
It’s OK to make an extra $2k per month if you’re a programmer. Here’s how. - mmaunder
http://markmaunder.com/2011/its-ok-to-make-an-extra-2k-per-month-if-youre-a-programmer-heres-how/
======
swombat
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.

~~~
mattdeboard
>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!

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

~~~
mattdeboard
Thanks, I had plenty of upvotes until you guys started replying.

~~~
barisme
My first time being downvoted, I think. Humor falls flat == bad. Got it. Sorry
for dragging you down with me.

------
bobbywilson0
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.

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

~~~
hugh3
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).

~~~
slouch
I agree with what you have said, here. There is definitely money in forums,
and this is surely why I have seen motorcycle.com buy up lots of forums over
the passed couple years.

You describe my biggest hit; people searching for something, finding my site
and writing a post or a reply that helps generate more search traffic. I don't
have to police much since the sites are very focused (not forums).

------
tptacek
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
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
What does BCC stand for?

~~~
zitterbewegung
Bingo Card Creator his website. See <http://www.bingocardcreator.com/>

~~~
lurker19
Patio is SEO incarnate. I can't even say he "struck again" with this organic
link, because he doesn't strike, he just _exudes_ SEO with every fiber of
being and press on his keyboard.

------
jeffreyrusso
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
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.

------
MatthewB
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.

~~~
mmaunder
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.

~~~
jhpriestley
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.

~~~
ebiester
Here's the question... would you pay for better information? Perhaps one with
an encyclopedic knowledge that was constantly expanding, say an eHow with
depth.

~~~
Silhouette
> Perhaps one with an encyclopedic knowledge that was constantly expanding,
> say an eHow with depth.

We already have one of those: it's called the World Wide Web.

If only bottom-feeders could stop getting in the way of navigating it, we
could get back to answering useful questions with a quick Web search the way
we used to.

------
edward
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

~~~
a5seo
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...

~~~
edward
Thanks, I had no idea.

~~~
getsat
Um, yeah, I would edit those URLs out before the edit window expires. Google
will kill your account.

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

~~~
getsat
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

~~~
toumhi
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.

~~~
getsat
That is true, but if the penalties were severe, you wouldn't have Monster,
Trovit, Juju, Indeed, SimplyHired, etc. all reposting the EXACT same job and
all ranking nice and high.

Autoblogs work entirely on copied content and do REALLY well for how little
work they require to setup.

~~~
toumhi
That's true but it still doesn't hurt your own site IMHO. Copying site would
be way below you in rankings (especially since Panda update it seems). Whether
it's possible to make an autoblog work is a different matter.

------
martingordon
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..._

~~~
caf
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."_.

------
ck2
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).

~~~
sliverstorm
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.

~~~
crocowhile
are the food stamps really limited in number??

~~~
ck2
Yup, there is a limited budget and if things get bad enough in a state they
will even limit them to only people who have disabilities. It's rare but has
happened.

Then there is the craziness that you are immediately ineligible for foodstamps
the very day you get a job, regardless if you do not get a paycheck for a
couple more weeks.

------
augustflanagan
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.

~~~
melvinram
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?

~~~
augustflanagan
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.

~~~
danneu
Just for fun, I'll throw in my own stats: I make $650/mo from 4,000,000
pageviews. However, the low rate is easily understood because I run a forum.

------
OstiaAntica
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
The ??? part of his profit formula—the blogging and marketing—is a part-time
job on its own.

Regardless, 150,000 hits per month is unrealistic.

~~~
MatthewB
Exactly. A website like this won't just start getting a ton of search traffic
overnight. It takes a lot of effort building links before the site will see
any traffic. This is definitely not a part-time gig.

~~~
jshen
This is true. I run a community/blogging site for fun, not profit called
yakkstr.com. There are about 50 regular users and it currently has around 5k
posts. I mention it because it's a good counter example. I've done no link
building, and I get very little search traffic. Maybe 50 visits per day.
Occasionally someone will post about a product, instead of their relationship
drama, and one girl posted about "mio liquid". That post gets about 2 hits a
day from google. We can extrapolate from this, 1000 pages like this would get
around 2000 hits a day and from my expeience that would earn about $1.50 a day
from ads.

~~~
getsat
> I've done no link building

You have 1,211 backlinks.

You have no meta descriptions on any of your pages. The links to your content
pages (e.g., <http://yakkstr.com/posts/3635-Cute-Friday>) aren't inside a
H1/H2 tag on your index pages. You _are_ letting Google crawl/index your tag
pages (pointless/bad). Your robots.txt isn't pointing to a sitemap. Are you
using Google webmaster tools?

Get rid of the /posts/N-title and just roll with /title, if possible.

Set up a RSS feed and add OpenSearch.

You have a lot of on-site SEO work to do. :)

~~~
tlrobinson
What resources do you recommend for learning more about SEO?

~~~
getsat
I'm by no means an expert, though I've worked with experts and picked up some
stuff from them. The rest I learned from Google and various forums:

<http://www.google.com/search?query=on-page+seo>

<http://blogs.sitepoint.com/ultimate-seo-checklist/>

[http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/search-engine-
optimization-3...](http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/search-engine-
optimization-3/faq-search-engine-optimization-182915.html)

Basically, SEO comes down to having awesome content, identifying it properly
on your site, and getting other people to link to it.

What is proposed in the OP's link is _NOT_ impossible as the various
detractors in this thread would have you believe, but it _IS_ a lot of work.
The tech stuff is easy, consistently building out your backlinks is the
hardest part. If you're lucky, they'll start to grow on their own and you have
100% passive income.

~~~
jshen
I didn't mean to imply that it's impossible, but that it is a LOT of work.
Becoming good at SEO and marketing, then executing a good plan, is a lot of
work. My site was intended to be an example of not doing that. Doing that
means trading a lot of time that could be spent learning ... I don't know,
machine learning or something. Is that worth maybe 2k a month? Depends on the
person.

But the OP made it sound easy. It's not easy.

~~~
getsat
As I stated here [1], It's definitely not easy, though I've found the only
difficult part to be getting initial traffic and consistently building high
quality backlinks. It's not something that can be automated, but it can be
outsourced.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2593650>

------
thinkalone
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...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/a74ba/not_an_adsense_millionaire_but_i_make_upwards_of/)
(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.

------
hxf148
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.

------
bitwize
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
Indeed he did!

------
antirez
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.

------
joshz
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.

------
tropin
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!

------
gitah
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
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.

------
jonknee
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.

------
kungfooey
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.

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

~~~
barisme
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.

~~~
chopsueyar
Are you in a metropolitan area?

Care to describe what type of apps you demo'ed? Language(s) used?

------
chopsueyar
What about arbitrage between Facebook ads and Adsense?

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

~~~
michael_dorfman
My experience is that it is very difficult to send traffic via Facebook ads to
_anywhere outside of Facebook_.

------
rs
>> 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.

------
anto1ne
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

~~~
getsat
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.

------
mleonhard
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
Feedjit

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

------
SeoxyS
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_
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.

------
guynamedloren
Interesting article. Have you done this successfully?

~~~
mmaunder
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
Sorry, what does "repro'd" mean?

~~~
thematt
Reproduced

~~~
wyclif
"Reproduce" is only two more characters than "repro'd." I can see why he was
thrown off by that. C'mon now.

------
SatvikBeri
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.

------
cowkingdeluxe
Do an extra 20 hours of work per month?

------
tluyben2
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?

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

~~~
mmaunder
OK thanks Kevin. Will check it out.

~~~
mmaunder
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.

~~~
stevelosh
Doesn't work for me either. FF 4.0.1 on OS X.

I have Pentadactyl installed -- maybe that's causing an issue?

~~~
mmaunder
OK repro'd it after installing Pentadactyl. Thanks guys, working on a fix now.

------
seeingfurther
This is exactly what findthebest is up to

------
MenaMena123
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.

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

~~~
orijing
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.

------
diamondhead
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.

------
MikeCapone
"500 Internal Server Error"

