How stable is this? Are you always one algorithm / policy change away from disaster?
It seems to rely primarily on Google ranks. Good gig if you can generate them.
Anyone have any other perspectives on how difficult this is?
It seems to rely primarily on Google ranks. Good gig if you can generate them.
Anyone have any other perspectives on how difficult this is?
Yes. I saw a peak of around $5k a month in AdSense around 2008 with a similar model as the story described. Personal finance articles. That got cut in half a few times by algorithm changes. Then I quit working on it altogether, and it slid more slowly. Though it still makes around $300/month with the current stale content and no updates for years.
It's not easy...basically a ton of outreach to get links, with few takers.
It's better in the long term to set up your own store and build up lifetime value around your own brand, which is what I'm currently doing. You can start out that way dropshipping from AliExpress or with print on demand products. It's more work, but it's also more stable and of course scales a lot better.
But an even better suggestion is to build SaaS products. It scales even more and not many people know how to do it.
The magic isn't in the device, it's in the flashing and configuring it for non-technical people.
But I think you are missing the point here - people who are asking the questions you are asking aren't my typical customers. It's some random guy who has never heard the word "linux".
But aren't you just selling junky products? That seems pretty unsustainable as well.
Print on demand is just designing your own t-shirts, mugs, shoes, pillows, jewelry, etc through services such as Zazzle, Teespring, Gearbubble. People have passions, such as for animals or hobbies, and love to signal it.
As for sustainability, dropshipping will kill your credibility if you keep doing it. There's plenty of shared warehousing/fulfillment services now like ShipBob where once you've established yourself, you can gradually scale your fulfillment and start wholesaling. I would move away from generic dropshipped products quickly, which are the easiest to start selling, just due to competition. But print on demand and private labeling are solid choices since you own the brand and design.
What is this "brand" that you speak of ? do consumers even care ?
But i don't understand what brand does a store that sells similar stuff to what you can find on Amazon can get.
0. https://nytimes.com/2017/05/03/magazine/the-online-marketpla...
There's a whole discipline on it.
But a google algorithm change could definitely crush his income.
There, no secret. That is the barrier to entry. 100 hundred well written articles will probably cost a good $10,000 on the mid/low end. Not many people want to spend $10,000 then see if Google will send them traffic.
I've done this as a full-time job (both in-house and in an agency setting) and you're off by about an order of magnitude for anything worth paying for.
I have paid 5-10c per word for articles between 500-1000 words, that were all very well written in Eastern European countries by expats and fluent English speakers.
A few colloquialisms needed editing out, but if you are getting only 5 articles a week, you are spending $300-500, and 1-2 hours of editing per article if that (which includes formatting, adding hyperlinks, etc).
Google cares only about how many links that content has. Links do not occur organically, especially not in the age of social media, where most natural non-commercial activity is locked away in walled gardens. Content owners have to actively pursue them. When serious competitors come in, they will have their own "private blog networks" that cross-link and crush any hand-made link networks.
SEO is a lie. You have to spam to win whenever there is significant competition.