 followers where a good portion of them actually interact on Twitter (and with you), I think that's more helpful. I know people with tens of thousands of followers who can't seem to get more than 10 people to retweet any blog post they write, but others with less who seem more influential.

ryanwaggoner2• 16 years ago

This is an interesting post, and I'm eager to hear what other people who have spent more time in the startup scene think of it. Here's my thoughts:

1. I think I've seen the "two groups" that the post talks about, but I have begun to have serious doubts that they're as fatalistic as they're made out to be. For example:

The in-crowd live in the U.S, they attended MIT or Berkeley, they write well, have interesting blogs and are followed by 400 or more people on twitter.

You can't change where you went to school, but you can improve your writing skills, start a blog, and get 400 followers on Twitter. In fact, this is trivial over a period of months. Writing good content is not only for the elite; it's how you become one of the elite ;)

2. If you do a little research up front on the market for whatever you're going to create, you might be able to just create one product rather than 400. It might be more difficult in the beginning, but you just might learn an incredible amount and turn out to be one of the most well-rounded sources of startup insight on HN. See patio11 / Bingo Card Creator for an example :)

3. My main concern would be sustainability; those 150 projects that make you $12k / month aren't going to do so forever. You'll run yourself ragged trying to keep them all together, and at some point, you'd probably be better off with a job. I guess what I'm saying is to try and pick a model that will scale more than $1/day projects will.

In spite of these criticisms, I did enjoy this article for its thought-provoking angle that's very different from a lot of the stuff I read on HN.

maxklein18• 16 years ago

1. It's very very difficult to learn to write well or be interesting. I have many friends and I know that no matter how hard they actually tried, they would not be able to write stuff people want to read. They are good at what they do, but they can't write even if they tried.

2. Creating one product is the route everyone takes by default. Yes, it works, but this is introducing an alternative route

3. Part of the optimisation is focusing on projects that are easy to spin off into new projects. If one project is selling clothes and the next is hospital management software, that's just stupid. If one is an auction management dashboard, the next is a sales management software, then it's easy to adapt. You learn quickly what ideas have generic code bases that are easy to adapt, and what ideas are very specific in their technology and are difficult to adapt.

ryanwaggoner2• 16 years ago

1. You might be right :) I still think more people could do it than think they can. And also, you don't have to write all that well to be popular online. Witness the majority of popular blogs.

2. I guess I'm arguing for fewer (several) as opposed to hundreds. I just wonder if creating 400 projects is sustainable, as well as whether it's the right mindset to have. But on the other hand, I'm guessing that, as you said, most people will hit their income target long before that, and I'd also guess that most people would naturally optimize this kind of strategy and focus on the most successful projects.

3. I'd have liked to see more about this in the article.

alex_c• 16 years ago

those 150 projects that make you $12k / month aren't going to do so forever.

I guess what it really comes down to is how much each project makes over its lifetime, relative to how much time you put into it. Pulling more numbers out of thin air, if it takes one day to push out a project making $1/day (a reasonable assumption, I think, once you've already made 100 of them or so), and if the project's useful lifetime is about 1 year, and if you work 200 days a year (so, 200 projects), that gives me $71000/year. You're not getting rich off this, but you can live comfortably almost anywhere in the world.

Of course, the catch is that the projects should require zero maintenance, otherwise it adds up very quickly.

kiba2• 16 years ago

Wikis are forever sustainable, even if it is horribly outdated.

However, depending on the niche you occupied, you barely get enough money above your domain cost renewal. Beyond a certain point, it is not worth your time to invest in it.

For me, it helps that I can wait a few year before bootstrapping my next website, along with freelance work. That wiki is still earning me money.

phreanix• 16 years ago

Just curious, as someone who is considering starting up a wiki, what is your revenue model? Just ads?

lsc2• 16 years ago

huh. my experience with my own wiki is that you need to watch it, else it will get filled with spam. have you got users doing that?

olalonde• 16 years ago

Although I wouldn't see myself doing 400 "half baked" projects, I understand that it could be a solution for people who are in it for the money. That being said, I definitely agree with the fact that your social network and environment can have a big influence on your success. We don't all have the chance to live in Silicon Valley.

sailormoon• 16 years ago

Ah, that photo brings back memories. That's the keihin-touhoku line in tokyo and believe me, it's an accurate depiction.

cwalcott• 16 years ago

It seems like marketing would still be an issue though. Even to make $1/day, someone has to find your software. If you're not marketing through a blog or Twitter, that leaves advertising. So now in addition to writing good ads, you need to make sure each project is making more than you're spending on advertising, which is a lot of work on its own.

DXL• 16 years ago

I wrote a script sometime ago, which sells about 4 copies a month for $25 each. The only way I marketed was by adding it to directories such as HotScripts. That will you give you some traffic if you're providing a solution in a field that's not highly competitive (a niche). You could try that.

maxklein18• 16 years ago

Actually, it's not. If you have to move 1000 copies of software in a month, then you need to market. If you want to move 1 copy a month, list it on download.com and you will move 1 copy. That's the beauty of the system - it minimises the need for marketing and instead ups the project count to make up for the loss there.

You are basically moving resources from one thing (marketing, promotion) into another (designing generic software, finding new ideas, writing software very fast). The second options are easy for software developers to do compared to marketing.

jacquesm21• 16 years ago

If you write software to move 1 copy per month then you'll be writing software to move 25 copies during the lifetime of that version. It'd be very hard to even support your users.

mixmax• 16 years ago

Assuming a 20 day work month and a 10 hour workday that will give you half an hour a month to work on each of your 400 projects. And assuming (optimistically) that you will spend 2 weeks doing each project it will take 15 years to get to 400.

And that's not counting overhead such as accounting, etc. for all of your projects.

I like the idea of the post, but maybe he took it a bit too far...

maxklein18• 16 years ago

That's the point - you don't start a new project every 2 weeks. You start off with an idea easily adaptable to various scenarios. Then adapt each time, target new people, and observe if the variation makes you required $1 a day. When you have nichified a codebase that nothing more can be squeezed of it, you start on the next.

waterlesscloud2• 16 years ago

So it's not really 400 projects, it's maybe 20 projects optimized in 20 different ways each.

That's a whole different way to look at it.

nfnaaron• 16 years ago

I think the idea is that each project gets an initial small period of launch work, and then after that they're mostly self-sustaining for their economic lifetime. "Optimize for time." In that case, half hour/month may be enough.

The 1$/day and 400/month figures are just for illustration. The idea is to crank on multiple simple things that share characteristics. As you optimize for time, you're also optimizing for "crank," getting better at cranking out simple things.

AmericanOP• 16 years ago

I think the odds of creating 400 money-making projects without one of them becoming a real success are very low.

dbz4• 16 years ago

One of the projects was putting thirty ninja videos on a website. When that project becomes a real success I'll buy you dinner.

mrtron• 16 years ago

Ask a ninja is ridiculously popular and probably started with a bunch of videos.

agbell2• 16 years ago

I think if you try to create 400 projects, most will make 0/day and a couple will make 10/day. Then you optimize those. Slowly you end up with a small number of projects generating a half decent amount money.

This is actually a great way to prevent yourself from choosing a local maximum in the product space. You climb a bunch of hills a little bit.

(edited)

brianobush2• 16 years ago

Over diversification is dangerous too. Jack of all apps, master of none? I like the idea, but the problem with this product space search is that is dead slow. You might want to search like this for a bit and see what takes off, then put more energy into the ones that are doing well.

agbell2• 16 years ago

You are right about the dangers of diversification. You would have to prune down projects as you go or else risk not doing anything well.

However, if the projects are designed to be all up front effort and no ongoing time costs, you can just leave them to languish. I have had things take off in a minor way, long after abandoning them.

aw3c23• 16 years ago

How on earth are you supposed to create and maintain 400 "projects" at once?

brianobush2• 16 years ago

Over time I assume the maintenance/attention would drop off. Though, I could see revenue dropping off too.

thibaut_barrere7• 16 years ago

It all depends on what you put behind the word 'project' (and there's no judgment in my sentence).

For most programmers, a project is something that has already a decent size, is complex to get out and test on the field.

If you think this way, a "side-project" can only be rare.

On the other hand: a friend of mine started exactly the way Max describes a long while back, and currently runs way more than 400 sites/projects.

He is also doing way more than 12k€ per month.

The thing is 95% of his projects wouldn't even catch the 'regular' (if there's such thing) programmer's interest :)

tjogin• 16 years ago

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

flog• 16 years ago

Thibaut, are they all advertising based?

The major pain point for me is payment processing.

axod3• 16 years ago

>> "and currently runs way more than 400 sites/projects."

I'm guessing they're some sort of auto generated content sites ranking and making money off ads?

axod3• 16 years ago

That's the reason this analogy never works. It's like saying

"Could you run 10,000km?"

".. erm no"

"ok, how about can you run 1km?"

"sure!"

"Great! so all you need to do, is do that 10,000 times! easy eh!?"

I have trouble paying more than 1 or 2 projects real attention. And without attention, things die.

Periodic• 16 years ago

Or perhaps it's like saying,

"So you want to visit every major city in Europe. Do you have a year of free time?"

"... erm no"

"Okay, could you maybe take a vacation every other year and visit just one country in Europe?"

"Yeah, I can do that."

"Great, just fit those in when you can for the rest of your life and you'll have done it. Easy, huh?"

YonghoShin• 16 years ago

Maintaining 400 projects is impractical, but it is possible to create 400 micro-businesses that don't need to be taken care of.

For example, you can create a website, write 10 high-value blog articles and make a landing page for a product you want to sell that is related to the articles. (This costs <$10) You have to put in the initial hours to tweak the content, maximize conversions and get good SEO, but after a certain point you can just let go.

Of course, you will get nowhere near the revenue you can get if you put in the hours to actually build the business. But if the purpose of the site is to maintain a certain level of income (like a lifestyle business) and grow no more, then this is definitely feasible.

Jeremy Schoemaker (online marketer) uses exactly this approach. 1) Find a niche, 2) create a product to help people in that niche, 3) create a system that will stay intact even if you don't touch it for a year.

awolf2• 16 years ago

I think the point is that these are the types of projects that you don't support at all.

I've got a few of these on my back-burner right now... $50-$100 /month, 0 effort.

aw3c23• 16 years ago

care to tell us what kind of projects those are?

conesus3• 16 years ago

This is a sure-fire way to create a lot of spam and hack products. The creative element of fostering a project and putting real intellectual effort is gone, for sake of trying to turn a measly profit. There is nothing artistic or genuine about what he is doing here. There is no soul in these products.

Of all the products and software I use, there is soul in every single one of them. Safari, Tweetie/Twitter, Hacker News, iTunes, Adium, Fireworks, TextMate, Sequel Pro, zsh, Firefox, and all of the websites I read. They each have something to be proud of. If you are making software and services that you cannot be proud of and are only there to make you money, then you have chosen a path that is less meaningful and will not bring you the kind of happiness and security that I think most software creators are looking for in building software.

Feeding your family is one thing, but creating and harboring what is effectively spam is not the only way to do it. Labors of love are perfectly capable of making you money, and with the right amount of luck, and much more preparation, you can find yourself rolling in the same dough as these bottom of the barrel money makers that this writer is scheming.

As they say, don't eat your soul to fill your belly.

sabat9• 16 years ago

I'm not sure your conclusion necessarily follows what he's proposing. He's saying: find 400 things that each make $1/day -- it's a thought experiment as much as it is a proposition, BTW.

Some people would certainly make 400 spam blogs or something else equally useless. I don't think that was the author's intention, though.

I wish I could personally say that every single thing I do has my heart and soul in it. I can't, for reasons outside my apparent control. I bet I could find 400 things I like enough to spend time on, and that's enough for me.

conesus3• 16 years ago

My conclusion stems from his primary example: A collection of ninja videos slathered with adsense. It's half-way to a spamblog, but he considers it something to be proud of.

nostrademons2• 16 years ago

Could you find time to spend on 400 things, though?

mahmud• 16 years ago

How many of those proud products have you paid for? :-)

conesus3• 16 years ago

I pay for software. TextMate isn't free. Neither is Fireworks. Safari comes free on Snow Leopard, which isn't free. I paid for NetNewsWire, Tweetie, etc. Of course I pay for software. So do many other people. The folks and companies behind these products make money off their labors of love.

Schlock like this "Videos of Owls littered in ads will net you cash" scheme is a hair away from spam, and is not in HN's best interest, other than to demonstrate that this is the route creative professionals should avoid.

patio112• 16 years ago

I'm not a big fan of creating that many products since it seems like you're forcing yourself into a churn-and-burn corner (and you'll probably be building systemic weaknesses into your model, like being one Googlewhack or AppStore reordering away from penury). However, the core insight about creation being one more process that can be scaled is potentially pretty big.

You can even use it in the service of the one big lovingly-handedcrafted adequately-supported non-sucking product that you're supposedly not capable of building/marketing/etc. For example, everybody and their dog has done "photo sharing website", and if you're coming to the Internet today with photo sharing site #85421 you're probably not going to get too far. However, you could probably do fairly well with the same tech and a focus on wedding photographers. (I happen to know that pond is well-fished, too, just an example.) And you could roll out new facets of your marketing/product creation strategy to target each niche you can identify, big and small.

For example: I very much doubt that I could make a software product about a subject as niche as owls of Asia while still adequately devoting time and resources to supporting/maintaining/improving it, but I'm pretty sure with an established product adding a bit about owls of Asia to the marketing mix is pretty much just a bolt-on-and-go sort of maneuver. (You might ask "Now is there anyone in the world who will actually pay money to do something associated with the owls of Asia?!" I have evidence in the affirmative.)

Edit to add: It seems Max and I independently chose owl-related niches as our practical examples, since he posted before me and I didn't see it. What are the odds, right?

vaksel• 16 years ago

Did you set the "in crowd #" at 400 twitter followers because that's what you have? Because 400 is pretty low, I'd say the number should be closer to 15,000

maxklein18• 16 years ago

15k followers is not in-crowd that's more like the exclusive country club crowd. Most seem to have 60 or 70 followers. The people who are just random programmers and not real marketers seem to have 400-600. But I obviously did not do any serious research on this.

acon• 16 years ago

This sort of reminds me of the old pottery story, where they had one group making which was graded on how many pots they made and another one which was only graded on their best pot. Of course the group which was graded on quantity made better pots in the end.

I really think that by iterating really quickly you will become good faster than if you try to make the perfect thing right away. So don't be paralyzed by trying to achieve perfection; go out and create, and then create some more.

gridspy• 16 years ago

There is a lot of merit in setting a series of easily achievable targets, each one slightly harder than the last.

This is the way I get everything done.

Psyonic2• 16 years ago

Sounds like the proverb taught to GO beginners: "Lose Your First 100 Games As Quickly As Possible"

jacoblyles• 16 years ago

Also works great for Chess. But horrible for Boxing.

dnsworks• 16 years ago

If ever I wanted the ability to down vote a blog submission, it was this one.

jacquesm21• 16 years ago

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 of work, not something to be proud of, that's for sure.

It is very hard to make stuff that does not need maintenance.

   pfn 	        3,203 	        18 	0.56% 	€0.08 	€0.26
   leftsidebar 	68 	        1 	1.47% 	€0.00 	€0.00
   linkbar 	72 	        0 	0.00% 	€0.00 	€0.00
   ccm    	1,012 	        2 	0.20% 	€0.06 	€0.06
   dzleft 	52,480 	        34 	0.06% 	€0.03 	€1.81
   dzlink 	47,804 	        98 	0.21% 	€0.04 	€1.87
   dzmain 	46,950 	        222 	0.47% 	€0.17 	€7.93
   fls 	        90,839 	        459 	0.51% 	€0.50 	€44.98
   gms 	        4,242 	        61 	1.44% 	€0.31 	€1.31
   hst160x600 	30,360 	        54 	0.18% 	€0.20 	€6.13
   hst468x60 	29,992 	        55 	0.18% 	€0.20 	€6.00
   jks 	        359 	        10 	2.79% 	€2.06 	€0.74
   lrmsmall 	90 	        0 	0.00% 	€0.00 	€0.00
   lrmtall 	2,173,823 	2,039 	0.09% 	€0.05 	€112.76
   lrm    	5,209 	        17 	0.33% 	€0.35 	€1.81
   lrmlink 	2,204,212 	2,234 	0.10% 	€0.05 	€115.06
   lrmlinkbar 	24,719 	        109 	0.44% 	€0.15 	€3.64
   mdcl 	84 	        1 	1.19% 	€0.05 	€0.00
   pcs 	        93,418 	        225 	0.24% 	€0.21 	€19.21
   pcslinkbar 	89,701 	        1,206 	1.34% 	€0.43 	€38.88
   stroompunt 	1,039 	        17 	1.64% 	€3.60 	€3.74
   cams   	1,510,897 	5,889 	0.39% 	€0.19 	€289.18
   ztk 	        27,112 	        711 	2.62% 	€3.69 	€100.15
   ztklinkbar 	28,534 	        462 	1.62% 	€1.30 	€37.10

These figures are for the month of January.

I've removed the ones that I consider total failures from this list or it would have been three times as long.

$1 per day per site sounds like a great plan in theory, but in practice it is quite hard to do that across a broad number of sites and not get bogged down in maintenance issues.

Anything with a form will attract spammers more than it will attract users, software will over time stop working because external things it depends on will change and so on.

Passive income is nice, but it is hard to make something that is really passive.

It's not a complete failure, but it definitely wasn't the success I expected either.

This is due to a whole pile of factors, maintenance has already been mentioned, lousy ECPM is another, inability to get any traction with some projects is a third (anybody interested in a complete platform for trading second hand cars or houses ?).

DanielBMarkham• 16 years ago

I'd add something else.

It's all so very easy to say that you can quickly make a buck a day on the internet. "Sure, just throw together some videos of puppies and put some adsense on there" but that's not the reality of the net today.

People and companies are heavily competing on every freaking keyword that anybody might be interested in. That doesn't mean there isn't opportunities, but it's a much longer haul than just brainstorming an idea and creating a simple web site.

jacquesm21• 16 years ago

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 $1 per day sites from the list (or lower) there would be only 5 sites left.

maxklein18• 16 years ago

Yes, if you're going to try to get into adsense or adwords at this point in time you are really behind the curve. The game has moved on - offer something people want. Use your hobby or pick something you can research and offer good info.

For example, I suddenly need to know a lot about tax because with my sudden increase in income I don't know what to do. I would easily pay $50 for a tax-for-dummies who make above $10k a month book. It's a small niche, but it is valuable.

Or healthcare. For sick people, this topic is very important. If there is something that offers me good value for this, I will pay for it.

I am asthmatic, for example. There are very few software out there to help asthmatics.

Don't do the adworse nonsense of years ago. Do tiny projects that help people or solve peoples problems and it will be easy to make your dollar.

maxklein18• 16 years ago

You misunderstand the optimisation principle. A project that makes $1 a day but is impossible to modify to make new projects is not a valid project. A project that requires an hour of maintainance everyday is not a valid project.

The point of my approach is TIME optimisation. For this, you have to automate - it is the first step of time optimisation. If you are not automating, or automation was not built into your plan before you started, you are doing it wrong.

What you have is the first iteration - my method would take all the ones above $1, then optimise the time spent maintaining it till it became minimal. If it were not possible to optimise it in that method, then someone external can be brought in, who maintains it for half the income, giving you absolute free time to make the next project.

I did not speak about bad performers yet - the projects who do not make the required $1. It's not possible to follow this system without hitting some duds. You spend a reasonable amount of time trying to bring it up, if it does not work, you have to get rid of it. You are optimising your time, so you cannot afford to do something that does not warrant the time spent on it.

jacquesm21• 16 years ago

> A project that makes $1 a day but is impossible to modify to make new projects is not a valid project.

Ok, this reduces the number of 'possible projects' considerably.

> A project that requires an hour of maintainance everyday is not a valid project.

Obviously, because at 1 hour of maintenance every day you'd be doing less than 15 projects total if you need some sleep.

But even the most trivial piece of software requires some maintenance. And at 400 projects you can spend no more than half a day per year building and maintaining, and that includes saturdays and sundays. Better hope you're single, if you're not you will be by the end of that year.

> For this, you have to automate - it is the first step of time optimisation. If you are not automating, or automation was not built into your plan before you started, you are doing it wrong.

This more or less limits you to very superficial sites that do nothing but aggregate other content or that are extremly thin variations on a theme.

Which is possible, but then it becomes hard to make that 1$ / day.

> What you have is the first iteration - my method would take all the ones above $1, then optimise the time spent maintaining it till it became minimal.

That sounds very theoretical, I think instead of keeping in the theoretical realm that you should actually do this, and write about how well it works. That would make for some very interesting reading.

> If it were not possible to optimise it in that method, then someone external can be brought in, who maintains it for half the income, giving you absolute free time to make the next project.

Why would they maintain it for half the income, if it was trivial to build they could build it themselves and keep 100%?

> I did not speak about bad performers yet - the projects who do not make the required $1. It's not possible to follow this system without hitting some duds.

Count on the majority, not just 'some'.

> You spend a reasonable amount of time trying to bring it up,

What's a reasonably amount of time here? A day ? There goes at $50 / hour one year of your income, assuming this is not a dud!

Again, I've been trying to do this, yes, using adsense, that old and so 2006 method of making money on small sites.

But I've yet to find something that works better, in spite of trying several different ad networks. And other monetization schemes are a lot more labour intensive.

This is a great idea in theory, but trust me it is very hard to execute in practice.

il2• 16 years ago

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 that do $1 a day on autopilot, your competitors(and big corporations) would already be scaling that model. The truth of the matter is that nothing runs on autopilot for long. Even with SEO, you constantly need to be producing fresh content, building links, and keeping abreast of ranking changes. And most of the time, these kinds of small-time efforts will still fail and lead to making $0 a day.

On the other hand, every millionaire Internet marketer I've ever talked to (and I've connected with many of the big ones) has succeeded by focusing on a single market/product and scaling it up instead of running around from one failed project to the next like a chicken with its head cut off. Oh, and most of these people are "normals"- they don't have popular blogs or lots of Twitter followers, they're quietly grinding every day and making a killing online.

Trust me, taking one project and not giving up until you MAKE IT WORK will be much more profitable in the long run.

Oh, and I've just gotten into AdWords a couple months ago( most of my previous experience has been with social traffic like Facebook) and am doing very well with it, so anyone who tells you it's too late to get in is either a competitor who doesn't want more competition on a traffic source, or doesn't know what he's talking about.

Talk to people who are actually succeeding online about their strategy, and you'll quickly see a pattern emerge. I bet very few of them got rich by making 400 AdSense sites.

richcollins• 16 years ago

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 idea to try something new.

ellyagg• 16 years ago

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.

Alex3917• 16 years ago

"Every millionaire Internet marketer I've ever talked to has succeeded by focusing on a single market/product"

My freshman year of college our rowing coach took us out to the salmon dam on the edge of the lake. He turned to the boat and asked, "How many times do you guys think the salmon try to jump over the dam before they give up?" I can't remember everyone's guesses, but the punchline was basically "They keep trying until either they make it or they fucking die."

This seems to be the ideal strategy for startups. The person who wins isn't the one with the biggest shovel or the one who digs the most holes, it's the person with enough discipline to keep digging in one place with the shovel they have.

sabat9• 16 years ago

* 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.

sherl0ck• 16 years ago

I believe it would be 'made for adsense'

jacquesm21• 16 years ago

'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 wikipedia clones with 6 adense ads per page? That's MFA, but there are lots of other examples.

GFischer• 16 years ago

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 :)

jacquesm21• 16 years ago

You're welcome. If you want more specific info mail me.

iworkforthem• 16 years ago

Pageviews vs earnings ratio seems a bit too low.

jacquesm21• 16 years ago

I couldn't agree more. When I started out I was budgeting the whole thing based on being able to make $0.50 ECPM, that seemed to be reasonable since I can't seem to be able to buy it under a dollar.

This still gives me the feeling that I'm being screwed royally somewhere.

mcdowall• 16 years ago

You have a couple of nice earning Niches there.

Personally from experience the hard work is in the research of finding a micro niche, once you have that nailed down then you quickly understand what topics are likely to be winners and which are to be duds. An understanding of SEO is critical though.

In terms of someone setting up, the barrier to entry may seem minimal but theres nothing like getting out there and giving it a go;

Google Product Search + Market Samurai + Hosting&Domain + X Site Pro + Adwords Account + SEO = Done.

vijayr2• 16 years ago

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)

joelhaus2• 16 years ago

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.

vijayr2• 16 years ago

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.

mattmaroon2• 16 years ago

This article is silly, and just wrong in every way. It totally discounts time spent doing these projects, and totally fails to understand expected value. For instance:

"I wrote a desktop software once, and priced it at $29.90. I sold one copy a month, which was terrible. That's $1 a day. It's really easy as a programmer to do something that makes $1 a day."

I suppose if that desktop software took an hour to make it would be worth it in a few months. More likely it took an amount of time that would better have been spent (from a purely financial perspective) working at Wal-Mart and then investing the funds in an ETF. To make $1 a day ($365/yr) takes only around $4k (what a good programmer earns in <2 weeks) tossed into the market. Thus any project that takes you longer than that for $1/day in return is a waste.

Also even if you assumed every project would net $1 per day, you'd still be better off thinking big. A hit Facebook app, for instance, might make $10,000 a day. (A megahit 10x that.) A good keyword to arbitrage via an affiliate account and AdSense could do the same.

You're far better off taking a 1% shot at $10k/day than a 100% shot at $1. (You're far better off taking a .1% shot.) You might say "well what about variance" but apparently you have the time to create 400 products.

Also, Twitter followers have done little of real value for anyone in terms of making a business profitable. On the list of ways to get customers to your web-based business, Twitter's still pretty far down the chain.

A far better plan would be to try to create one product that makes $1 per person you drive to it. This is doable. Then you can buy users for far less with ads, roll your profits into more ads, rinse, repeat. This is how people like me who rarely if ever use Twitter have made oodles from the web. (I've done this now multiple times, for reference.)

zaidf5• 16 years ago

Matt, a huge part that I think he has left out is the use of outsourcing stuff offshore. A lot of his projects seem to be content plays. You can get lots of content produced offshore for very cheap.

The end result? You can have 5 people working full-time at $500/month each($2500/month), each producing content for 50 of your sites. Now you might wonder how one guy can write content for 50 sites. It's actually not that hard. Give 2 hours per blog post per site. And in a 9hrs day, you can cover 3-4 sites, averaging out to about 2 blog posts/month per site--which can be profitable in the big scheme of things.

When quality is not a huge consideration, you can get a lot of cheap stuff done offshore.

mattmaroon2• 16 years ago

Is he advocating splogging? I didn't gather that at all from his post, and if so that's on par with advocating spamming.

jacquesm21• 16 years ago

I'd still not give you odds on making more than $1 per 'project' per day though.

Factoring in all the costs you'd be very happy to be a bit above break even after a year with tons of 'content' ripped by mfa sites that don't do all the work and that don't invest the money. They'll be making your profit. And at $1 / day per project you're not going to spend any time suing the infringers either.

sshumaker2• 16 years ago

A better approach:

Get a job at at a startup run by those MIT elite. Kick ass and make yourself invaluable. The next time one of the founders starts their own thing, they'll bring you along at the very beginning. Use that role to get more involved with the business and network like crazy.

Wash, rinse, and repeat.

Depending on your effort, by the third time around you should have the connections and experience necessary to do your own startup - get VC funding - and make the deals necessary to give it a good chance at success.

albertni• 16 years ago

Just as a sidenote, there really aren't that many tech startups started by MIT people, at least relative to say Stanford or Harvard.

sshumaker2• 16 years ago

I was referring to the "MIT elite" mentioned in the original link. Basically - if you haven't gone to a school where you were able to make great connections (Stanford, MIT, Harvard), you'll need to make those connections on the job.

thibaut_barrere7• 16 years ago

I have not a huge startup experience (except my first two jobs that were kind of startups), but someone following this track should be careful about avoiding burn-out.

dabeeeenster2• 16 years ago

"The normals lack any of those attributes. They may be 50 years old, or have gone to community college, or may have learned programming on their own, or may come from Bulgaria or some other distant country."

That is, frankly, racist.

sabat9• 16 years ago

Why is it racist?

dabeeeenster2• 16 years ago

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

prawn4• 16 years ago

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.

enriketuned2• 16 years ago

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

prawn4• 16 years ago

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.

stokee• 16 years ago

I actually don't agree with the in-crowd - normal philosophy. As long as someone works hard and gives good focus then the chances of someone being highly successful is pretty good. As I always say, 99% effort, 1% luck.

galactus2• 16 years ago

In short, forget interesting projects, spam and SEO are the way to go :P

maneesh• 16 years ago

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 < 4h/week. The software I wrote can be seen just after the 3m' mark here: 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.

timtrueman• 16 years ago

This advice feels wrong but it reminds of what Jason Fried said at this year's startup school, which I feel is better advice anyways. [I'm probably butchering it but one of the gists of it was] Just get started and practice making money.

http://www.justin.tv/clip/b897875d2e8cd907

VladimirGolovin• 16 years ago

To borrow Warren Buffet's term, the in-crowd are the winners of the Ovarian Lottery, and the normals (with me among them) are the losers.

"I’ve had it so good in this world, you know. The odds were fifty-to-one against me born in the United States in 1930. I won the lottery the day I emerged from the womb by being in the United States instead of in some other country where my chances would have been way different.

Imagine there are two identical twins in the womb, both equally bright and energetic. And the genie says to them, “One of you is going to be born in the United States, and one of you is going to be born in Bangladesh. And if you wind up in Bangladesh, you will pay no taxes. What percentage of your income would you bid to be the one this is born in the United States?” It says something about the fact that society has something to do with your fate and not just your innate qualities. The people who say, “I did it all myself,” and think of themselves as Horatio Alger – believe me, they’d bid more to be in the United States than in Bangladesh. That’s the Ovarian Lottery."

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