[ComputerGuru]

Guess I didn't get the memo. I'm not quite at 500 yet, but it took 12 hours to make a site that makes 250 a day. I'm sure I can easily bring that up to 500 (for instance, the site doesn't even render in IE right now). And I can make another 10 like it.

In response to FreeRadical: It's all about the point of diminishing returns. I spent 6 years on my first site, and it's a huge amount of work with literally thousands of manhours put into it. Just a month ago I launched another site, intended to be a minimum viable product that I can just develop and leave, and it's working out OK thus far. Don't get me wrong, the first is very much successful (2MM+ pageviews a month), but that's thousands of hours I could have put into making multiple other sites, each making a lot less but relatively more.

[palish]

What the f....

How?

[codexon]

but it took 12 hours to make a site that makes 250 a day

I'd really like to see the stats on that.

Every time someone tells me that they spent (small amount of hours) on a website that (makes more than $1 a day) they are exaggerating to the extreme by not including advertising, hosting, domain expenses and maintenance time.

[middlegeek]

I would guess he is not exaggerating in the terms you mention, but what it took to get him there. Reading "12 hours...$250 a day" sounds like he started from zero. He probably didn't.

A while back there was this post about launching a minimally viable product in 3 hours. http://blog.amirkhella.com/2010/09/21/the-story-of-keynotopi... 3 hours and he's making money! What am I doing wrong?

Nothing. Take a look around his site. He is already an extensive expert in the field of user experience, with numerous successes under his belt. I am sure those successes were the product of a lot of education and years and years of hard work. He already has quite a following on his blog due to those successes. There was a lot that went on before he could start marketing something and sell it right off the bat.

Last summer I saw Michael Franti in concert. You may know him as the overnight success that had the song "Say Hey" if you listen to pop radio at all. (It has been in numerous TV shows, a Corona commercial, It was one of the songs played during Oprah's last show, etc.) I happen to know him as an artist who traveled from festival to festival year in and year out. Sometimes playing to a couple hundred people. Even before success, he was a world traveler, has played with indigenous people in the bush of third world countries with no electricity. He was a successful spoken word performer and has been in several bands that rose and fell long before he current lineup. I think he had released about 10 or 11 albums with various groups with virtually no mainstream success before the album that included Say Hey. At the concert I saw him at, he mentioned the press he was getting at being an overnight success and added, "yeah, with 20 years in the making."

So I guess you could say that Michael probably made hundreds of thousands of dollars for singing that 3 minute song. But there was a lot that went on in his life to get him there.

[nl]

I was like you for a long time, until two things happened:

1) I met someone who is running a site that took him a few hours to build, cents to run (AppEngine) (plus $20 for two domain names) and makes over $1000/month (yeah, so he's spent more time since then, but not much.)

2) I build a site that cost me $15 to build ($10 domain hosting, $5 - refundable - to join an affiliate program), hours to build (it's basically a blog on Wordpress) and makes me nearly $200/month.

I can't say I'm an expert, but one way to duplicate this is to find a vertical problem domain with a lot of interest (ie, busy forums), find some problem they have (often it's some kind of calculation that people always have trouble with) and build a crappy, ugly tool to do it for them. Make the calculation URL addressable, then put a short note in a forum saying what you've done and follow up by using it in a few discussions.

[palish]

But what part actually earns you money?

[3pt14159]

I've had best responses with Amazon's affiliate program. Made about $130 bucks from something like 5 or 6 blog posts. Hourly rate worth it? Nope. Was it fun? Yep. Basically what I've learned is that Google's dynamic ad placement is the last thing you should try. Putting in an ad (or affiliate link, there are even services that will auto do this with Javascript, so you're users wont see and you don't have to be part of a billion referral programs. Gray hat? Maybe.) that actually targets what you are talking about is so much more effective.

[nl]

I've written a context sensitive affiliate adserver that serves relevant ads via Javascript. That works reasonably well, but I do need to optimize the ads themselves some.

[3pt14159]

That is really cool. Have you open sourced it? It's JavaScript in the first place so I know anyone can see it in your site, but it would be cool to track it on Github.

[nl]

On that site I make $100-$180 month from affiliate sales, $5-$10 from AdSense.

If you are dealing with physical products then affiliate programs can work quite well.

Edit: On my friend's site is is all AdSense. His is non-physical product related.

[maheshs]

URLs please

[anigbrowl]

Isn't this like saying a doctor could make more money if they didn't have to waste years going to medical school?