Wow. I went on the road and missed all this. And I'm one of the people who asked for a follow up post. Shame about the deleted content. I'll check out the Reddit stuff and dog food link. Thanks minimalist.
Whatever the content was -scam, porn, online gambling, hey I'm all ears if it makes money. I didn't ask you to share to pass any judgments.
I actually run a little site that costs me $10 a month of fees. It makes $400 per month. Enough to intrigue me about the idea that there is money out there but not enough for me to put anymore energy into it. Friends have told me that I should try to expand it but really I just run it for the novelty of being able to make a few hundred dollars a month. I've done this for ten years. I don't update any human generated content. I barely remember the password.
I learned "SEO" after watching my site get bonked down on Yahoo! And Google rankings. It was not as complex as people make it sound. After spending a career pulling signal out of noise samples the "science" was easy to control. I had to write a silly program to update my content daily to really get on top of the bots. Fun to figure out.
I get about 1000 hits a week. I have no ads and don't know much about that stuff. I know they're valuable because two years ago somebody cloned my site with everything but my product and put ads on theirs - is 1000 hits that valuable ? Must be. I sell a file that is worth money to a small number of folks. Five a week pay for a download file. It's a pretty sad conversion rate but hey, it's all automatic. And I get one visitor a quarter who emails me and says I'm scammy because my stuff didn't work for him. I guess that's 1/60 customers.
Thanks minimalist. I think it is interesting that this kind of activity is out there and that you are an expert. I'm not below trying something like this. I just wouldn't try it on people here.
I recall sitting with a colleague ten years ago showing him the snippet of magic I sell online and saying "ya know, there are people who will pay a few dollars for this if we could just find them or they could find us efficiently." He called BS and buried me in negativity. I have never told him to this day that it works. And, he's so convinced that it doesn't he never googled the subject even though he came up with it in the first place. Be careful about negativity I guess. (This belongs in the things I had to unlearn thread)
I hate getting scammed but hey if it makes money I'm at least academically curious. Thanks again for the follow up post.
I guess my feeling on this is I wouldn't be mad if I had asked you, "how did you do it" and you showed me a how to on running a successful porn site. I asked and got a valid answer. Even Robert Kiyosaki taught me something. Yes (I've posted this before) I bought his VPs tapes, audio tapes, game and multiple books before I figured out his game and his mark (me). And at the end of the day it actually made me richer in real money. I wouldn't be retired if I hadn't learned from that huckster. Jacob wasn't on the scene yet so I had to settle for RK.
I'm off to see a real scammy guy today. He charges 1.25% of assets under management to yield 1% before fees. I'll save my negativity for him.