[john_moscow]

Just my 5 cents on making linux-commands-examples.com into an actual business:

1. Do a Google Trends research on the Linux commands people search for (and get trouble with/get confused with). Pick ~5 most popular ones.

2. Find 2-5 pages on the Internet for each command where people asked for help and didn't get a 100% satisfying reply.

3. Write a description page (or article) for each of those commands, explaining the stuff people struggle with. Publish link on pages found at #2. Unless you write something cheesy there, people will actually be helpful and won't ban you.

4. Install Google Analytics. Set yourself a proxy goal of 1000 users per day. Start analyzing: how many views per day do you get from a Linux command with score of X in Google Trends with Y links on it from other forums? Back-propagate your goal to actionable items: write N more pages on topics A,B and C, M links for each.

5. Once you get >1000 visitors/day, you can start monetizing it. A very rough ballpark estimate is $1 per 1000 views (give or take, more like 0.1$-10$ depending on a plethora of factors).

6. Once you get a flow of at least $1/day, do your back-propagation again and make a system for yourself when you can look at a topic in Google Trends, quickly search relevant forums, and know exactly how many $/month would an article on this topic bring you. Then compare this income with your effort to write and promote an article and decide whether this is a business you want to do.

P.S. You can also get traffic on writing articles like "did you know those rare time-saving features of commands X, Y or Z" and publishing them on Reddit, HN and other similar sites. Once you figure out the right style to do it so that people will consider it helpful advice and not spam, you can get decent traffic.

Disclaimer: I use those techniques to advertise my paid tool for developers. It may not pay off for a purely ad-monetized content site.

[landon32]

This is a great process for becoming a nice-cashflow side project, but I doubt there's enough people searching for linux commands for this to ever be huge.

Not saying this isn't a great idea, just saying that it's wise to hedge expectations and not expect this to be a get rich quick scheme.

I think if you wanted to turn it into a larger business, the next step would be to determine an adjacent niche that your readers would also like. E.g. maybe a lot of software engineers at tech companies read linux-commands-examples.com, so you could sell them "new hire 1-sheets" for basic linux commands or something. Could help to get more in depth analytics on who's using your product there.

[evbots]

I actually disagree with this. As someone who uses linux as the primary build OS for my software projects, i need to know just enough to make things work but I don't necessarily want to be an uber linux expert. This results in me constantly googling "command for <XYZ> ubuntu", which usually lands me on a stackoverflow page with something that points me in the right direction. Now, i'm not saying a linux example commands website will be successful for my anecdotal reason, but i have to imagine there are many more devs just like me.

[marcus_holmes]

yes, but do the numbers....

how many of you are there? People in that stage of learning Linux where they google the 5 most common things people get wrong?

Let's be generous and say 1 million. That seems reasonable. It's certainly more than 100,000 and less than 10 million.

Let's be more generous and say that all these people search for this once a week.

At $1 per 1000 pageviews (the generous estimate) that caps income at $1K/week maximum.

That's a nice side-project, if it captures 100% of all the traffic and manage to monetise it (I'd like to see the percentages of Linux users/admins who also install an adblocker; I suspect it's high).

I do this all the time... "I want a service that does X". But I'm not typical, so the market always ends up being small. The standard startup advice of "solve a problem you have yourself" doesn't work for me. I call it my "Kardashian Problem": I don't understand why anyone would ever spend any time paying the Kardashians any attention whatsoever. This is clearly my problem, because the Kardashians are very popular, and the bajillions of people who do pay them attention seem very OK with it. So I am clearly not a very good judge of the market and should not trust my instincts about what will sell well.

[jackgolding]

This is where you upsell into ebooks, video courses and paid training. Also if you build an email list you can build partnerships which will lead to a much higher CPM.

[marcus_holmes]

yeah, but then your business model is selling ebooks, video courses and paid training, and this just becomes one of a number of avenues to reach your market. Which is all totally fine, of course, but the business is no longer "a website with the 5 answers to the most commonly asked Linux questions" :)

[earenndil]

A friend of a friend owns and runs google ads on linux.die.net (linux manpages). It pays his mortgage.

[vermilingua]

But I'd wager that the audience of people looking for an article on a command, and the people that want a manpage up on a non linux device (a second screen, a phone?) are mostly disjunct, and that the latter is far larger.

[adetrest]

I never realized there were ads on this website. Always though it was someone doing it for the love of it.

[EADGBE]

They certainly do it for the love. And the mortgage.

[vi1rus]

There is no need to search for a unicorn at first. It's about starting and doing something

[rmetzler]

Check out the Linux command zines Julia Evans creates and sells online. I don’t know the exact numbers, but if I remember correctly she sold like 3.000 PDFs for $10 each.

[PopeDotNinja]

My gut reaction is:

- 1,000 views/day => ~$1/day => ~$30/month

- 100,000 views/day => ~$100/day => ~$3,000/month

- having blogged about something on a regular basis that I cared about, I think my blog got maybe 50,000 visitors in 3 years, although I wasn't trying to attract them per se, and then I ran out of things I wanted to talk about

- you'd have to really like creating content to grind away for a long time to start making any real money, unless you get lucky & somehow attract a bug audience that sticks around

- if/when I decide to create a business again, I'd probably hate trying to build up an audience that was monetized with ads alone

[GoToRO]

To add to what you said: 50,000 visitors in 3 years is much less than 50,000 visitors in one month for example. From my experience sites with low traffic do not receive the same high quality ads as the top sites. This is done so that top publishers always have revenue and also because is harder to detect fraud on low traffic.

Also, the numer of ads to be served on the network varies and when it drops, the lower quality, lower traffic sites are the first to remain without ads that convert and so without revenue.

[dwild]

> I wasn't trying to attract them per se

If you read his comment, it's actually what he tell him to do.

You can have the best content in the world, if no one know it exist, no one will read it. We all believe they will come by themselves and sure it may happens from time to time, but they are the exception, not the rule.

[mandeepj]

> Once you get >1000 visitors/day

That is a big once.

>you can start monetizing it

How? Ads from an ad bank?

[harel]

AdSense IS an Ad Bank...

[spiderfarmer]

Adsense is a good start.

[DonHopkins]

Expanding your Linux commands site to also covering Unix commands in general, Mac shell commands and Windows Linux subsystem commands specifically, might enlarge your audience.

[rayalez]

Thank you for such an amazing advice, that sounds like a plan I'm going to follow with my future projects as well!

Do you mind sharing your app? I'm really curious.

[Ayraa]

To add to this, it may take a long time to build a big enough audience to make money off ads. But you can use these educational articles as content marketing and lead generation for programming services (example: extract email addresses meeting specific criteria).

[tootahe45]

I have multiple 1k+/day sites, including 1k+/day forum with avg 7 min visit time. I can't get any accepted for Google ads, unfortunately.

[primitivesuave]

This is a fantastic piece of advice and I am sure many more people along with the OP appreciate your insight.