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Comment by zzeroparticle | Hacker News Reader

Does a blog reviewing music count?

Though I started in 2008, I didn't really make any attempts at monetizing until late 2009 and started with Adsense, then linked all the albums reviewed to two online stores that sell the CDs in question. All told, it took me maybe 3 months to make my first dollar and even longer for affiliate commissions to come in. I didn't make my first sale until maybe February 2010.

Obviously this isn't a product-based project, so it's not representative of the webapp stuff that others are producing.

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Absolutely.

If you're using Wordpress, try one of the Twitter integration plugins. You can choose hashtags when creating a new blog entry and it will be auto-posted to a Twitter account. You should see a bump in traffic after each post.

Thanks!

I've actually been doing manual updates to my personal twitter account after each post with a blurb about the latest article. Each tweet is customized rather than a generic auto-update message. I'm just not sure whether this is the best way of going about it or if I should take your suggestion and completely automate it. Maybe create a separate twitter account and do both?

> Maybe create a separate twitter account and do both?

No reason not to. :)

I had a few blogs (well, "autoblogs") go from $5-6/day on 400-500 unique visitors to $10-12 after installing and configuring Twitter Tools. A human touch generally results in higher yield than automation with most marketing stuff, though.

> A human touch generally results in higher yield than automation with most marketing stuff, though.

Do you think that's because readers recognize it as being "more human" and are more interested, or because humans are better at making copy than automation, or a combination of the two?

Probably more of a combination of the two. Automated posts are pretty obvious, even to the less technically inclined. Lots of people will use something like "spyntax" (stuff like "This is {awesome|cool}, {take a look|check it out}!") to generate reusable copy, but it still generally feels fake. That's about the extent of human touch most people will give things if their goal is complete automation.

If you're writing posts/excerpts/replies manually, it's way more authentic and believable. Language is obviously super important in marketing (especially online), and it's one area where computers still have lots of improvement to make.

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