Ask HN: I made $1.01 yesterday. What next?

Don't believe the notion that making 100 websites that earn $1 a day is easier than making 1 website that makes $100 a day. It's not.

Create value, make users want to stick around, iterate, grow.

Oh no! I definitely want to look into making sure that this one is good enough before I look to make a second. I do have a million more projects I'd like to take on - but each of them has to play out to their maximum potential before I switch to the next.

If this can make $1 in 1 day on an evening's work, how far can I get if it's actually a GOOD site?

Feedback from where people see the areas of concern is useful. I've already read "Load time" in the comments as well as "game quality" and "exclusive content"

Load time is one thing I'd not considered. I think the images must load quickly for me because I've got them all in my browser cache.

I've changed the default sort order of the games so you're much less likely to get 'crap' on your first click than you were when they were random - but I'm working on adding categories as we speak, that way people will be able to find their genre quickly.

Thanks for the feedback :)

how far it gets its going to be related to how people are finding your site, and how much room you have to grow.

if everyone is coming in from search, it depends how many people are searching.

I have a few content sites that drive about $10CPM, but even with #1 organic ranking, I'm limited to about 1500 visitors a month. 95% of my traffic is from search. 99% of my revenue is from people that found my site from search.

generally, as far as adsense goes, the common wisdom is that repeat users do not drive advertising revenue. it's the search hoppers that are the ones that often click on the ads. making the site sticky doesn't necessarily mean more adsense revenue, and here is probably where other advertising mechanisms that require high number of impressions would start to come into play.

affiliate marketing might be something to look into as a supplemental as well, although i'm not sure what that is in your market.

I've got a site that gets ~10,000 uniques per month (www.area51.org), and I still have never found a way to make much money at it. Yes, I've got ads. And yes, I've thought about affiliate marketing. But I wish I could bust out of my boxed thinking and come up with some revenue model that's more compelling.

(On the other hand, the site is self-sustaining; I don't have to think about it much.)

However, making 50 sites that make 500 a day is a lot easier than making one site that makes 25000 a day. A lot easier.

What are you basing this on?

Making 1 site that makes 500 a day is quite difficult. Just ask about 99% of people here on HN that have tried.

Guess I didn't get the memo. I'm not quite at 500 yet, but it took 12 hours to make a site that makes 250 a day. I'm sure I can easily bring that up to 500 (for instance, the site doesn't even render in IE right now). And I can make another 10 like it.

In response to FreeRadical: It's all about the point of diminishing returns. I spent 6 years on my first site, and it's a huge amount of work with literally thousands of manhours put into it. Just a month ago I launched another site, intended to be a minimum viable product that I can just develop and leave, and it's working out OK thus far. Don't get me wrong, the first is very much successful (2MM+ pageviews a month), but that's thousands of hours I could have put into making multiple other sites, each making a lot less but relatively more.

What the f....

How?

but it took 12 hours to make a site that makes 250 a day

I'd really like to see the stats on that.

Every time someone tells me that they spent (small amount of hours) on a website that (makes more than $1 a day) they are exaggerating to the extreme by not including advertising, hosting, domain expenses and maintenance time.

I was like you for a long time, until two things happened:

1) I met someone who is running a site that took him a few hours to build, cents to run (AppEngine) (plus $20 for two domain names) and makes over $1000/month (yeah, so he's spent more time since then, but not much.)

2) I build a site that cost me $15 to build ($10 domain hosting, $5 - refundable - to join an affiliate program), hours to build (it's basically a blog on Wordpress) and makes me nearly $200/month.

I can't say I'm an expert, but one way to duplicate this is to find a vertical problem domain with a lot of interest (ie, busy forums), find some problem they have (often it's some kind of calculation that people always have trouble with) and build a crappy, ugly tool to do it for them. Make the calculation URL addressable, then put a short note in a forum saying what you've done and follow up by using it in a few discussions.

But what part actually earns you money?

I've had best responses with Amazon's affiliate program. Made about $130 bucks from something like 5 or 6 blog posts. Hourly rate worth it? Nope. Was it fun? Yep. Basically what I've learned is that Google's dynamic ad placement is the last thing you should try. Putting in an ad (or affiliate link, there are even services that will auto do this with Javascript, so you're users wont see and you don't have to be part of a billion referral programs. Gray hat? Maybe.) that actually targets what you are talking about is so much more effective.

I've written a context sensitive affiliate adserver that serves relevant ads via Javascript. That works reasonably well, but I do need to optimize the ads themselves some.

That is really cool. Have you open sourced it? It's JavaScript in the first place so I know anyone can see it in your site, but it would be cool to track it on Github.

No, it's not open source.

Not much in in Javascript - just the part that displays the ad. All the intelligence is on the server, mostly in Java.

On that site I make $100-$180 month from affiliate sales, $5-$10 from AdSense.

If you are dealing with physical products then affiliate programs can work quite well.

Edit: On my friend's site is is all AdSense. His is non-physical product related.

URLs please

I would guess he is not exaggerating in the terms you mention, but what it took to get him there. Reading "12 hours...$250 a day" sounds like he started from zero. He probably didn't.

A while back there was this post about launching a minimally viable product in 3 hours. http://blog.amirkhella.com/2010/09/21/the-story-of-keynotopi... 3 hours and he's making money! What am I doing wrong?

Nothing. Take a look around his site. He is already an extensive expert in the field of user experience, with numerous successes under his belt. I am sure those successes were the product of a lot of education and years and years of hard work. He already has quite a following on his blog due to those successes. There was a lot that went on before he could start marketing something and sell it right off the bat.

Last summer I saw Michael Franti in concert. You may know him as the overnight success that had the song "Say Hey" if you listen to pop radio at all. (It has been in numerous TV shows, a Corona commercial, It was one of the songs played during Oprah's last show, etc.) I happen to know him as an artist who traveled from festival to festival year in and year out. Sometimes playing to a couple hundred people. Even before success, he was a world traveler, has played with indigenous people in the bush of third world countries with no electricity. He was a successful spoken word performer and has been in several bands that rose and fell long before he current lineup. I think he had released about 10 or 11 albums with various groups with virtually no mainstream success before the album that included Say Hey. At the concert I saw him at, he mentioned the press he was getting at being an overnight success and added, "yeah, with 20 years in the making."

So I guess you could say that Michael probably made hundreds of thousands of dollars for singing that 3 minute song. But there was a lot that went on in his life to get him there.

Isn't this like saying a doctor could make more money if they didn't have to waste years going to medical school?

Link please ComputerGuru?

30% to 70% CTR is nearly impossible. You can only get it in very specific cases.

1.5% CTR is pretty good for Adsense. If you can get it up to 5%, consider yourself lucky.

Yeah, 70% ctr=LIE don't believe it. I think if you go a 70% ctr google would shut you down for clickfraud.

Recently, I had to find a new copy of lame_enc.dll for a computer I just bought. Every site I landed on (besides sourceforge) had three or four "Download" buttons. I wasn't confident that ANY of them weren't ads. I'm sure those pages have a great ad CTR.

That would be against Adsense TOS, as far as I understand.

I recently did a survey of those sites, and a large number of those links are links to other similar paid products that have more or less relevance to what they're linking to or are of the '$5/month virus check' variety.

Some of our affiliates at work have like 95% conversion. I am not sure what do they promise to give the people if they buy our stuff but it has to be pretty good

This isnt answering your question but i've got a quick suggestion for you dev wise.

Cache those images on your front page, then stitch them together into a big sprite and then use CSS to display the specific image from the sprite. It'll greatly decrease the load time on that page.

Ref: http://css-tricks.com/css-sprites/

Wouldn't you want to decrease load times? Or do you think people are more likely to click on an ad, if they have to wait longer?

Doing that would decrease load times for repeat visitors.

My bad, i meant decrease, i've fixed it.

Inline images with data URIs might perform equally well with less hackery.

data URIs are not supported on IE. css sprites supported anywhere and quite common.

Wikipedia says that IE8 supports them to some extent. But you are right, you would need to build two solutions to support older browsers, too.

why do you need to implement two solutions if sprites is OK for this case? data url is great in some cases, for example generate images on client side but imho css sprites are optimal there.

data urls aren't cacheable either.

Look at the browser stats (You do have google analytics (or similar) installed). Then make a business decision if you want to exclude x% of yoru customers. It might make business sense

Thank you very much! I hadn't taken the time to think about load times... but you're absolutely right.

I'm going to put it on the list as one of my priorities. I think improving / creating a navigation system where players can find a game by category, tag or genre is a higher priority (though I could be wrong)

I'm also hoping to add a game description and * star rating to the mouse over tooltip.

I think if users can find the game they want to play - they might forgive load time (though I could very well be wrong).

Maybe I should put fewer games on the front page? (I do like having a lot of squares to look at, it makes it seem more fun to me)

but you're absoloutely right. load time with a star beside it - right there on my TODO list :)

You may add a navigation system, but please make it optional and keep the ability to just click on a picture and start playing.

Product differentiation would be an obvious next step:

- Start growing a player community(which is how Kongregate works)

- Place more extreme filters on quality or genre(this is the basis of sites like physicsgames.net).

- Invest in some exclusive content. This is expensive and probably a bad idea at the early stage, but the fastest way to get started is to go onto FlashGameLicense and browse the stuff that's up for bid or auction.

I would suggest taking some time to figure out your focus before you go too deeply into the site optimization, else you'll build the wrong thing.

Yeah - driving traffic via sponsored games would be in the long term plan. I'm still not certain if the traffic is sustainable.

After all, after friends and family finish checking it out, who do I have left? Everything gets a 'blip' at the start with your first facebook post "he friends, check it out" then trickle until search engines find you.

I wrote a game for KONG once. I like how it works there. (http://www.kongregate.com/games/lythrdskynrd/dizzy-ship)

There is a question of the value of sponsored game traffic VS a good PPC campaign. What point do you decide it's worth throwing a few hundred down on a sponsorship? I'm not sure :)

Congrats on the site and getting started on a project.

How are you driving visitors to the site currently?

http://imgur.com/kw2av

:D ummm. ycombinator

I read another comment about reddit / stumble / digg / etc... So I'll have to go there next. For today, once I get tag-navigation done (it's looking pretty sweet already) then I guess a reddit submission.

Since I regularly read reddit I'll feel a little more comfortable with the community there. Hopefully they'll be as supportive as HN is :)

I really do feel nervous about making sure people like it, and making sure it's good enough to show off.

Showing work in progress to HN is a bit of a different story because we're all such "doers" around here. I guess I just feel "safer" starting here. (if that makes sense?)

ycombinator may be a good temporary boost of traffic while you're on the frontpage of HN but you'll need to look at a more sustainable way of generating traffic - this is where I struggle the most. I run an ecommerce company that does a moderate bit of traffic (around 70k uniques a month) - 70% of my traffic is PPC (Google, Yahoo/Bing) and the rest is done through organic optimization. My business has a very low repeat customer ratio due to our market (sorry can't explain this bit i don't want to share my company publicly). Here is what i've learned:

I fucking hate SEO. I've spent well over 100k hiring and firing contractors from around the world. I've worked with some of the biggest names in SEO down to the most unknown people in India. We spend a lot of time trying to manipulate search engines to work the way we want them and it's all a game. If i were in your position i'd focus around creating content people WANT to use and leverage communities like this to help figure out how to improve them so WE market the product for you (this isn't easy though - you have to be EXCEPTIONAL). General SEO/SEM tactics are good to know and practice, but i really believe the best/most sustainable approach to a successful site is creating something people actually want and are willing to tell their friends about. Don't let this bit of discourage you, create something great!

To make reddit work, you need to make sure of a few things. First, know the culture. Memes and talking points of the moment, what's generating buzz. Second, know the games you're submitting - what genres they belong to and what their strengths are compared to prominent titles. Third, don't use a dummy account, use your own if you have one... use an account that has a history and a voice. Just spamming submissions will not work.

OMG "it's made of people"!

Yeah it's a mindblow when you realize this. But it's not made of people who spend 6 hours a night watching tv.

There has never been a better time for creators, of all kind.

I wish that people would remember that "it's made by people" when they email customer support. Sometimes people can be so harsh.

As someone who worked tech support for four years... this.

That's why I always try to be as entertaining as possible (while still being clear and helping them solve my problem). I recently had to exchange a pair of pants that I really liked but didn't fit on an online store. I ended up describing receiving their pants "As if the mighty Norse god Thor himself rode down from Aesir with a lightning bolt in one hand and these pants in the other."

I figure their lives are hard enough, might as well make them smile sometimes.

I worked in technical support for 12 years. Yeah it's amazing how people treat other people over the phone or email.

Working in tech and retail showed me this. I decided to make it up to the world in general, in a small way.

So now, every christmas, I find some of the services I use (like my bank, full of VERY helpful, friendly people) who have call centres active on Christmas day, and I ring them and say thanks and Merry Christmas.

The only downside is occasionally someone will cry because a random stranger wished them a Merry Christmas because they're at work.

That's awesome. We had a customer who would call in about once a week just to say hi and thank us. It's not supposed to work this way - but I guarantee she got the best service of any of our customers. I once had a customer call me back after a bad call, and apologize for being rude. It did nearly make me cry.

Hmmm, having brought this here, and showing that it can be monetized relatively easily... expect competition ;-)

Dont make 100 websites. Optimize this one. SEO and compelling content. There are plenty sites that can help you with SEO if you Google for them. There was even someone in the community offering services pro-bono. But do also make your website more compelling/attractive. Integrate some value added service if they give you your email. Like a high scores page or newsletter. See if you can't make the games multiplayer and get some competition going.

Free tip:

http://www.reddit.com/r/webgames

I don't know how many of these are going to be embeddable, but I drop by there every once in a while when I feel like procrastinating and sort by "top" for this month or whatever.

This is great for you because people are essentially finding games for you and crowd-sourcing a rating. The top games are usually pretty great. A handful have actually blown me away.

Consider monetizing with game related affiliate programs. There are lots of toolbars, gaming sites that pay $1-$3 CPAs which will improve your eCPM.

Seems like the last the web needs is another half assed Flash games site.

You can't argue with profit.

I think I'm still at my "collect underpants" phase :)

(EDIT: for anyone who doesn't get the reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnomes_(South_Park))

Oh what a poor state the world would be in if everyone believed that. :)

Side note: I have no problem with the OP's website.

that's for the internet to decide

this just warmed my heart a little. thank you :')

Despite the -1 rank of the comment, I do appreciate the feedback.

The things we build aren't always about what the internet needs, but maybe there's some value in starting small and building it into something great.

I'm not trying to dominate the universe of flash game websites - but I I am utterly fascinated by the idea of earning my living and being completely in control of my own destiny.

In my background I've worked for a mega-corporation (Nortel Networks, they're like Cisco systems, only bankrupt) and I've worked as a public employee (high school teacher). Nowadays I work for a smaller 40 person company ... but I'm still not my own boss.

This is an entirely new concept to me. I can create value and sell it directly and I can do it according to my own rules...

I 100% appreciate that this is "just another half assed flash site". I just built it to see if I could. But it made $0.50 on day one and $1.01 on day two.

So maybe there's something here.

If this does fizzle, at least I'll have learned something. Whatever I do pick up from this experience, I will be able to take to my next project. If this one doesn't "take" then maybe my next one will.

Or maybe by sharing the experience with HN we'll all learn something. Maybe I'll make a contact with someone who's similarly minded and we'll team up to make a project that ends up being better than either of us could have done on our own.

Who knows?

You're 100% right though - i mean it - the internet does not need "yet another crappy flash games site" ... it's a hell of a lot better than a page-park though http://thegames.com/

Obligatory clickable:

http://fstr.net

looks weird on opera. the enlarged preview for a game on mouseover gets too big for the grid, so that the entire next row is pushed back.

thanks :) I can't bear to even think about how it looks in IE.

I'm honestly thinking of just putting an <!//--[if IE]-- sorry this website is not supported in IE, but here's an animated gif of a dancing bear for your amusement ---!>

around the entire site.

You probably don't want to do this, since there is (anecdotally at least) a correlation between ad clicks and less sophisticated visitors. It may be a pain, but there's a good chance that IE users will be where you make the most money.

I'd lose the atrocious bevel on logo, looks positively amateurish. What's wrong with plain old outlined font? Also, you need the bare minimum of added value: let users rate games. Put the ratings in a database. There, you just add some value.

Alternatively, a hand-picked selection of games is more value to me as a visitor, than if you had every flash game in the universe embedded on that page. No one has the time to play all those. Choosing which ones are worthy of wasting your time is the hardest part.

Logo changed. I just dropped the bevel as advised. Better?

Ratings and comments "incoming" - on the list. There's a lot of feedback on here so It's going to take me a few days to prioritize everything.

Facebook comments are quick though. I've done that before.

You might like to check out my distribution feed - loads of great games zipped up ready for distribution or embedding from a wide selection of the top devs and portals:

http://playtomic.com/games/catalog

You can pull it all in via script through the very customizable feed:

http://playtomic.com/games/feed

Portals are a lot of work though. You'll need a strategy - find keywords you want to target, optimize and build links towards them etc.

You can also license games through http://www.flashgamelicense.com/ which gets your branding in games and funnels traffic back to you.

Your site crashed my browser and in turn my Mac. I never even saw it.

Really? Weird ... I have hundreds of users and nobody's reported any problems. Was it the feed or the catalog link?

catalog - I must admit I force killed the browser (Firefox) after a while, but it resulted in an unkillable process. Therefore I had to hard reset the Mac.

Might have been the straw that broke the camel's back ... it loads a couple hundred thumbnails since I haven't gotten around to paginating it / sorting that stuff out yet.

OH MY GOD! :D thank you so much :)!

I mean that.

I've been working all day and have just uploaded a whack of improvements

- categories now implemented - adsense moved around (hopefully) optimized a bit for clickyness

I've actually taken some ads off the page - but I'm really interested in finding more content. At the moment, I've just been using http://addictinggames.com (bless him, plug plug)

But more sites and content will make my place much better. I'm especially in love with embeddable!

I've been going at it solid since my OP without a break - so I've got to step away for a little - but I'll definitely take advantage of this :)

Hey, you've hit the big time. Become an angel investor and give me the $1.01, I'll turn it into $5.27 by next Tuesday.

Hi Alex, nice work and congrats on your first step =) Have you ever thought of specializing in showcasing just educational games/ flash games? I think it would be very valuable and it would easily catch on among parents/young kids. You could also link it to educational resources like Khan Academy, etc..

With CTR of 1.5% and 245 visitors, it looks like you are making $0.5 per click. Is it true? It seems to me it's ridiculously high price, or at leaast not sustainable in the long term, isn't it?

I'm learning web programming, trying to start up little sites. Please leave me your email or drop a line: nleschov at gmail

email sent. we'll have a chat and see if I can't help you out a bit :)

I've got a gaming website, like yours, but not as smart looking: http://www.funnygamesspot.com

What I suggest is getting a Facebook fanpage up, and corral all your friends. You could get a following for your site that will revisit it again and again.

Good luck, and nice work!

Nice! Are you making any money on your site?

Averages out to less than a buck a day, so it's not a money maker by any stretch of the imagination.

1.5% is really not bad at all! How much traffic do you get per day?

I'd change the URL structure from numeric to keyword bases (happy to help with apache config if you like).

I'd also provide a search box, powered by google search so you can still get ad clicks. Add an addthis.com button to each page to build backlinks and virality.

I'm on my third day of traffic so far. Waiting for analytics to arrive. I had about 50 visitors yesterday and think I might be approaching 1000 for today :)

I've upgraded to adding TAGS & Categories for links - but am still stuck with numbers on the games codes. I think you might be right though, in terms of SEO that will improve value.

Unfortunately, at the moment, I'm populating the game page via ajax so google won't really know what pages I've got on there until after I follow up with those recommendations of yours.

I think it's good advice though.

yeah, fstr.net/arcade-game is better than fstr.net/651

for memorability but also hugely important for SEO.

How many hits did you get for the past few days?

What were the traffic sources?

You might be able to do more targeted advertising to bring in more users, although that would obviously cut into your meager earnings at this point.

Anyways, good on you for executing on an idea! Many people don't even get to that point.

How do you drive traffic to this site?

I think there's a reasonable claim to be made that your ad placement is deceptive. It looks like a navigational menu for the website.

Either way, good luck :)

Bravo and congrats! You have earned that first dollar. A dollar isn't always very significant in everyday life but that figurative dollar is for you. Good luck!

Contact me

I can help if lookin into gaming revenue.

jimmy@inodesoft.com

Please. Fix. Logo. It's the only part of your site that really looks outdated.

Thanks. In terms of everything else, I admit it's poor. I cranked it out quickly in fireworks and agree.

I like the colors - but the bevel is low quality. I'll have to make an effort on the logo in round 2. :)

Does Google permit telling how much are you earning with Adsense?

yikes! thanks for this comment.

I'd actually just announced the earnings (as I wanted to share) - but my ignorance of their policy in this respect has given way to caution.

I've deleted the post where I say the exact $ value of the earnings and instead will just say that it's managed to buy a pizza dinner.

Make $2.00 today.

how are you getting the game data? going to each game and copying the info? or did you automate it?

Start promoting it to get traffic. Leverage stumbleupon, reddit, facebook/twitter, and possibly organic.

Adsense pubs who make good money have sites that get a veritable shit ton of traffic every day, or have sites with ads with incredibly high CPC amounts