

Creating a Small Website to Earn Passive Income: Second Attempt - toumhi
http://sparklewise.com/?p=1104

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Shenglong
Passive income is a funny phrase... I've tried it before too, but always end
up pouring more time and energy into it than I first intend. At first it's "I
need to put time into this to get it started, then it'll be all good."

When it's generating income, the question becomes "can this be scaled to make
even _more_ money?" Then we adapt, A/B test, work promotion channels, obsess
over page rank, refine analytics... ugh.

I wish you luck :)

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euroclydon
Yeah, I've spent 80 hours solid hours on my little micro-web-business, and
with ~1500 monthly visitors and 15 sales over three months, I've only made
$206.

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aaronblohowiak
Spend 200 on ads, if you make > $206, repeat. 1% conversion is pretty good for
only 80 hours.

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fgblanch
Just one comment. You should not put the green color when the BMI is below
average. That could make people think that their correct weight is when they
are too skinny. I think that this is not a good thing for the people who are
worried for their bmi.

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fgblanch
Apart from that it looks great :)

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toumhi
I hadn't realized that. I got several comments because of other color
problems. Other people have told me that they thought there was a problem
because of the result in red text (it's always red). So you're skinny uh? :-)
Thanks for the feedback!

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funthree
Red should probably be on both ends of the scale, with green in the middle.
Also I had to go and convert stuff, but obviously not aimed at Americans.

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chopsueyar
Good luck to you. In my personal experience, many Clickbank products are
simply garbage.

I had an Adwords account banned because of a Clickbank product. What was this
controversial product?

Instructions for building a chicken coop. There are more "legitimate"
affiliate companies you may want to try. Amazon, Commission Junction, etc.

I am no longer able to use Adwords...ever.

[UPDATE]

I have also had Facebook Advertising suspended because of Clickbank products,
too.

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Tichy
I don't know Clickbank, but in general it seems very difficult to make money
with affiliate sales - unless you earn a lot with every sale.

That is just my impression. On the other hand, AdWords just keep chugging
away, getting better and better. Especially for this beauty/health related
site there could be expensive keywords. There will probably be ads for silly
fat burner things, cosmetic surgery, and so on. I suppose the more scammy the
ad, the more expensive.

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chopsueyar
I actually had advertised on Facebook Ads, a Clickbank product that was
converting 1 in 20 (5%). But the ad was suspended by Facebook after 1 day
because of the product, not the ad.

Also, do you mean Adsense?

I still have my Adsense account and generate enough for some beer money each
month.

But if I wanted to pay Google to advertise a site through PPC, I am banned for
life.

Stange that Google won't take my money, but is happy to write me checks.

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Tichy
Yes, sorry, I meant AdSense.

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prknight
More ideas Rank it then sell it to someone who can do something useful with
it, such as a fitness coach/company or any other interested health related
org.

Or build up a list and instead of trying to monetize immediately provide tips
to get a healthier bmi, then offer products or services after building up a
relationship with the listmembers.

Or partner up with someone who is a coach or has value to offer to people who
are interested in improving their bmi.

All three of these are more interesting and likely more profitable than trying
to push affiliate or cpa type offers straight up to your visitors.

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toumhi
Yeah it corresponds to what I've been reading lately on customer acquisition:
build the list!

Very nice ideas on how to take it to the next level, thanks!

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chopsueyar
I was looking at flippa.com for recent sales, and I saw a site that had sold,
claiming to make over $3,000 per month in Adsense revenue.

What is the site about?

Outback Steakhouse Coupons.

It did rank number 1 in Google search results, so I believe it to be possible.

Did it offer coupons of any kind?

Nope.

It seems the less complex the idea, the more profitable it is.

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sandycheeks
Up until about 3 or 4 years ago it was fairly easy to pick an affiliate
product and then make a website and get traffic for it that converted with a
positive ROI.

It was basically an arbitrage opportunity in an unbalanced market.

Now that the market is more balanced, it is necessary to have the traffic
first (usually by providing engaging content) and then find affiliate
marketing programs to successfully monetize that existing traffic. More often
than not, selling advertising on a website pays better than affiliate
programs.

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Kilimanjaro
Make a 'Celebrity BMI' facebook or iphone app and go viral in no time.

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brohee
Don't forget to include athletes in the list so everyone can see how retarded
BMI is.

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roel_v
What's your background - software or design? Did you do the design yourself?

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toumhi
Hey roel, I'm a software developer. I outsourced the design through Odesk (for
something like 200 euros). You have to test a few designers to find one you
like but it's so worth it not to spend tons of time myself to end with a
crappy design anyway :-)

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p4bl0
This also means that you have to invest 200€ in addition to the time spent
coding it and to the hosting+domain fees in order to get things started.
Considering the goal you expressed (making passive money), why was this your
choice compared to spend less money at first, code it and just make it
functional (not beautiful), and only if it works or show signs that it will,
then spend the 200€ (or even more then) on the design?

(In case it needs to be said: I'm not saying you made a wrong choice, I'd
really like to know/understand why you chose to go this way :-)).

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roel_v
Apart from having a landing page and trying to get it ranked for certain
terms, I don't think you can validate an idea without being able to show/tell
people what it will look like. The quality of the product will be judged upon
what it looks like, if I made a 1995's style white page with just two form
fields and a 'submit' button, that couldn't be used to validate the idea with.

In my mostly-unqualified-to-comment-opinion, that is.

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raivo
Yeah, that's what I did initially with my "daily exercise you can do at work
email" site.

I decided to spend a minimum amount of time on it to just test it out: just a
form and a little description. The only decoration was that the text was
centered and navy :)

Results: only 4 sign ups over 3 months..mostly from friends and family.

Then I made a nicer design, added content, and voila got about 30 sign ups in
about 1 month through google search results. Added benefit is that now I'm not
embarrassed to promote the site which of course has yielded many more sign
ups.

To sum up: an effort invested in design pays off since good looks provide a
hint of legitimacy. Generally speaking :)

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p4bl0
Thanks for the answers.

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wlievens
_Votre IMC est NaN_

Input validation would be nice.

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Hisoka
Have you thought about expanding the scope and making this into a possible
larger business? It seems you could provide calculators for other stuff too
like calories, cholesterol, etc

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toumhi
Yeah that's true but I chose the domain specifically to calculate the BMI
(calculerimc.com -> "bmi calculator").It could still potentially accomodate
more calculators though. For now, I want to build traffic to "BMI calculator"
keywords and then possibly branch out to more calculators.

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somedude1234abc
You should look up some more seo tricks to get your site more popular!

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toumhi
SEO is hard, what tricks do you have in mind? For now my SEO strategy is to
contact people who have fitness related blogs and fitness related link lists
and get my site in there. Also I could build more content with a blog for
example. But tricks? :-)

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grecy
spend a few hours reading around reddit.com/r/seo In the last few days I have
learnt a lot.

