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Comment by maxklein | Hacker News Reader

Yes, if you're going to try to get into adsense or adwords at this point in time you are really behind the curve. The game has moved on - offer something people want. Use your hobby or pick something you can research and offer good info.

For example, I suddenly need to know a lot about tax because with my sudden increase in income I don't know what to do. I would easily pay $50 for a tax-for-dummies who make above $10k a month book. It's a small niche, but it is valuable.

Or healthcare. For sick people, this topic is very important. If there is something that offers me good value for this, I will pay for it.

I am asthmatic, for example. There are very few software out there to help asthmatics.

Don't do the adworse nonsense of years ago. Do tiny projects that help people or solve peoples problems and it will be easy to make your dollar.

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There's a contradiction in there somewhere.

The reason I said maintenance is important is because the game is 'moving on' all the time. So, whatever you make today that will make you your $1/day will not continue to do so for a long time. You'll be in a new ratrace, but one of your own making. The one where you will have to replace old stuff with new stuff fast enough to make up for the churn.

The $50 tax-for-dummies book sounds like a great plan, but it would take a man-year or more to write that book before you'd pay $50 for it.

It had better not be a small niche then!

How could software help asthmatics ?

The 'adworse nonsense' is still the easiest way to monetize 'tiny' things.

The game is moving, but since your target is so low at $1, you can let your projects not be cutting edge, so long they are meeting their target.

You need to design your projects right and since you know you don't have time to waste, you need to design in an ever-green manner. Don't do things that will flame for a month and burn out - maintainance every 6 months should be the aim.

For asthmatics for example, we need to track lung capacity (there is something you get given that gives you this info when you blow in), and we need to keep track of the spray so it does not finish. Additionally, there are certain excercise one should do to improve lung capacity (like running). If I made such a simple tracker as a start (daily vs capacity), I could start selling this quickly.

I could then use the same tracker as a weight tracker. Or study tracker. Stuff like that. So the new projects are just offshoots of the original project.

As they say, there's an app for that:

http://www.iphonefootprint.com/2008/09/health-information-tr...

I can't find a web version of it off hand, so let's say it doesn't exist yet and you are now going to build it to prove this method works ?

You'd have to keep track of your time to calculate your hourly wage, that would be an interesting experiment.

I'm really curious how that will work out.

I would be pretty interested in seeing quantified results as well.

I'm not going to build this because I looked up asthma search count a while back and didn't like what I saw. There is another chronic disease with far more searches and a lot more competing software. I'll be building for that soon, and though I won't explicitely say the name anyone who is interesting in pursuing the niche should feel free to.

But following on your own theory, if it is trivial to clone the concept on to something related then you'd have to do both anyway. After all, changing the concept and marketing it for two or more different diseases is exactly what you are advocating, and doing it only for a single disease would be the opposite!

Yeah, but I'm not going to waste my time on an area with no market, even if it just a little time. I start off with the high market thing, if it works I can modify to enter the smaller markets, but I test on the most likely first.

So how are you monetizing if not via adsense?

I would imagine that he's selling information, i.e. they type in a credit card number or click a PayPal link on his website, and he sends them a PDF or .doc containing some information that is relevant to them.

@maxklein Would love some feedback on a specific case too. The tax-for-dummies book idea has value, but it doesn't fit into the "optimize for time" strategy you advocate.

For instance, while working in tax law for a number of years, I created an annotated Google Custom Search Engine for my own research purposes.

As evidence that it's an under-served niche, the website where it's published was cited by a UCalifornia Law Library and a number of other related websites as a useful resource for tax research purposes.

Besides adsense, how would you generate income for this?

I don't really know how ads work, so I've never actually used them. A tax search engine seems to me like an ideal place for affiliate selling of books on tax, and ebooks that other people are selling.

You have the terms people are searching for, just match a book to the term and offer to sell to them. Something like that, but I have no idea about the market.

From your article: I once made a video hosting website and put 30 ninja videos on it. Adsense money was about $1 a day.

From your post above: I don't really know how ads work, so I've never actually used them.

Huh? Which one is true?

Use as in optimised for them and actually made an effort to learn how to make things work with adsense. What I did on the video site was embed the code google gave and that's it. That does not mean I know anything about adsense.

Are you still making 1$ off your site today?

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