Define "hard." It is an eminently achievable goal to build a business which makes $1,000 a month. That isn't a "get into the NFL then win the Superbowl" goal, that is a "get into college" goal on the relative-risk-of-total-failure continuum. The process of doing it is fairly well understood and focused application of effort towards it makes it quite likely that you will succeed.
It does require a bit of a mindset change. You have to stop thinking of yourself as a "skilled developer", for one, since development skill leads to success in software businesses like the ability to cook amazing waffles leads to successfully running a bed and breakfast.
You have to stop thinking of yourself as a "skilled developer", for one, since development skill leads to success in software businesses like the ability to cook amazing waffles leads to successfully running a bed and breakfast.
A few years ago I was part of a small company, and one day we had a meeting to discuss our future (and yes, porn was one of the things we discussed, though we ended up not pursuing it). The question we asked was, "What was the goal of the company?" If the answer was "To make money", then was writing code the proper way to do it? Each of us, being coders, had come to think so.
I sometimes think that having a skill or a passion for some hands-on activity is a detriment because it leads you think you can and should be doing that as the path to success. The whole "do what you love and the money will follow" nonsense.
OTOH, if you believe you have no tangible skill, but think you can recognize or anticipate a market, then you don't bother trying to implement the solution yourself; you go hire people. (Of course pulling that off is a skill in itself, but it's a different sort from the "make things with your hands" realm where coding lives.)
From a business point of view it may make more sense to take a high-paying but soul-sucking Rails contract job and use the money to pay other developers to implement you MVP.
since development skill leads to success in software businesses like the ability to cook amazing waffles leads to successfully running a bed and breakfast.
Yes, a very important point. This is the central idea of The E-Myth (i.e. doing a thing and running a business that does that thing require very different skill sets).
Break down exactly why you think that that isn't sustainable, then engineer those worries away.
Do you think your project will need new features regularly? Pick a project whose problem domain changes rarely, and get out of the features = value mindset because it is outrageously false.
Do you think you will have to be constantly selling? Don't pick something with high touch sales processes for a side project.
Do you think your project will require support regularly? Do something less critical, so you have less time pressure on support. Do something simpler. Give people self-help resources and push them. Automate as much of your support burden as reasonably possible. (e.g. "Hey Patrick I need a receipt" takes me about 10 seconds to answer. It used to take a few minutes, but I get asked it frequently enough to justify 30 minutes of dev to make it quick.)
Do you think you will need to play sysadmin frequently? Become a better engineer. (I have a couple articles about this.)
I am not the sharpest knife in the HN drawer by a long shot. Currently I'm travelling internationally doing some networking at a Silicon Valley startup and, on the weekdays, consulting in NYC. I profoundly hate flying right now. I also have two software businesses and, from their perspective, this state of affairs is exactly identical to me just sleeping in back at my house. It is rather unlikely the businesses will cause significant work for me.
Patrick, yes it's a regular selling problem as my membership peaked a couple of months ago and I'm trying to keep current members during this plateau.
Perhaps I have fallen for the features mistake to make more value for those members, but I've not implemented much to start with.
Doing email marketing, email replies to customers, adding testimonials, adding features, creating new info products... this one project takes all the time, but it's multiple times too small to sustain me.
Maybe email marketing isn't the right choice? I know personally I never purchase products emailed to me, if I spend 3 seconds scanning the email you're lucky. Granted I may not be your target audience.
Applying your startup skills to projects in the adult space will certainly help you wing your way to $1000/m v easily.
Big data/machine learning of all the meta data associated on tube sites, repurposing content for tablets, recommendation engines, social layers that are delineated/firewalled from the mainstream social graph, hosting/live streaming services for adult content -- are all opportunity spaces that come to mind.
Many of these projects can be kept on "life-support" and still bring in a healthy profit if set up correctly.
Please don't down-vote because it's porn - it's a legal and legitimate space
Many of these projects can be kept on "life-support" and still bring in a healthy profit if set up correctly.
How do you know this? I'm genuinely curious; is this reasonable speculation (but still speculation) or do you have some concrete evidence of this working for people?
What I've read lately about porn sites suggests that the days of easy money are gone, modulo a few outliers.
What I've read lately about porn sites suggests that the days of easy money are gone
What has disappeared are the "gallery sites" that were easy to make - often by hand - or using basic CMS's like wordpress.
Most of the people who say it is over are the "old skool" industry folks who hate the Tube sites because they represent a level of technical expertise that they cannot match (but most HN'ers can)
What is happening is real technology is disrupting the space and those without skills are getting pushed out.
People are still paying for porn, and content sites need to find the distribution and new leads.
I know this because my partner has a lot of projects in this space. I also know many people - from owners of some of the biggest content houses here in SF thru to engineers who work on startups and supplement their income at night through this kinds of projects.
It's actually more common then you think, most people just don't want to put their names to it.
Thanks very much for the detail. I think the next step might be to identify some under-served niche. Though, given the Internet, I have a hard time thinking any interest is under-served, at least for long.
I know a guy who built a "tube site" software in PHP when tubes were still fairly new and he was making ~10,000$/month within a few weeks. He didn't spend a dime on advertising, just word of mouth and posting on adult boards with a link to his site in his signature.
I've been wanting to build a niche video/picture site for a while (to deal with all the CDN/scaling issues involved myself), and I've also been looking for a project I can use this Programming Collective Intelligence book on.
Adult seems to be a good next project for me. The only initial unknown I can think of would be where content would come from unless it's user-supplied. Any other links/info/thoughts?
Several years ago I thought about building something in the adult market (never got to it). Your best bet is to go to the adult webmaster's board: http://gfy.com If you're looking for affiliate programs, if I recall correctly, they gave you tons of content for free.
Affiliate deals with content sites - which are more than just advertising because they tend to have insane revenue sharing deals for the lifetime of the lead - often 50% split of membership fees for the life of the subscription.
So from just a single user signing up for a $30/month subscription, you would make over $180/year.
My partner enjoys a healthy secondary income (way way above the monthly figure mentioned in the original question) from such activity.
If you do big-data analysis and/or curation of content you can probably sell this to other sites too as many in this space are cash rich and tech-ability poor.
I've not because I don't actually have any projects in this space - my partner (Violet Blue) does and I help her with the technical side of her sites and as someone with a media/tech background I find a lot of it quite interesting.
And a lot of people would rather consume porn rather than those burgers. It's all subjective and down to personal taste. He makes a good point about not being downvoted simply for the market he's chosen.
Because lot of people would rather consume porn rather than burger, and those same people would rather flip burgers rather than produce porn, is why porn is so profitable.
If that was not the case, porn would have been as cheap as dozons of say, ERP applications.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted. You didn't pass any judgment on others, just saying that for you and others it's not justifiable. I 100% agree with you - I had many opportunities to go into that space, but had to decline all of them because I wouldn't feel right doing it, and would have a hard time explaining it to my parents.
Questions like this, "what should I build", and "which language should I use", and etc make me cringe when I read them. Asking questions is awesome, but these just don't seem to be productive. His question isn't related to building a web app at all, he just wants to know if he built that app, could it make $1k+ per month. Plus, any answer(s) given will likely just fuel his planning, and not execution.
In his defense I know lots of developers doing small webapps they intend to keep on life support and not actively work at growing in an attempt to hit their magic mark for what their monthly budget / expenses are. This may not be the attitude of the majority of HNers but lots of people would be happy with a way to make 2500$ a month for themselves... Just enough to maintain a modest quality of life in the midwest.
Both the question and the answer are all kinds of silly. You can't start a project with the end goal of making $1000 a month, or you will surely fail. Instead, you've gotta motivated to solve a problem you've identified and then you need to execute on it.
Coding isn't everything either. You may be a fine developer, but you're forgetting about design, marketing, customer support, dealing with crisis when your project does good, dealing when depression when it doesn't…
Don't make a plan to get to $1000. Rather, build something cool, and when $1000 does or does not show up at the door, be thankful and learn from the experience. And try again. Iterate.
I have an eBook for sale for $39.00 that will show you how in ten easy steps, it includes:
1) how to market yourself and use the power of social networking to do the marketing for you
2) how to unlock the power of referrals
3) how you can grow from making $1000 a month, to over $10,000 a month in three more months of work.
"I never thought I could own my own business, but it is just so easy" - happy customer
$37 would be more common for that sort of book, BTW ;-) (Coincidentally just yesterday I noted there are 10x the results for "$37 ebook" than for "$39 ebook" on Google.)
I have many products that make more than $1000 a month. Tip - use the app stores to cut away the pain of having to market to users through vague means. App stores are a godsend if you are a good developer but bad marketer.
Would you care to elaborate on which app stores. I can see how people can make money developing mobile apps, but is it possible to get a decent revenue from say Chrome Webstore.
Why must it be a web app? To me web apps are only useful for a specific sort of software, not for all types of software. People who want everything to be web apps are just mentally inflexible.
The app store for web apps is twitter and facebook.
I don't know where you read that. Here is the question:
"Is it hard to build, market and maintain a web app that makes at least $1000 a month? For a single, skilled web developer."
You might consider that splitting hairs, but I think the question was quite clear, and very precise. Basically, he's interested in capitalizing on an existing skill set and wondering about the business side of things.
Offtopic I know, but this comment is exactly the type where seeing points on comments would be really useful. As it stands, I won't click this link because I have no idea if it's worth it, or worse some kind of scam.
6 years into building web-apps and finally I am just now seeing a few bucks rolling in (still <$1000 month).
I wasted lots of time, primarily pursuing the wrong kinds of business models (free!!!) or putting effort into the wrong areas of a business, ultimately burning out because things weren't working.
But, even if you've picked a good product with a good market, for the un-initiated engineer there's this mysterious delta between being able to build something (anything!), and making that something successful. My recommendation (because its working for me), is to find a co-founder who is a business guy employed at a successful small software company. Painting with broad strokes here, but try to pick a sales or marketing guy over a biz dev guy, I think they are connected better with the product.
You've heard this advice before. Its true. Engineers think of the world as meritocratic. But good product != success. You need someone to help you get past this way of thinking.
Indeed. How does the poster figure Apple got their image? It was pretty bad, their image I mean, in the 90s. It surely couldn't be something crazy like they make great products :)
If it takes you one year to get that product to $1K/month, then you'll need 20 years... But you have to consider that in 20 years, some of your apps will die and also managing 20 apps and customers is a headache.
I think saying, however sarcastically, that if it was that easy, everyone would be doing it is kinda pointless. The most important step is to get started in the first place.
Even if you don't make huge amounts of money (disclaimer: that's my blog post linked at the bottom of the answer), there's a huge gulf between those that spend their days thinking about possibilities, and those that get up and start their projects. If you're in the latter group, you stand a much greater chance :)
Is it hard to write a story or make a film that people will watch? Same thing, just a bit different. "Everyone" seems to know the answer, but the truth is nobody knows. Because everyone would do it then.
What does a "recurring billing system" do? I'm new to this, but all I did for now was to store PayPal's (actually the clone that exists in my country) transactions in my database, and bump the "good_until" timestamp when a new payment is received (via POST in my case).
1. Pick a tool you can build which will make money for people.
2. Build it for people who will pay.
3. Market to them.
4. Build it.
5. Ship it.
6. Market to them. (Over and over. It's not a one-time thing.)
I've done it, and I teach other people to do it. (But the thing is - once you reach $1000, you might as well go further since the first $100 is the hardest, once you get that, you have proof and you begin to have leverage for word of mouth and client success stories and yadda yadda yadda.)
This is Hacker News, not "Write A Business Book For Me For Free Then Hold My Hand" News. There's a lot out there on how to do each one of those steps, in books mostly and some of the better software-biz blogs. The fact that I didn't write a 30,000-word essay doesn't make what I'm saying any less true.
So few people even say that the first step exists, or that it should come first, that alone is worth stating. Then go look for resources for how-to.
I'm not asking you to do it, but honestly, I really haven't ever found any of these places that contain much more info about step 1 than was contained in your rough outline (but I have found lots of places that contain roughly the same amount of actionable info in longer form).
If a piece of writing does go further, it typically just advises the reader to do something like "Talk to people and find out," which is frustratingly circular. Talking to people is something most of us do every day without any profit, and "find out" just restates the problem.
It may be that this has been written about well somewhere, but I have never seen it. I figure it must be one of those things where you just have to figure it out for yourself, and for those who have figured it out, these vague platitudes look like actionable advice because they're able to mentally fill in the blanks.
There are plenty of books on market research, customer development, and internet marketing (real books and serious ebooks/classes) that go much deeper into the topic. Have you been reading those, or just blog posts?
Blog posts are by nature superficial, and more importantly, if you're reading blog posts by people in the tech world about marketing, you're probably picking the wrong teachers to learn from.
As a biz book nerd, who reads probably 30 biz books a year (for the last 12 years), I've never found one or even two resources that are end-to-end adequate. What I've learned, I've pieced together from hundreds of sources, including some meant for enterprise (and adapted for my needs), like _Pricing with Confidence_, and taking vague hand-wavy inspiration (_Purple Cow_) and looking for specific, real-world actions to make it concrete.
That's why I created my "30x500" course: to be a super-concise, super-specific crash course for nerd types (like me) who want to create their first product and want to do it with as little risk of failure as possible. I teach systems. I'm not gonna really pitch it here, cuz it's neither the time nor the place, but to say that I know what you're talking about -- and the stuff IS out there.
It either takes digging and work to piece it together into a strategy, or a willingness to shell out for something accelerated. My course is not the only one where you can learn how to do market research -- but you're going to be hard pressed to find it in one book, or two books, or 10 books, because the strategies and techniques to reduce risk are very valuable. And they take a LOT of work to create… I've spent hundreds of hours on building my course, doing research, tweaking the teaching methods & order, the metaphors, the workbooks, the homework, the supporting materials.
You'll rarely find that level of energy and diligence put into a business book, unless it's a byproduct of "workshopping" (like the GTD system was a workshop long before it was a book). Teaching workshops is vastly more profitable, and in a lot of ways more emotionally rewarding, than selling a book. So as blog posts are to books, books are to live classes & workshops. There's no equivalent reward for selling a $20 - $30 book with that kind of information in it... unless you can turn around and sell something more expensive, and leverage fame, like David Allen did.
That aside, there are courses & workshops where you can learn a lot more about step #1 -- other than mine! I've found these two to be excellent at the "figuring out what to sell" side of things: Presell Formula by Clay Collins, and Product Launch Formula by Jeff Walker.
Laugh if you must, yep it's internet marketer slumming, but they're really good at what they do. A person who wants to succeed won't sneer at any source of workable knowledge.
Here are the products I've planned & designed, which sell well:
1. Freckle
2. JavaScript Performance Rocks
3. Various JavaScript workshops
4. my entrepreneurship class (30x500)
And, by the end of June, we'll be launching our 2nd SaaS, Charm, which is much larger & took a longer time to develop (while I was fighting undiagnosed chronic fatigue syndrome), and we've already got people chomping at the bit to sign up and pay us for it. After that, we're creating self-study versions of our JS workshops.
If you're going to employ snarky skepticism, you might as well do your research first!
Great, I'm strong believer in diversification. But you haven't launched 4 successful SaaS, and whilst I wish you luck with Charm, it's a bit cheeky to suggest success before success has been achieved!
We have big companies just chomping at the bit to pay us - their words, "when can we pay you?" and our beta testers are ecstatic. We have 2000 people on our advance notice list. I think it's safe to say that it is going to go very well for us indeed.
(That's not to say we won't have technical or growing pains. I'm sure we will. That's part of the reason we haven't launched yet -- that, and my chronic fatigue making me useless for weeks on end without warning.)
(Serious question. I suck at asking questions that get me useful answers. I have some websites that have been around a while and make next to nothing in spite of having something of value to offer. I want to make $2000-$3000/mo. How on earth do I get there from here?)
You can start by being specific. There's no generic answer here. You can't really try to understand "succeeding at businesses" in the abstract. You have to do things on a case-by-case basis. So if you ask about one of your _specific_ sites, people can help you.
Okay. How would one get more quality traffic with this specific challenge: It's a health site where I talk about getting myself well when doctors claim it cannot be done. The rest of the world thinks it cannot be done either so it's a hard sell.
So far, I have been working on building an audience painfully slowly. Since I am also working on getting myself well, content does not go up as regularly as I would like. My feeling has been this is probably a good thing for now because the first thing I have to do is win over my audience and the world just does not believe this can be done. Maybe I am completely wrong (about needing to build the audience this way)? But without participating in email lists and hearing what other people are asking, I also don't really know what to talk about -- I don't just psychically know what is different about what I am doing compared to other people. So for me that relationship to the audience is important and there has been a huge barrier for a long time. It is gradually coming down. Maybe I do know exactly what I am doing and it just takes time. Or maybe I am an idiot and someone else would have no problem slapping some content onto the site and generating an income.
It's a health site where I talk about getting myself well when doctors claim it cannot be done.
Besides your Mom, no one cares about getting you well.
Since I am also working on getting myself well...
Supposing I were sick, I'd care mainly about getting myself well. It sounds like you don't have the answers, so why am I bothering?
It sounds like you aren't selling solutions. So your best bet is to sell sympathy and motivation. My suggestion: make it more of a forum, allow other people to tell their stories as well. Focus on sharing emotions as much as sharing solutions.
Monetization will probably come from ads selling snake oil. Near as I can tell, that's the primary method of monetization in health related sites - selling homeopathy and herbs to desperate people.
Besides your Mom, no one cares about getting you well.
As noted elsewhere: The site exists because there are people who are interested in what I did to get well, not because I had any plans to create such a site. It gives them clues as to how to get themselves healthier when all else has failed. I talk about what worked for me in large part because I have zero interest in giving advice per se. I think that is part of what is wrong with conventional medicine: Doctors routinely prescribe treatments with short term benefits and long term costs, which is not so bad if you are basically healthy and can take the hit for an acute problem. But it's deadly if you have a chronic health issue. And the fact that they take this basic approach is no secret. It's done quite openly: We all know about the huge fold-outs detailing the negative side effects that come with most prescription drugs and the waivers that have to be signed before they will perform surgery. Since getting myself healthier relied heavily on trading short term costs for long term gains, I have zero interest in replicating a system that I am convinced is part of the problem.
So your best bet is to sell sympathy and motivation. My suggestion: make it more of a forum, allow other people to tell their stories as well. Focus on sharing emotions as much as sharing solutions.
I own several email lists. I cannot for the life of me get conversations going on them. I also briefly had a forum for the site. It was overrun with spam and had maybe three members (myself included). So I've tried that route and failed, quite consistently and miserably. It works better for me to try to get people sharing info when someone else owns/runs the discussion space. And that is a piece I am working on elsewhere, for the purpose of helping people help themselves. I'm also not interested in selling sympathy or motivation per se. There is a saying that "an example is the best lecture" and I have found that to be true. So I do offer myself as an example in hopes that it inspires people to feel "If she can do it, I can do it". But I have zero interest in being some cheerleader.
Again, I was not asking about monetizing the site. Only about getting traffic, a question you have not addressed. As stated earlier: I have several websites. I really don't expect this site to be where the money is. But it is the most mature/developed of the sites I own and it basically serves as a proving ground for me to learn stuff.
Honestly this is like trying to sell pages off your own personal diary. Im going to say from my POV there is no way you can make serious money of of this.Google adsense yes but we all know how that goes if you have low traffic. BUT if you can gather an Audience and after that write a book about this..your blog audience could spread the word about ''the guy who defied the odds''
In regards to both this reply and the other one where I wrote a lengthier response, please note I have not asked "how do I monetize this?" I have asked "How do I get quality traffic for the site?"
My expectation is that at some point there will be an app and that will have more potential for being monetized. For now, I only want to know how to get more traffic. Can anyone address that specific question and leave out your opinions that I am crazy to try to monetize this?
Without even getting into the ethics of selling health advice before the experiments are complete, consider the probability that it's just a terrible idea to try to monetize your personal health site, no matter how you do it.
The point of your health regimen is to get yourself well. The point of your health site should be to help you get yourself well -- by motivating you to stick to your plan, by helping you keep records of your own plans and thinking and data, and by recruiting folks to help encourage and coach you and share advice and conduct experiments along with you.
Don't screw up your own priorities and motivations by introducing an additional profit motive. When your health is at stake, you need to do what you need to do, not what your audience wants to pay for. If, after all your experiments, it turns out that the healthiest path for you is the most boring thing ever, something that nobody wants to read about and that can't be sold for money but that is nonetheless effective for you... great! Mission accomplished, you're healthy. Don't bias your judgement by asking a market to vote with its money. They'll end up (e.g.) steering you to the latest fad, whether it's healthy for you or not.
A) I am well on my way to being well. Although I continue to learn, the site does not exist to get me well. It exists because I made some off-the-cuff remark on an email list where I was held in high esteem, got attacked for it, was politely asked to "prove" what I had said and I said "give me a day or two to get back to you so I can put together the information". The response to the next email where I backed up my remark was stuff like "Can I forward it to someone I know who has a child with the same condition?". So I began working on putting the information on a website so people can share the links without asking to forward my emails.
B) It turns out that there is actually research that backs up some of what I kind of stumbled across. But it doesn't get much press because it won't make any drug companies rich.
C) I don't mind helping people but 1) I have bills to pay myself 2) if it benefits others and has value, why shouldn't I get something in return? and 3) people don't take it seriously when it isn't "for profit". Just being some nice person who got well and is willing to share what I know is very unconvincing for helping others.
D) I often contemplate just taking the site down. I am okay with just getting on with my life now that I am healthy enough to do that. But other people have made it clear they don't want it to come down. Both this year and in a previous year, donations paid my hosting service renewal when I couldn't afford it (this year: Thank you HN!).
As for the ethics question, I have had that thrown in my face before. People are dying from what I have and doctors can't really help them. Is it possible for people to misuse the information on my site and wind up with a problem because of it? Yes. Is it likely that doing nothing is worse? Very much so. My approach is much more conservative than what doctors do and much safer.
How would one get more quality traffic with this specific challenge: It's a health site where I talk about getting myself well when doctors claim it cannot be done.
The first thing to define is "quality traffic". Let's say the health condition is a painful nose wart. If only 14 people in the U.S. have this condition you're never going to get significant traffic. If the condition is indeed widespread you have to ask how people would search for it. Would they type "painful nose warts" or maybe something else like "nose bumps"? If you have been assuming people use the same keyword phrasing you do to describe the same thing you need to investigate what is the actual case. Google's keyword tool can help by showing what people are searching for. (I recommend comparing broad and exact match versions too.) Make a list of all possible phrasing. This can help you identify long tail keywords which there is little competition for, and sometimes strong keywords nobody targets well at all.
After you've confirmed that there is indeed significant traffic to be had for your topic, and you're armed with your keyword list the next step is to set up your site to be successful when aligned with those things. Probably the quickest and easiest thing to do is start a Wordpress blog, since there are many theme possibilities and it's already going to have many SEO basics built in. Next, go to Google and type in: SEO site: news.ycombinator.com. Take a day or two to read through many of the results. Pay extra attention to comments by patio11. Now, consider how you can follow as much of that advice as possible with your site. Be prepared to work and improve on this for days or weeks. The time consuming part of receiving free traffic from search engines really boils down to: creating quality content (keep your phrasing list in mind here!) on the topic, and receiving links to that content. If your content is good enough, links will start appearing naturally. This can take time, but it will happen. To help things along be proactive by reaching out to sites, communities, writers, organizations which have anything at all to do with your topic. Ask them directly for links back, or possibly if you can write a guest post on their site referencing your site. If you follow these steps correctly, over time you will see results.
Now that you've established traffic you need to monetize it. There are a couple ways to do that. If the traffic is significant enough, and depending on the topic, simply putting up ads may be enough. If there are complimentary products to aid in getting healthy, like a special measurement machine, see if you can position yourself to earn a commission whenever it's sold through your site as an affiliate (start contacting suppliers directly if you need to and pitch them).
The other way to monetize your traffic is by selling access to the information itself. You hold valuable information. You want to monetize it. And here I disagree with mechanical_fish. There is nothing wrong with asking people to pay for you taking the time to show them a way to improve their life. Doctors and drug companies don't work free. They are usually quite expensive, and they don't have all the answers as they are literally "practicing" medicine. Providing alternatives which may be more effective and likely less costly as well is certainly worth something.
The approach I would use when taking this route is freely offering about 80-90% of the solution and trying to monetize the remaining 10%. As you say you will probably face skepticism about any proposed solution, whether it's true or not. Talking openly and candidly about the first 90% is a way to address that skepticism. People can detect when you are probably being genuine, and they will respond to that. I would tell my story as genuinely and matter-of-factly as possible on my blog, and interact with readers. Next, I would offer one of two options which could be monetized. My favorite thing to do would be adding a premium membership forum to my site. I'd make it known that in this forum participants shared and progressed together, as well as having access to me. Even if you gave away 100% of your solution, coaching members along is still likely to be a needed and valuable product.
The other option is to package up the remaining 10% in an eBook format where you essentially re-tell your entire story, but with 100% of the information. Show your site visitors that you have taken time to put together a more in depth look at the topic, and you hope they will pay the modest < $5 cost to receive it.
Last, be sure to have a legal disclaimer stipulating that you're not a doctor, you're only telling your story, and people should consult their doctor before beginning any form of treatment for anything.
I actually just looked into your site healthgazelle.com. I'm afraid I would recommend pursuing another avenue to reach $2,000-3000 per month. One area you seem to be good at is writing. I'd pick another area you're an expert in or passionate about which is far more popular, then build up a blog audience writing about it.
There are two problems. The first, good traffic quality, can't be changed. The second, your site not being optimized for search engines can, but without the traffic there isn't much point.
It took me several seconds to find out that the topic of your site seems to be cystic fibrosis. You actually have a decent store of content about your topic, but right now it's practically invisible to search engines (for example, you refer to it as "CF", and you're not implementing good page title tags, or effective headers, urls, etc.). As I said, that can be fixed. The bigger problem is that Google's keyword tool for "cystic fibrosis" (exact match phrasing) shows not many are searching for what you're offering.
The general term "cystic fibrosis" has decent numbers, but that can include everything from people checking what it is to students doing reports on it. You are interested in people looking for treatment for it, and those numbers are very, very low. Perhaps people don't think to look for a treatment for it. Whatever the case, you would need to be near the #1 result for the keyword "cystic fibrosis treatment", beating out sites like mayoclinic.com and nlm.nih.gov, and you still wouldn't have more than a few thousand clicks per month. Maybe that's enough for you, but I'd pick a more popular traffic topic.
Also, please note I have a typo in my recommendation above to learn more about effective SEO. You need to type into Google "seo site:news.ycombinator.com" with no space after "site:" to see only results from HN.
I have no plans of making $2000-$3000 off that one site. I have other things in the works. They need a great deal more fleshing out (one project has exactly zero actual content). Nor is the site intended to be about cystic fibrosis per se. I advocate eating right, exercise, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" and so on. Those things are more broadly applicable than just treating my specific condition. And I am quite well aware that very few people go looking for info on how to get well while living with CF. Still, I want to use this site to learn about building traffic as it is the most developed site I have. So thank you very much for your suggestions and for correcting the typo.
One area you seem to be good at is writing. I'd pick another area you're an expert in or passionate about which is far more popular, then build up a blog audience writing about it.
:-)
That's kind of the long term goal. Only I am thinking webcomic. Time will tell.
It does require a bit of a mindset change. You have to stop thinking of yourself as a "skilled developer", for one, since development skill leads to success in software businesses like the ability to cook amazing waffles leads to successfully running a bed and breakfast.