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Comment by rozenmd | Hacker News Reader

Consider teaching on your own blog - it's not immediate money, but if you're patient, you'll start to get folks asking if you're available for consulting, or if you've considered writing a book on what you write about.

Source: I wrote a book about a single function in React, it did okay.

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Ive thought about the blog thing, i just have no idea how to find readers? With the book the publisher takes care of the marketing part? I think that's a common theme Im noticing with where I seem to stop. How do i find, reader, clients, users for whatever i want to do.

It comes from naturally participating in the community - someone will ask a question, you'll respond "oh hey here's how you do that", and link them to your blog with additional details (or you'll write an article that solves the issue and share it if it comes up again)

Yup, nearly all the blog stuff I have is just to save time on explaining things over and over to someone on HN or FB. Look to answer questions and then blog about stuff where the answer is long.

And then once you're explaining the thing over and over again and need to get into more depth, write a book or training module. For example, some things need background knowledge on how coroutines work, and then you end up explaining why we use coroutines over threading, and so on.

What’s a growing area/project that is poorly documented? Just start blogging as if you were creating documentation, add code examples, etc. Since you’re bad at marketing, make it SEO.

Once you have some traffic coming in, promote a paid course/ebook where you build a full project/app or some bigger unit of work with the thing.

Writing books just don’t make enough money. It makes you look like cool for having published a book, and that’s about it.

"Enough" money varies widely between people. There are plenty of people who choose lower stress at the cost of not maximizing income and it sounds like OP might be interested in that.

I second this. I wrote a book for Manning, and I always describe it as something I'm really glad I did, that I'll never do again.

However, it did have nice second order effects on my career, and if I had written a book in an area that hasn't sputtered out (mine was on building voice apps for smart assistant platforms), I suspect it may have even lead to work directly.

Found your book. So you would consider this area dead? Why? Did Google et al close down their APIs?

I wouldn't consider it dead yet, but I do consider it a failed platform. (I've been intending to write a blog post on this.)

Alexa/Amazon is still going, but there are rumors that layoffs will disproportionately impact this division, Google has shut down their APIs unless you're wanting to integrate with an Android app, and Apple has never really opened up Siri.

As for why—it's so hard to build a business on the platforms. They are geared toward "get in and get out" interactions and for things like ordering a pizza, you've already got your phone on you. I still think voice has life, and I love using my devices, but it didn't take off how I thought it might.

It’s great long term marketing though.

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