Suggestions?
How do you go about setting up an LLC from abroad (like you in Japan), and was it the sort of thing that could be done on a shoestring budget?
Short version: You can get an American LLC created while living on the far side of the moon for a few hundred bucks, but I'd suggest waiting until you have a compelling reason to create one. I have not yet had a compelling reason. That might change in the upcoming year, but for the last 3.5 years, I've used the US'/Japan's most common business structure: sole proprietorship.
If you still haven't made an LLC, that assumption was clearly wrong, and the barrier I'd had to getting started is illusory. It's time to get to work!
Last question for you-- did you have to register your sole proprietorship with anyone or can you pretty much just make a website and start selling your software?
My instinct would be to get started now. Complicating factors may include: product/Svc liabilities, IP rights/protection, your bookkeeping system, local rules & restrictions.
Second, sell a killer screencast or e-book. You'd need to actually be good at making one of these, of course, and have a very good presentation. If you have domain specific knowledge, though, you may have something valuable.
Thanks for providing a spark of inpiration here! When I was in college I earned extra money teaching private guitar lessons. When I finally moved on a student of mine was kind enough to photo copy and hand me to a transcription of every_single_lesson I'd given them over three years. This stack of paper has been sitting on my shelf for nostalgic purposes only ... until now.
Hit me up at contact[@]bitbuffet[.]com if you wanna give it a spin!
I'll definitely look into Google Checkout though, its probably a great option for selling ebooks like you said.
The hard part is identifying the niche and being patient enough to see it through. A lot of people seem to think they can setup a sales page, put the buy now button on it, and start making $500/mo in 7 days. It doesn't usually work that way.
Its really not quantity! This is a market of quality. Just look through clickbank's affiliates for ideas for crap landing pages and crap ebooks (for the most part, spare maybe ~10).
Good sample pages, good outline, no boring plain black and white text, and connect with what your clients really need. Create a wiki/forum or something for registered users to access. The book isn't the only part... you want to build a community (elo adsense!)
This attitude is more obvious with screencasts. Even 30 minute screencasts can sell OK at $9.. and the amount of effort to put that together is far less than even a, say, 25 page e-book. You just need to hit the right stuff.
All that said, my basic investigations show that in the general programming world, books of < 100 pages tend to go around $9, books of over 200 pages tend to be > $20. But this is all very arm-wavey.
I did this when I was tight on cash, since it can usually be done in a weekend: research a local group of businesses (ie. dentists or furniture stores) using Google Maps and grab all of their info. See which businesses don't have websites - and if they do check out how they look/work.
For the companies that didn't, I'd write a simple sales letter offering a discounted website. Something like the client that originally bought the site ended up bailing near the end, but I got a deposit out of them so I'm selling this site for cost. Since the other customer already paid (say, $1000), and costs were $1500, I can give you the site for $500.
That site is really just a cheap TemplateMonster design ($40-50) and once I get the payment I'll send over a word doc requesting all of the info they want for the pages and all the media they want uploaded. Probably a good 6-10 hours of work, for a decent profit (I typically charged them around $800 for the site).
Once completed you sell them on hosting (grab a VPS for $30/mo. and charge them $50/mo. to host their site - I put ~10 clients on a VPS (comfortably) since the sites get very little traffic). You sell them on newsletter hosting, explain benefits of contacting customers directly about offers for almost $0 cost to them. Email is huge to local businesses, set them up with mail@theirdomain.com and many will worship you. So many people still use xyz123@isp.net for their BUSINESS email.
For customers that already have sites, offer a redesign, better functionality (contact/quote request forms, email newsletter hosting, etc.).
There's also lots of money in local business directories, if you know anything about SEO. Offer them targeted traffic/leads at $XX/mo. - even more if they want a banner on the site.
So much cash offline, go and take it. It may be harder to do it based on the country, but I refuse to believe there isn't at least some need for it. If not - hit up craigslist in the US and start pimping your offerings ;)
I also read 91% of local businesses are unhappy with their online marketing efforts (i NEED to find the link for this again). If 91% of a population is unhappy with something, you probably have an opportunity. Go fuck shit up. You can do it, and you'll make your money.
Businesses spend a ridiculous amount of money on offline advertising (ie. Yellowpages), so much that when you come to them offering online advertising for ridiculously low prices ($50-100/mo.) they just go for it most of the time. A Yellowpages ad can cost $500-1500/mo. for a tiny little placement.
My friend essentially built a network of niche sites for his city, so {cityname}furniture.com, {cityname}dentists, {cityname}antiques etc. The sites were just simple directories with some content, a contact/request a quote form and a list of local businesses. He'd gather a list of businesses and contact them all explaining the site and how it would cost them $50/mo. for a listing, it would help their search rankings, bring traffic, generate leads and new business, etc.
He said his best money was actually made off dentists and he had to break the site up into {neighbourhood}dentists because there were so many in the city interested. A typical site would feature 3-4 banner ads that cost $100/mo. (little 125x125 squares for each dental firm), and then around 10 or so $50/mo. business listings (custom page, images of office, testimonials, etc).
It's fair to say a single site would net him $800/mo - of course this varies on the type of business being targeted, but there are so many kinds of businesses to target that you won't be able to capture every market in the city.
On top of things, he made money generating leads for the businesses. For the dentist example, he had a "request a quote" form that basically got people to explain what they wanted done, budget, their contact info, etc. He sold leads for ~$20 each (would make the different dentists bid on them). This is nothing for most places as a lead can turn into $1000 worth of business in the first appointment, and thousands more over the years as that patient returns.
If you can create a value added service locally and get people onboard for next to nothing (as they see it, $50 is nothing), then you have a real opportunity to make some cash. Take this to the next level and start managing their PPC campaigns and managing ad deals and you have yourself a healthy local market - most of which you can find someone cheap to handle (around the cost of a secretary, anyone with a bit of technical know-how will do).
Bringing all this stuff up again kind of makes me want to go back into it.. hmm. weekend project perhaps?
I was so inspired by this model, that I actually generated a list of all cities in pennsylvania and the corresponding {cityname}furniture.com, {cityname}dentists.com, {cityname}antiques.com, only to find that almost all of the registered domains were just parked on GoDaddy or AdSense spam sites :(
I'm not trying to be a dick - the domain names your friend used probably follow a different pattern - but I'd really love to see an example of this.
Thanks a lot for an inspiring post!
My research on this topic... http://www.nikhileshrao.com/post/9824/links-on-local-interne...
If someone can figure out a unique way to scale sales without adding more human capital,they will do very well. On the flip side, most of these people don't want to "do it themselves". You can outsource most of the actual service work at a scaleable expense. I look at it this way, sure anyone can learn accounting, but you want an accountant to do your taxes. Same thing with local businesses and web advertising- yes they could learn it themselves, but they'd rather have a pro do it. They just want to run their business.
I can't echo this enough -- small businesses have so much cash for offline stuff, it's not even funny. I'm learning that via my latest startup, MailFinch.
How did this work? Was the final price after upselling on other services?
Basically I'd say the site was $2400, the company who was going to buy it paid 50% upfront. My costs for the site are.. $1900 (designers, devs, etc), so I'd just ask for the difference.
The site would cost $700 upfront for them, which looks like an absolute steal to them. I would then explain the hosting and the email newsletter stuff, and typically upsell them on $100/mo. in services (that basically cost me nothing to run, other than maybe an hour of work per month). $100/mo. was kind of the minimum, my biggest contract was $600/month for sending out 2 mailings a week and updating the site periodically. Maybe 3-4 hours of work per month - most of it was just copying/pasting and pressing save.
A few questions. Your Reliance Wireless Broadband stick.. What speeds can you get upto on it? Can you stream youtube videos smoothly?
About your 4hww model. If you're outsourcing all your writing, editing, seo marketing.. does that leave any profits left for you?
the costs are minuscule in comparison to the profits, esp caus ethe costs are one day costs and the profits are passive and month fter month
1) Parse the CSV 2) Google search for each term, and get the # of hits (ie. the competition), and the page ranks of the top few pages. 3) Filters out, and displays the ones that are worth going after.
How long have you been at this?
Offline affiliate marketing is win-win, but in a cheap country it might be hard to pull off.
<adsense>
I know there are some issues with getting accepted for adsense in other countries. If you have problems, email me (profile link) and I'll give you one of the solutions.
1. Find a notepad. 2. Write: "Things I can teach you:" 3. List everything you imagine you can teach a person (This can range from simple math to programming to drawing to singing like an american idol?) 4. Hard part is over! Relax and decide on your mid-range topics (ones you're not a guru at, but with a little research could obviously teach someone) 5. Create little niche sites (google keyword tool -> show CPC -> Arrange by amount of hits (look in the 10k-20k views range -> google "keyword" (yeah quotes) -> if its less than 40k pages, and wikipedia is a top result, you probably just found a $9 investment (domain cost) that would turn into $20/mo. 6. Once you've spent 2 weeks doing this, you should have a feel for the idea and what grasps people's attention etc. Try some of your more guruish topics. Hell, make an ebook and offer it on one of your adsense sites.
</adsense>
<articles/imgs>There are also tons of sites that pay you to write articles[1] or photoshop!</art/img>
<translations>You said cheap country, but I don't really understand the scope of that... but I'm going to assume you know another language. If so, start a site offering translation services or just scope out people. iPhone apps, etc need translations and shell out serious cash for them.</trans>
my experience(I made money, got cocky, and lost too much): http://sanguinity.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/money22.png
xutopia's recent story(6k/ebook) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1159445
One final bit: when you research (blogs/sites) you will probably stumble upon keywords like 'mesothelioma, structured settlements, annuity payments, criminal lawyers, tax attorneys, asbestos, etc,' being the gold mines. Don't waste your time. $40/clk($5-15 your share) sounds amazing, but its another losing game trying to get ranked in search engines.
First result in google for some micro niche. Notice how the articles are over on the right, the page is filled with content relating to the keyword, and adsense is splattered everywhere.
It is a generic site, probably spun articles (used a program to rewrite someone else's articles), but its still in the top of the search engine.
Once I got into SEO, I realized that 90% of the sites I access from random google searches are just there to make adsense money. No upkeep is involved. None of the content is original.
I was searching for "Ford Escort ZX2 2002 install intake" and the first 3 links were all spun articles... BUT I actually found the information I needed in these spun articles. So, how evil is this? Iono.
- Find other people who want to know what you know, then charge $97-497 a month to coach them.
- Do NOT start a blog for advertising dollars or do mechanical turk - your ROI will be extremely low vs. the time and energy you spend. Instead, use a website to sell your products or services, whatever they may be.
I dunna about that, information is pretty FREE these days
Being that we live in an information age, it's the new currency. If you think that it's free, then you're only seeing the castoffs.
Yet, it's pretty expensive. The most used resources of information are schools/uni and they are the most expensive.
Books, videos, tutorials, Seminars... are also paying. There are free valuable information, but it's rare.
To prove this, go to your local university and ask how much it costs to take a class by examination (no classtime, simply take the final exam).
MIT is actually well known for making information free, but the credential is expensive.
+1 to this - when I was in school, I was never denied a seat in a class that I wasn't officially enrolled in (I took maybe 6 or 7 extra courses that way - oddly enough, I was kicked out of some classes I enrolled in, for space/seniority/in-major reasons), and I always asked the professor before sitting in (I probably could have gotten away with not doing that, since in the math/science departments half the professors don't bother to learn names anyhow, but asking seemed like the polite thing to do).
Some of the most interesting stuff I learned was in those classes, and it's actually how I ended up getting back into programming (I hadn't programmed since middle school)...it's a great way to sample stuff outside your major without needing to worry about doing badly in the classes.
I know people that do this sometimes even as non-students, and they've told me that most professors don't usually mind, though occasionally they'll say no.
How do you even get into the buildings without an ID?
My suggestion: photoshop something that looks vaguely like an NYU ID, then stick it in your wallet behind a clear window. Flash it at guards when you come in, they don't care enough to look closely.
Amazon's Product Advertising API provides access to lots of their data, so if you so choose you can make mini niche shopping sites with significant dynamic data.
The only thing I'd be concerned about is receiving payments if you're not in one of the Amazon locales. Don't know if you need a valid tax ID or something. I think you can choose to get paid by checks though, if that works for you.
1. I second what peter said about screencasts or ebooks. We've made a good amount of money selling a DVD on SEO for a niche industry. Ours is basically all screencasts and basic SEO knowledge. If you have skills in that area or know someone who does, it can work. Granted, we did physical DVDs but you can just as easily do an ebook or web-based videos.
2. Take the BSD-licensed iui code (http://code.google.com/p/iui), style it up, and tie it into some PHP scripts so businesses in a niche industry can create iPhone-compatible websites (i.e. "iPhone sites for plumbers and contractors"). Give them simple install instructions for basic web hosts and it will sell. We've done it and it's worked well.
3. Niche industry WordPress themes. We just started doing this and it seems to be working. If you spin it for a "niche", you can charge more than the $30 themes you'll find other places.
Hope that helps.
You can basically shadow interesting/scalable projects for sale on sites like Flippa. Occasionally, something good will popup, for example, a twitter spamming system that autotweets and adds followers.
Then you simply clone what works, add better features, do better SEO or whatever, and VOILA!
Look at http://oss-security.openwall.org for some -- You could probably make around $500 to $5000 depending on your exploit / vulnerability.
Just thought you'd check that out if interested.
Same for Mozilla/Firefox: http://www.mozilla.org/security/bug-bounty.html
- Write articles (around $150).
- Make something (script, firefox addon) for a client (around $100)
- Google Adsense (around $50)
Or something else entirely?
I find jobs on forums, problogger, blogs that accept guest posts...
Nettuts pays $150 if it's good enough
Usually the topic are in math, statistics or philosophy. Nothing a professional (or smart undergrad) on these topics wouldn't already get, but something for other interested people.
Also, is this $500-1000 / mo sustained over a long period of time, or is it more like the flash-in-the-pan Facebook apps that briefly go viral, peak, and then collapse after a few weeks?
- There is a "Share This" button at the bottom
- Things were viral before Twitter / FB / Digg - I believe its called "word of mouth".
(RE: Word of mouth - point taken.. I was just expressing surprise that you didn't take advantage of more direct forms of social media virality)
Thanks!
* Create small sitescripts that do only one small task and sell them for like $70. For instance, paid and free listing directory scripts, a twitpic.com clone, etc.
* Create really nice XHTML/CSS and/or WordPress themes. I used to think those themes didn't make money, but then I heard that WooThemes pulled in $2M in 2009. So, that sent me for a loop. It's all about execution, presentation, helping the buyer make a decision on what they're getting, the right price range, etc.
* Think up all the areas in your life you are excited about and knowledgeable about, and create blogs on each of these niches. Use a WordPress theme that supports ad blocks on the right, with space where you can either put your VideoEgg.com ads and things like that, or sell the slots. Create a CAN-SPAM compliant opt-in subscription list form where one can get your feed announcements by email, as well as receive pitches (once a month) for an eBook offer. To entice them, give them a free eBook for signing up. Send them only a monthly email. Start with other relevant eBook offers, but eventually you can create your own and sell those. Connect your blog post announcements to Twitter. Revise your WordPress RSS code (via custom theming or a plugin) so that occasionally a vaguely relevant CPA offer is injected in there every 6th post, or an eBook offer -- just as long as it's relevant.
* Create the same sort of concept as the blogs, but with forums.
* Add a live podcast or screencast to your blog, and make available the video or audio later on. This creates stickiness and excitement to your site such that the ads might get clicked.
* Use multiple whitehat affiliate marketing strategies but in niches that you feel passionate about. So, if you like Model Railroading, that's what you bring up websites about, mixed in with different ad strategies such as eBooks, toolbar downloads, CPA, PPC, and CPM. Just don't overdo it and, as well, try to keep those ads a little bit relevant.
* It's easy to write an eBook in an area you are passionate about, and then sell it. You could even purchase some inexpensive ones in a given niche you like just so that you have an idea of how to compose yours -- but don't plagiarize. There are tons of facts and statistics you can reprint if you follow proper copyright laws for these things.
* Eventually once you get rolling a little, you can briefly hire a web traffic expert to see what suggestions this consultant may have.
* Stay away from dropshipping, websites that supposedly make it easy for you to do something (like build a dropshipping business), selling offers you are not passionate about, greyhat or blackhat affiliate marketing strategies, or get-rich-quick schemes and guides.
* Once you get strategies working, you need to go back and design them better, and collect feedback for a little while to make the sites look more fantastic.
* Experiment on each of these things to see which systems bring in the most revenue.
* Automate all of this so that you don't have to spend so much time fiddling with it. For instance, with forums, there are many "lost souls" out there who want to be moderators, and who would do well in that role for free even. You could then sit back and moderate the moderators. If it's a good year with earnings, then around Christmas-time you can ask the moderators for a paypal ID and send them a small financial gift of say, $200 to $500 USD and just preface it with, "I don't always have an opportunity to do this, but we had a good ad revenue year and your skills as moderator were partly responsible, so here's a holiday gift as a token of my appreciation."
* Take 15% of all your profit, from day 1, and give it to charity. Clearly let your site visitors know this, and also provide them a donate button if they want to do that too. It boosts public perception of your site, the quality of guy you are, and so on. Plus, it's a tax write-off and for a good cause. Most of the time, this kind of goodwill increases participation on your site, rather than deflect it. And once a year, do a charity drive on each of your sites, using one of those thermometer things to show how much was achieved towards a goal. Start with a very low goal of like $2000. Compare your visitor levels to how much donation cash you received for a particular cause, and challenge your visitors to increase the needle on that goal every year.
* Most of all -- don't over-strategize. You can polish later. Just keep it legal, keep it fun, be mindful of your visitor's interests, don't overdo it, reinvest as necessary, identify and avoid time-waster tasks, automate like mad, and watch and sometimes emulate what others are doing to help their sites. But most of all, just --do-- something rather than nothing.
* And when you get bored with a niche after you've grown it, sell it for 30% to 50% more than last year's total earnings from it, even if you have to put the site on the market for awhile to catch a fish.
On a side note, is it just me, or is Hacker News getting more and more interested in affiliate marketing?
I'm slowly going back into affiliate marketing and product creation (did it for years, but became a consultant). Scalable income intrigues me (and I'm sure many others), never really liked the whole hours for dollars trade.
2. Move to your cheap country and take the rest of the year off.
I hear Richard Stallman can actually pull this off in a not-so-cheap country, too.
It wouldn't serve as a main source of income, but at least you'll have money to spend on commodities that you won't have to take out of whatever actual main source you find.
Tip: If you try this, when searching for HITs, only look for 5-cent HITS or above, and don't bother with $5 stuff, which no one ever gets.
Besides, for anyone, I would recommend they get a relatively easy regular day job, such as paper-pusher or something -- anything where they work 8 hours exactly, never get asked to stay late, and can go home. Then, at night, work very hard for two years on passive income niche forums and blogs, small scripts, products, and eBooks. Once that builds up steadily, quit the day job and do online freelance work whether that be for PPC Management, SEO Management, programming, whatever. Mix the two -- active and passive income -- such that you can live a comfortable life. Then, use the Dave Ramsey Snowball method to pay down debts as fast as possible. Then move into site flipping, then small-time angel investment of websites and products in your interest, and eventually full-time angel investment work.
This seems to be beneficial for both parties:
a) Payer sets value for the service he wants and has that service delivered by a specified time (or I don't get paid)
b) I deliver as quickly as I am able to, thus achieving my desired goal of minimizing time spent earning the money
For someone who works fulltime, however, one can invest time showing how to do some things that require a long ramp-up period.
If you really want to make money fast, then rentacoder is a good choice, though it does not scale.
If you have a couple of month ramp up time, then you can look at making simple shareware - but this is not a good idea for something to do in panic mode.
AppSalesGraph, Art You Should Know, .. I'm just curious what else you're up to.
Any ideas how quickly I could make the money off of something like elance (or how quickly you could, since we don't know our relative coding speeds)? Likewise for Mechanical Turk?
We just started our open source task site but there are two notable tasks for the languages you listed: Fix Audio Sync against Video in live555.cpp, $500 http://nextsprocket.com/tasks/fix-audio-sync-against-video-i...
Nokogiri pure-Java version for JRuby, >$600 http://nextsprocket.com/tasks/nokogiri-pure-java-version-for...
the nokogiri problem's been around and people are dying for a good solution!
From a supplier point of view, there's two options - either going for fixed price bids for projects, or for bidding for stuff on an hourly basis.
In terms of rates we average about $20 an hour for top quality C++ stuff, about $17 for good Django/Python and about $12 for web-design/HTML. You need to subtract elance fees. But if you're good - it wouldn't be hard to earn a lot more than your target without having to work too hard.
Where you really pay is that elance takes something like 5-10% of whatever you earn for the job.
That said, I created an account and scored relatively highly on a few of the tests a while back. I've gotten invited to submit proposals for jobs on a regular basis ever since. (For example, I received 7 invitations last month.)
I usually turn down the invitations, as I have plenty of work, but one of my favorite clients found me through elance.
http://www.thesimpledollar.com/2009/07/05/can-you-actually-e...
If it's like it was back then, I think you might be able to make $400 on it in a month. Not the quickest or most fun way to do it, though. I like the eBook idea.
http://www.cringely.com/2009/03/parrot-secrets/
I wish you the best of luck with trying to find a way to make a decent living.
Or do you want to do x amount of work and expect to get $400 a month for life?
Some of the opportunities people (such as patio11) have posted are what I'm interested in. I will be following up on some of those.
On the other hand, I also find some of the longer-term infrastructure-building advice (e.g. SEO, e-book stuff) useful, provided it's got a high probability of generating some cash within a month or two.
It's much easier to build something that makes thousands of dollars a month than something that makes hundreds of dollars (and it keeps scaling up).
It's much easier to succeed when you give yourself a few years than a few months.
An article for an online programming 'zine normally takes me between 4 and 8 hours to write well (2000-4000 words).
Which sounds a lot better than your interpretation.
This is my experiment: http://www.readthislink.com
I did this for the personal savings market and "sim-only" mobile telephony subscriptions market in the Netherlands. It brings in a couple of hundred euros a month with only 1-2 hours of maintenance.