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

http://markmaunder.com/2011/its-ok-to-make-an-extra-2k-per-month-if-youre-a-programmer-heres-how/

by mmaunder • 15 years ago

325 173 15 years ago

markmaunder.com

kevinherron• 15 years ago

My back button doesn't work in FF4 on your site but does work in Chrome.

mmaunder7• 15 years ago

OK thanks Kevin. Will check it out.

mmaunder7• 15 years ago

Works for me in FF 4.0.1 on OSX. Clicked the HN link and then back and it works. I haven't done anything sinister, but will try it on a PC as soon as I can find one.

mestudent• 15 years ago

Broken on vanilla Firefox 4.0.1 on ubuntu 11.04 as well

lovamova• 15 years ago

It 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• 15 years ago

Interesting article. Have you done this successfully?

mmaunder7• 15 years ago

Yes, 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.

gierach• 15 years ago

Sorry, what does "repro'd" mean?

thematt2• 15 years ago

What are the addresses for those sites?

OstiaAntica• 15 years ago

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• 15 years 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.

MatthewB3• 15 years 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.

workhorse• 15 years ago

Post a link to a site that you created following this that is making $2k a month.

getsat20• 15 years ago

No 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

toumhi2• 15 years ago

A 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.

swombat• 15 years ago

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.

Homunculiheaded• 15 years ago

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

palish• 15 years ago

But would they pay $2,000 per month?

getsat20• 15 years ago

I believe that most people would be willing to set up an "unfulfilling" side project to generate an extra $2,000 USD/month.

SwellJoe2• 15 years ago

I wouldn't. I'd rather put that time into my fulfilling business. After a year of such extra effort, it'll probably make more than $2000/month difference in my bottom line; though that assumes I have a real business to invest my time in, and that I can afford to work for a year before seeing that $2k (or more) show up.

I have my doubts that yet another generated content spam site would be worth $2k/month, though I'm sure there are a few...I kinda suspect it'd take months of experimentation to actually find one that pays, and keeps paying over a long term. If you only get one $2k month, and it drops like a rock soon after (either after competitors sweep in and rejiggle the same data, or after the data becomes stale and needs more human intervention to update).

Also, ew. I'd feel gross if I were creating spam for a living. I've come upon this kind of site quite a lot when looking at government auctions (which admittedly have horrible sites, when provided by the government), and the level of spam in the industry is just disgusting. Everybody fighting for the same keywords, clogging up google results for the real data, always out of date, often pointing to no-longer existent goods, mingling many types and branches of government (each branch has different requirements for buying from a government auction; even if you qualify to buy at one, you may not qualify to buy at several others) to beef up their listings, etc. When done poorly, it's evil, plain and simple. A low-grade evil, but evil, nonetheless. I don't want that kind of thing on my conscience, and I don't see how anyone could do it well on a few hours a week or month.

clark-kent• 15 years ago

But not when it takes 6 months to get it going. For a 6 month project I would aim higher. How about building a useful app or web based service in 6 months and making some real money from it.

mattdeboard2• 15 years ago

>As the cost...drops, the number of viable niches literally explodes

My God, thank you for the warning. I will be alert for exploding numbers!

barisme4• 15 years ago

This reply is quite hilarious. I'm bursting with laughter.

cromulent• 15 years ago

Obligatory XKCD: http://xkcd.com/725/

rmc4• 15 years ago

This isn't "scraping government websites", this is using your skills as a programmer to manipulate data, to make graphs and visualizations of the data.

uxp2• 15 years ago

This is what I got from the article. data.gov has LOADS of datasets for the USA, as well as hundreds of other APIs from different departments that can be used to retrieve that data in real time.

The problem comes just after you click "download" and realize you have a 600MB XML file listing the Ph levels of groundwater sites around the country for the past 25 years. How in the hell are you going to make that data an interesting draw that users want to read or learn about?

I have no skill for frontend design, but I've recently begun to learn how to display data in an intelligent manner. If anyone is interested, these books have helped me:

Information Dashboard Design: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596100162

Visualizing Data: http://www.amazon.com/Visualizing-Data-Explaining-Processing...

Beautiful Data: http://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Data-Stories-Elegant-Solutio...

lurker194• 15 years ago

The article does recommend buying freelance writing for $10 per page, which is more than $3/hr for the low-complexity writing presumably required. For example, he kind of writing on DMV.org, that just puts some chatty flow between steps in a workflow and around the data.

bobbin_cygna• 15 years ago

> there are more fulfilling ways to make $2k/month, imho

like what?

leon_2• 15 years ago

Hmm, I always assumed you could earn way more with spam.

orijing• 15 years ago

If 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• 15 years ago

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.

patio11• 15 years ago

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.

reedlaw• 15 years ago

What does BCC stand for?

chopsueyar6• 15 years ago

Unfortunately, every time you write a reply, I keep hearing "Hello ladies..." in my head.

nerfhammer• 15 years ago

How do you find liquid affiliate markets?

MatthewB3• 15 years ago

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 would work anymore.

mmaunder7• 15 years ago

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.

MatthewB3• 15 years ago

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.

jhpriestley• 15 years ago

As 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• 15 years ago

"500 Internal Server Error"

jonknee• 15 years ago

I 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• 15 years ago

The 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• 15 years ago

Had 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• 15 years ago

It'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• 15 years ago

In 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• 15 years ago

It'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• 15 years ago

Reminds 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_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.

augustflanagan2• 15 years ago

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.

k33l0r• 15 years ago

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

melvinram• 15 years ago

I'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?

augustflanagan2• 15 years ago

You'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.

_delirium• 15 years ago

I 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.

getsat20• 15 years ago

I've seen 2-4% CTR across my sites. Positioning of your ads matters a LOT.

If you use Wordpress, consider using something like http://www.ctrtheme.com or ProSense.

chopsueyar6• 15 years ago

I have about 5,000 page views per month and make about $50 from adsense.

In April, I had a 1.78% CTR.

The shitty thing is, it is an AJAX app, so there is only the frontpage, and each lookup does not refresh the Adsense ad. The average time on the site is about 12 minutes.

This is also not a very high volume search term. So the upside for me is pretty limited. Even if I ranked #1, ahead of the .gov site, I do not think I would come close to $2,000.

getsat20• 15 years ago

> The shitty thing is, it is an AJAX app, so there is only the frontpage, and each lookup does not refresh the Adsense ad.

It should be pretty simply to reload the contents of your ad block in the "success" callback of your Ajax library... you're probably leaving a ridiculous amount of money on the table.

Two9A• 15 years ago

It's figures like this that make me think I'm not doing very well with my articles site.

0.02% CTR on 50k page views a month; revenue under $1. I guess that's the compromise you make when your niche is involved articles for a technical audience, but is there a way to improve that?

rmc4• 15 years ago

I get about 3,500 pageviews a month, ~ 2.6% CTR with a CPC of €0.10

nl• 15 years ago

I make ~$100-$200/month from < 10,000 pageviews (although not with AdSense).

It's pretty much impossible to claim any CTR or CPC rate is unrealistic because they vary so massively depending on the site, the market and even things like the time of year.

bitwize• 15 years ago

Didn'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• 15 years ago

Indeed he did!

diamondhead• 15 years ago

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.

joshz• 15 years ago

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.

seeingfurther• 15 years ago

This is exactly what findthebest is up to

bobbywilson0• 15 years ago

This 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.

slouch4• 15 years ago

There is much less work involved in maintenance if you setup sites in a way such that users create the content

hugh3• 15 years ago

Theoretically, 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) 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).

MenaMena123• 15 years ago

You 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.

ck24• 15 years ago

I 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).

sliverstorm2• 15 years ago

The 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• 15 years ago

On the other hand, I had a roommate who spent his time criticizing "government handouts" while at the same time using food stamps himself.

crocowhile• 15 years ago

are the food stamps really limited in number??

ck24• 15 years ago

Actually, the amount of paperwork and hassle to apply for foodstamps is crazy. It can be embarrassing because you have to provide so many details about your life and give them legal permission to dig into all kinds of records.

I realize the need to prevent fraud but there has to be some kind of balance to allowing someone in a bad situation to keep a little dignity.

Then there is the craziness that you can buy things like candy with foodstamps but not vitamins.

anto1ne• 15 years ago

1. 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

getsat20• 15 years ago

You 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

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• 15 years ago

It 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.

nostrademons2• 15 years ago

Can 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• 15 years ago

One 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.

chopsueyar6• 15 years ago

Where do you find clients willing to pay $100/hr for sidework?

joshcrews• 15 years ago

Ruby development

barisme4• 15 years ago

I demo'd some apps I made at a local group and before I knew it they were beating the doors down. Job offers too, but I turn those down.

gitah• 15 years ago

I'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• 15 years ago

I'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.

edward2• 15 years ago

I made sites that list British post offices and post boxes:

http://edwardbetts.com/postoffices/ and 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

a5seo2• 15 years ago

You 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...

edward2• 15 years ago

Thanks, I had no idea.

barisme4• 15 years ago

I 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• 15 years ago

How did you get those sites known?

getsat20• 15 years ago

Either 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.

chopsueyar6• 15 years ago

What about arbitrage between Facebook ads and Adsense?

Has anyone successfully sent Facebook traffic via paid ads to their adsense site profitably?

michael_dorfman• 15 years ago

My experience is that it is very difficult to send traffic via Facebook ads to anywhere outside of Facebook.

mleonhard• 15 years ago

It'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• 15 years ago

Feedjit

http://www.techstars.org/mentors/mmaunder/

SeoxyS• 15 years ago

This 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_2• 15 years ago

don'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• 15 years ago

Do an extra 20 hours of work per month?

jeffreyrusso• 15 years ago

This 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• 15 years ago

I 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• 15 years ago

Nice, 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• 15 years ago

Dudes 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.

rs• 15 years 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• 15 years ago

This 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.

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

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