
How to become rich even if nobody is following you on Twitter - maxklein
http://blog.cubeofm.com/how-to-become-rich-even-if-nobody-is-followin
======
patio11
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?

------
conesus
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.

~~~
sabat
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.

~~~
conesus
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.

~~~
waterlesscloud
I think he considers it a way to make money.

------
mattmaroon
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.)

~~~
zaidf
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.

~~~
jacquesm
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.

~~~
zaidf
It's totally doable IMO. A friend of mine who knows nothing more than how to
setup a wordpress(answer: get her bf to do it) wrote 20 posts and forgot about
the blog. She gets ~$50 check from google every month. She was laughing about
it.

The life time value of her blog post is pretty cool!

I don't know if it scales(I'm presuming it does from posts like the OP). But
hey I like the initial numbers.

~~~
jacquesm
Cool!

But to prove it works you need to scale it, and that's where the hard part
sits I think.

I fell for it in just that way.

This all started with <http://www.clustercompute.com/>

A small site about a project that I built years ago.

I rebuilt it using drupal, and the template had a nice spot for a google ad in
it so I thought oh well, whatever, let's do that.

To my surprise it made some money! Hey I thought, that's easy, let's do that
some more. And that's when I ran in to the statistics of the thing, when the
numbers get larger the payout seems to drop considerably.

$50 per month is great as 'found' income, and as long as your site is small
you'll be able to stay under the radar of the cloners, but as soon as you
start getting significant traffic (as in show up on alexas 100,000 or so) then
you're going to be cloned left right and center.

You'll be competing with your own content on 20 other sites.

Even on HN we get plenty of 'blogspam' submissions that are basically nothing
but the original article quoted with a one line addition (if that).

~~~
zaidf
I don't think the idea is so much to grow that one site's revenue from $50 to
$500 by making it a full fledge property that attracts attention.

The idea is to build 400 _small_ $50 properties that stay low-key and bring in
a small but sustained amount of rev each month.

From your effort, it seems like you tried to make one large property which I
can see as being harder to pull off for _this_ particular strategy.

~~~
jacquesm
No, on the contrary, I tried exactly that, but it seems that some stuff
develops traction and the majority simply bombs.

So very few sites land on that '$1/day' target.

Maybe it's my lousy aim!

------
Sukotto
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.

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

~~~
patio11
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."

~~~
maxklein
I'm not saying it is impossible to write and sell good software and keep
improving it. I'm saying that a lot of people have tried it and do not have
the neccessary advice and reach to make the software successful.

Look at all the Review my startup posts. I have only ever seen a handful
actually become successful. Most just seem to fade off.

I'm not saying you NEED to be from that group to do it successfully. But it is
difficult. What you did, has not been replicable by most of the other people
here.

~~~
javery
That's because most of the Review my startup posts are really "check out my
weekend project I threw together". You can get all the advice you need through
great books and online content, and reach is simply a matter of building up
your online presence through a good blog, open source projects, etc.

------
ryanwaggoner
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.

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

~~~
kiba
That's pretty much it.

------
icey
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.

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

~~~
maxklein
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.

~~~
javery
So these might be great ways to make a little bit of money, but they don't
really create value (except for the theme). Creating a successful startup
should be more about creating value then making money, if you create value the
money will come. When you think about success do you define it as money or
building something people use and love (and also makes you money). If you want
to make a cheap buck there are plenty of ways to do it without providing
value. Go create a trash blog on a popular keyword, become a domain squatter,
etc. But I want to create value and build something people will use and enjoy
using.

~~~
philfreo
Agreed - these ideas are not a startup - they don't create real value as a
company. However the idea of making passive income is very attractive to many
programmers, and creates an opportunity to have time to work on something big.

------
aw3c2
How on earth are you supposed to create and maintain 400 "projects" at once?

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

~~~
thibaut_barrere
Those I know revolve around affiliation, alternate search engines, porn/erotic
stuff, niche technological forums and such topics :)

Not by him but in the same kind of idea, here's an example:

<http://fastpowertools.com/>

A while back I know the owner of this site did a few hundreds $ per month. It
was really an eye-opener to me :)

Of course this requires SEO skills to earn more than a few bucks, that need to
be learn on the way.

I started a couple of sites like this one, and although I earned a bit of
money, I wanted to try sites that are really useful to myself, which I'm
focusing on now.

I think it's always good to remind myself that between what would look a half-
spammy site to a regular programmer, and the typical too complex projects
regular programmers would start, there's a sweet spot in the middle.

~~~
aw3c2
That site looks like a shady search engine spam site. I could never earn money
like that and feel good about myself.

~~~
thibaut_barrere
Well, it's a fun experiment per se - but for one it's hard to really get past
the few bucks stage here.

I do understand what you say, that said. My overall feeling is that these kind
of sites are not really "changing the world", if I dare.

So now I'm trying to solve real issues I have. It's more fun for me!

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

~~~
sshumaker
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.

------
acon
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.

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

~~~
jacoblyles
Also works great for Chess. But horrible for Boxing.

~~~
Psyonic
You certainly do have to modify that advice to avoid serious injury, but from
my limited boxing experience I'll say that nothing teaches you to keep your
hands up like getting smacked around a few times.

------
jacquesm
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 ?).

~~~
il
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.

~~~
ellyagg
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.

~~~
jacquesm
Interesting! So, what's the state now, has he been able to continue that
trend? Does he have maintenance issues yet? Or does it seem like his model
will scale forever?

My 'little projects' make about 800 euros or 1200 dollars per month, so that's
about 1/5th of what your friend is doing, or rather was doing when he quit to
start working full time.

I'm not saying it's a total failure, but it's not the success I'd hoped for
either. And, to be honest at $6,000 per month I'd probably still not be too
happy about it, but that's simply because I figured I'd be doing much better
when I started out. (I already had a $10,000 per month project with 0
maintenance to tide me over while doing this, if it weren't for that I
wouldn't have made it this far).

If he's managed to take $1 / day with 0 input from now forward then he's done
very well, but from a business point of view investing 2 to 3 years and
getting to $6000 (or $1200 as in my case) still does not count as time well
spent.

For instance, if I had spent that time consulting it would have brought a
multiple of that (but I'd have to continue to consult, which is of course the
whole point of this exercise).

~~~
prawn
This is a standard guy with no real experience and no programming experience
getting to $72k/yr after investing some time. Not quite living the dream, but
it's not awful either given that he may not have had some outrageous education
or experience and is now getting passive income that he can gradually build
on.

I think anyone here with some general startup knowledge/ability (e.g., can buy
a domain, set up hosting, write HTML, write content, etc) could probably build
up a passive $50/day source to give them a bit of a buffer to create bigger
projects. Or they should at least be trying it to see if they can pull it off.

------
agbell
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)

~~~
brianobush
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.

~~~
agbell
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.

------
prawn
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.

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

~~~
prawn
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.

~~~
enriketuned
Thank you very much for this precise and very helpful answer!

------
maneesh
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.

------
VladimirGolovin
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."_

------
cwalcott
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.

~~~
maxklein
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.

~~~
jacquesm
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.

------
vijayr
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)

~~~
joelhaus
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.

~~~
vijayr
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.

------
dbz
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.

~~~
chime
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.

~~~
dbz
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!

~~~
maxklein
One of the reasons I write now is to grow my popularity, so that one day I
will have enough reach to be able to build something big and grand and people
will actually notice.

~~~
jfornear
Why do you have to have reach in order to build something big and grand? Your
reach has no bearing on the quality of your product! The idea is to build
something so great that others will talk favorably about it regardless of what
you say.

~~~
coryrc
Except for projects that require a large userbase before it is useful
(auctions, dating sites, etc). Then, a large following can be the jumpstart
you need.

------
mixmax
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...

~~~
maxklein
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.

~~~
waterlesscloud
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.

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

------
timtrueman
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>

------
olalonde
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.

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

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

~~~
sabat
Ask a Ninja is so popular that he/they (I'm unclear) appeared alongside a
bunch of stars in SF recently -- in honor of Conan O'Brien, whom I presume was
there as well. Holy cow.

------
stokee
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.

------
vaksel
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

~~~
maxklein
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.

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

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

------
dabeeeenster
"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.

~~~
sabat
Why is it racist?

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

~~~
maxklein
A bulgarian with bad english is very distant from the silicon valley
connections.

