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



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

"Could you run 10,000km?"

".. erm no"

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

"sure!"

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

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


Or perhaps it's like saying,

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

"... erm no"

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

"Yeah, I can do that."

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


Apart from the fact that then, you're not visiting them all on a single trip, so by the time you get to the 5th or so, you can't remember the 1st any more (If you don't pay projects attention, they die).


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 :)


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


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.


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


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!


What I wouldn't give for a way to filter all sites like that from search engine results ;)


I would pay for that as well :)

Do you know of projects that achieve that correctly ?

I know about custom google search engines with all the big retail stores removed, for instance.


Is there a generic webapp (something like OSCommerce) that can automatically create an affiliate store like the one you linked when supplied with a list of item names or URLs?


Search for "affiliate store script" and I think you should find some.


Thibaut, are they all advertising based?

The major pain point for me is payment processing.


nope: it's really a mix of affiliate/commissions, regular ads and micropayments (allopass).


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

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


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

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


care to tell us what kind of projects those are?


iPhone apps. 2 of 3 of them use the standard free+ads, paid+features model. The other, my most successful, is strictly paid at $1.99.

They were a lot of work up front and some have required minimal maintenance- but supporting them hasn't even taken up even 2% of my coding time in the past year.


How many hours did you spend making them?


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


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

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

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

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




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