Creating a Small Website to Earn Passive Income: Second Attempt | Hacker News Reader

Creating a Small Website to Earn Passive Income: Second Attempt

sparklewise.com

48 pointstoumhi36 comments

Passive income is a funny phrase... I've tried it before too, but always end up pouring more time and energy into it than I first intend. At first it's "I need to put time into this to get it started, then it'll be all good."

When it's generating income, the question becomes "can this be scaled to make even more money?" Then we adapt, A/B test, work promotion channels, obsess over page rank, refine analytics... ugh.

I wish you luck :)

Yup, that exact thing happened with my product. I told myself "I'm just going to create a small marketing site, sell it and see what happens."

I launched it, got a few sales, and then started to think "well, if I add this feature to the site, maybe I can increase sales, or I need these blog posts, or I need to A/B test this button, etc..." and before you know it, it's not passive.

Yeah, I've spent 80 hours solid hours on my little micro-web-business, and with ~1500 monthly visitors and 15 sales over three months, I've only made $206.

Spend 200 on ads, if you make > $206, repeat. 1% conversion is pretty good for only 80 hours.

Just one comment. You should not put the green color when the BMI is below average. That could make people think that their correct weight is when they are too skinny. I think that this is not a good thing for the people who are worried for their bmi.

Apart from that it looks great :)

I hadn't realized that. I got several comments because of other color problems. Other people have told me that they thought there was a problem because of the result in red text (it's always red). So you're skinny uh? :-) Thanks for the feedback!

Red should probably be on both ends of the scale, with green in the middle. Also I had to go and convert stuff, but obviously not aimed at Americans.

Good luck to you. In my personal experience, many Clickbank products are simply garbage.

I had an Adwords account banned because of a Clickbank product. What was this controversial product?

Instructions for building a chicken coop. There are more "legitimate" affiliate companies you may want to try. Amazon, Commission Junction, etc.

I am no longer able to use Adwords...ever.

[UPDATE]

I have also had Facebook Advertising suspended because of Clickbank products, too.

I don't know Clickbank, but in general it seems very difficult to make money with affiliate sales - unless you earn a lot with every sale.

That is just my impression. On the other hand, AdWords just keep chugging away, getting better and better. Especially for this beauty/health related site there could be expensive keywords. There will probably be ads for silly fat burner things, cosmetic surgery, and so on. I suppose the more scammy the ad, the more expensive.

I actually had advertised on Facebook Ads, a Clickbank product that was converting 1 in 20 (5%). But the ad was suspended by Facebook after 1 day because of the product, not the ad.

Also, do you mean Adsense?

I still have my Adsense account and generate enough for some beer money each month.

But if I wanted to pay Google to advertise a site through PPC, I am banned for life.

Stange that Google won't take my money, but is happy to write me checks.

Yes, sorry, I meant AdSense.

It sounds like you were trying to do click arbitrage. Is that forbidden by Google / FB ads? I don't really understand why it would be, but I guess I could understand that being a more reasonable cause for a ban than the fact that you were advertising a chicken coop.

No arbitrage, just advertising Clickbank products through Facebook and Adwords.

I was told by Adwords staff, that if I change the content of the Chicken Coop site to conform to Google's policies, the account ban would be lifted.

Unfortunately, as an affiliate, I have no control over the content of the Clickbank site I am promoting, nor any warning as to when it went into 'non-compliance'.

I did not think the Chicken Coop site was insidious.

More ideas Rank it then sell it to someone who can do something useful with it, such as a fitness coach/company or any other interested health related org.

Or build up a list and instead of trying to monetize immediately provide tips to get a healthier bmi, then offer products or services after building up a relationship with the listmembers.

Or partner up with someone who is a coach or has value to offer to people who are interested in improving their bmi.

All three of these are more interesting and likely more profitable than trying to push affiliate or cpa type offers straight up to your visitors.

Yeah it corresponds to what I've been reading lately on customer acquisition: build the list!

Very nice ideas on how to take it to the next level, thanks!

I was looking at flippa.com for recent sales, and I saw a site that had sold, claiming to make over $3,000 per month in Adsense revenue.

What is the site about?

Outback Steakhouse Coupons.

It did rank number 1 in Google search results, so I believe it to be possible.

Did it offer coupons of any kind?

Nope.

It seems the less complex the idea, the more profitable it is.

Up until about 3 or 4 years ago it was fairly easy to pick an affiliate product and then make a website and get traffic for it that converted with a positive ROI.

It was basically an arbitrage opportunity in an unbalanced market.

Now that the market is more balanced, it is necessary to have the traffic first (usually by providing engaging content) and then find affiliate marketing programs to successfully monetize that existing traffic. More often than not, selling advertising on a website pays better than affiliate programs.

Make a 'Celebrity BMI' facebook or iphone app and go viral in no time.

Not sure why you're downvoted, I think it's quite a nifty idea.

Don't forget to include athletes in the list so everyone can see how retarded BMI is.

What's your background - software or design? Did you do the design yourself?

Hey roel, I'm a software developer. I outsourced the design through Odesk (for something like 200 euros). You have to test a few designers to find one you like but it's so worth it not to spend tons of time myself to end with a crappy design anyway :-)

This also means that you have to invest 200€ in addition to the time spent coding it and to the hosting+domain fees in order to get things started. Considering the goal you expressed (making passive money), why was this your choice compared to spend less money at first, code it and just make it functional (not beautiful), and only if it works or show signs that it will, then spend the 200€ (or even more then) on the design?

(In case it needs to be said: I'm not saying you made a wrong choice, I'd really like to know/understand why you chose to go this way :-)).

I understand your point, however I think the idea is validated by looked at google search results: 40.000 people look for exactly how to compute their BMI. I also saw that there were several sites built around the purpose of calculating your BMI, however I think they are executed poorly. So there's a market for it, even if it's only to make passive income.

To justify spending 200 euros: 200 euros is really not much in the grand scheme of things and considering the above, I think it's worth the expense. When asking for links and you have a good looking site, your requests are more likely to be answered than if you have a garbage-looking site.

Regarding whether it's a wise investment of my time, it's harder to say. There's the time developing it but also (mostly) marketing it, link building etc. I think at some point you have to go with your guts, you will never have all the data you wish at the beginning. Then if it works really well, I can look into adding more features, more calculators, more content etc...

Apart from having a landing page and trying to get it ranked for certain terms, I don't think you can validate an idea without being able to show/tell people what it will look like. The quality of the product will be judged upon what it looks like, if I made a 1995's style white page with just two form fields and a 'submit' button, that couldn't be used to validate the idea with.

In my mostly-unqualified-to-comment-opinion, that is.

Yeah, that's what I did initially with my "daily exercise you can do at work email" site.

I decided to spend a minimum amount of time on it to just test it out: just a form and a little description. The only decoration was that the text was centered and navy :)

Results: only 4 sign ups over 3 months..mostly from friends and family.

Then I made a nicer design, added content, and voila got about 30 sign ups in about 1 month through google search results. Added benefit is that now I'm not embarrassed to promote the site which of course has yielded many more sign ups.

To sum up: an effort invested in design pays off since good looks provide a hint of legitimacy. Generally speaking :)

Thanks for the answers.

I was just wondering because it looks quite OK, but I saw some small graphical quirks that made me think 'professional design with modifications by a programmer' (no offense, I have the worst taste and no skills in design myself, but I've been studying design basics lately and I'm starting to notice things like the wrong color green box on the right on the 'IMC Femme' page which sticks out like a sore thumb).

Also the 'main' box where you enter height and weight can I think be made much nicer looking with a few small modifications, I think it's important for you if you want others to put your widget on their site. The numbers in the stars are too big and not properly centered, the stars themselves are too big, the alignment of all elements is off (text not centered, button not aligned to other elements, no padding in the box title, bottom padding too big or not in balance with other padding).

All of this from somebody who doesn't know anything about design so I may just be talking out of my ass here.

I have mixed experiences with getting design off odesk/elance-like sites, and I'm a cheapskate and afraid to spend money on my own products without being sure that it will pay itself back. Which is a self-fulfilling prophecy because crappy looking things will sell badly, too.

Anyway I'm quite impressed how you're coming up with multiple ways to spin such a basic thing like a BMI calculator. I hope you will find ways to make this work and make money for you.

hey Roel,

thanks for the detailed critic :-) It's true I'm a software developer and design is difficult for me. I've noted your points and will try to address them with my designer.

BTW, are you dutch (your name)? I'm French but am based in Amsterdam :-)

Votre IMC est NaN

Input validation would be nice.

Have you thought about expanding the scope and making this into a possible larger business? It seems you could provide calculators for other stuff too like calories, cholesterol, etc

Yeah that's true but I chose the domain specifically to calculate the BMI (calculerimc.com -> "bmi calculator").It could still potentially accomodate more calculators though. For now, I want to build traffic to "BMI calculator" keywords and then possibly branch out to more calculators.

You should look up some more seo tricks to get your site more popular!

SEO is hard, what tricks do you have in mind? For now my SEO strategy is to contact people who have fitness related blogs and fitness related link lists and get my site in there. Also I could build more content with a blog for example. But tricks? :-)

spend a few hours reading around reddit.com/r/seo In the last few days I have learnt a lot.

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