100 ways to make no money

Hi everyone,

I'm new here and after a lot of reading thought of sharing my 50 (or rather -50) cents. I'll firstly introduce myself briefly: I work as software developer and earn decent money working as contractor in London. It's great but at some point I'd like to have my own "stuff"/source of income,/whatsoever, so that I don't have a boss anymore! haha. So I'm always trying new projects and ideas whenever I've got some spare time. I also work on some of them with friends/colleagues. I'd like to think that I'm clever enough to be able to do something worthy, but I guess I haven't invested enough time, effort, or both.

Anyway, I wish I could share a brilliant method to make shit lot of money, easily and quickly, but unfortunately I'm not there yet. So far I've tried quite a few things and none of them have quite worked. I still thought it worth sharing them here so that hopefully would still somehow help others to at least avoid my mistakes if not learn from them. Also any suggestions to improve or do things differently would be greatly appreciated. So, until I find something that works, I'll be sharing on this thread the things that I've tried so far, starting from one on this post.

Please, feel free to move this post elsewhere, since it's not actually helping anyone to make money (as of yet) I just didn't know where to put it.

#1: Spam/aggregator blog: So I've done many websites and android apps, and stuff whenever I had an idea, and I always struggled to get people to know/visit/download them, so I thought maybe creating a blog that auto-generates content might somehow change that and that's what I did. I don't know much about SEO, but I know that duplicating content is probably one of the worst things you can do, but that's where my "idea" comes in place:
I created a wordpress site with a brand new domain (didn't know about all that trend of getting expired domains and so on until few days ago, when I found this website , still haven't been able to find any decent domain available, but anyway, sorry by the offtopic). I installed a plugin WP-Pipes that allows you to fetch RSS news and automatically post the content. I installed social sharing plugins, cache optimizers, I put the blog fully on SSL using a free SSL certificate on letsencrypt (I read somewhere that HTTPS helps in SEO because google likes it.).
Nothing fancy until there, but then I thought I'd have to do something to avoid duplicating content, and then I thought, how could I do that without actually having to do that? And I decided to use a few free APIs that by using machine learning techniques are able to do a kind of summary of a given text (all it does is remove some sentences and reorder them, really). I modified the wordpress plugin to call this API's before posting the content and then added a "Full article" link to the source. I created a FB page, google plus page, thumblr, twitter. I integrated some auto-social posting plugins to spam twitter, fb and thumblr. I also found some cheeky JS code that would "make" visitors of the website like the FB page "automagically" (it doesn't always work, but kind of does, the user has to click anywhere). I think that's about it, well I also used some chrome extension to follow people massively and I have over 1k followers on twitter.

It's been running for a few months already, and it's working a little bit better than what I expected. There is some activity on twitter, people liking twits, and the web is getting some visitors from social, but nothing much, almost no organic visitors, I guess it's not that easy to cheat on the big G... I have adsense on the blog but I haven't earn not even 1$ so far and I doubt that's gonna change any time soon, I guess I'm shutting it down soon, because at the beginning I thought that if sharing in Twitter kind of works, maybe other socials would as well, and I could work on that, but FB, Tumblr and G+ are not performing as well, not at all rather, so probably there's nothing much to do with it, any ideas will be welcomed, as it's purely an experiment and I don't "care" being penalised, in fact it might probably be already the case.

So, that was my first contribution to the community, this is the first method, but hopefully won't be the last I share with you guys. Don't try it at home (Because it doesn't work! haha).

Regards!

I think this is great, some people only share the success they have had but sharing the failures will help others learn. Thanks for sharing.

Nice with a failure story for a change! Personally, I am no good with social media, so it's nice to know i'm not the only one not banking there.

Coding is a great skill to have, I would build more on that if I were you. Freelance projects, ask the community here what they would like as an app = BST, everybody loves automation.

You know as a dev myself I used to do similar things. Just make something and thought yeah its cool, but then no one uses it cos no one even knows about it. Started learning SEO to help solve that problem.

Keep experimenting though man. Never give that up. I still always love to tinker with new things. Learning SEO is a key focus for me right now and so far so good. When I've got the game down a bit better I'll revisit the software side of things a bit later. I always had this naive mentality that just cos I can write software that I could build some automated system to bring in the bucks and it just doesn't really work that way. It's more about learning business, how to do market research, how to provide something of value to people and how to get ranked in G. Once you've got all that down you can automate or streamline parts of that with software but I've found steering away from that angle and just focusing on the fundamentals first is bringing in some results.

Good luck man.

Haha wow! That sounds EXCACTLY like what iv'e been doing the past few months ! I'm also new to this whole SEO thingy (I come from a background in hacking/web dev) and iv'e set up a site that runs automatically aswell (rss fetch, twitter/facebook automation) decent twitter activity but not so much on facebook, and avg 40 visits a day on the site x.x - do you perhaps have a skype? we can share some tips!

I feel ya, but don't give up. It might not be a bad idea to hold onto what you have created so far and take a step back or sit on it if you are really going to try a different method. Everything takes time and your not going to make a ton of money over night, maybe even not for a couple months depending on what you are doing. So just hang in there!

Fantastic thread title, a real stopper.

Doing something without investigating it's true profitability. Assumn it will work because you want to belive it does.

Applies to any project, but it's the root of a lot of making no money.

p0w3rf said:

#1: Spam/aggregator blog

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You failed with that, because you didn't understand the value of such a website and the situation you need to be in be able to extract it. I don't think anybody creates such a website with the idea of ranking it. Such websites are something that you make when you already have a good traffic source and you want to make money from it. Then if you have a website full of nice content that your audience is interested in, you can start sharing it with them and they'll go visit your aggregator website and start making you some money from the ads. But this only works when you already have the audience to promote it to. I know because I've personally done that and it's something that works well in such circumstances. You just don't do it to rank and you don't try to spin the content in any way, you just keep the original high quality content and bank on the impressions you're able to generate.

So if you want a website like this to work for you, concentrate on amassing a sizable social media following and don't expect to start earning something until your following is huge. And when your following becomes huge, try other methods of monetizing it as well.

Oh dear, can't believe it's been over two years already! Totally forgot about this but here I am again, resurrecting this post

#2: Instagram & Twitter bot: Spoiler: I actually made some money with this method, although not as much as I'd like of course, otherwise it wouldn't be on this thread, and I'd be very excited to post one of those many successful stories. Anyway. A few months after my last post the company I was working for by then was shut down and we were given 1 month in advance paid and almost holidays so after chilling for a few days I got bored and decided to do something. As coding addict I thought of building something of course because I like creating things, but this time it would be something different. The reason (like that was the only reason, so naive...) all my previous projects failed was because no one knew about them, so I thought I had to build something capable of getting exposure somehow, and that's how the idea of the bot came to my mind. Goal was to reach as many people as possible, still unsure for what purpose but we would cross that bridge when we come to it. So I did some research and thought all existing bots were shit because they were using the APIs provided by the social websites or kind of chaining curl requests with hardcoded parameters. I thought I was clever than that and as I had some experience writing automated browser tests with selenium I thought I was having a genius idea by using that to build a bot. It would emulate the browser, so I would fool instagram, and facebook and twitter and anything I wanted (I know over-confident hahaha). I started with instagram and at the beginning was something basic, doing a few likes and then massively following and unfollowing, some random sleeps here and there and job done. After a few weeks it kind of worked and I created a few IG accounts to test it. Had to adjust a few parameters and add a few more "random" behaviours but accounts started to grow with more or less success depending on the niche. Two years later I'm still doing it, and I've evolved the tool with quite a few nice features (some will consider them basic, some useless, etc..): do not follow again a person previously unfollowed, stop following/unfollowing when instagram starts refusing requests, etc. At the moment my biggest account has 86.4k followers (second one 41.4k and the rest 20-30k, very interesting the difference considering 5 or 6 started at the same time and using the same method to grow them in all of them, I guess I nailed the target on that one) and I've over 10 accounts. The main issue that I see is that they have very poor engagement, probably because I don't give a f*ck about them (except one that I like, about soccer/football) mainly because I'm not interested in the niche/topic. I still have them running in autopilot with random pics scrapped posted nearly daily, and they keep growing but not the engagement. I know I could probably make some more money if I invested time managing them properly but miles away from making a living out of it so not really keen on spending much time on them except for fun on the sports one. So, anyway, I've tried to monetise them selling shoutouts with limited success, netting 996$ in fiverr in total after 2 years. One guy tried to buy the sports account and offered me 350$ which I probably should've taken and bought something nice, but sports ones is my baby! hahaha.

This is too long already for my first post after two years, so I'll just finish saying that even thought I made some money, was a big disappointment, because the main goal was being able to drive people from there to my projects and I've tried that with almost 0% success rate (ie. drive visitors to download one mobile game I developed, or drive customers to an online shop of a friend). Tried with swipe stories, and with links in bio, a few times and it was a total fail. I think I need to learn a lot about how IG works before I can monetise it properly but not very keen on investing the time it takes so it's kind of a road to nowhere... Any advice on this would be very appreciated! Meanwhile I'll carry on growing them as it doesn't cost me anything other than ocasional maintenance of the bot...

If you read all the way through here I'm glad I managed to keep you engaged, I wish I could do that with my IG followers! LOL

Hoping my next post doesn't take another 2 years!
Cheers!

Thanks for sharing your journey. Your first project could have succeeded if you scraped only the most popular posts in certain niches and re-promoted them on those channels.

blackbeans said:

Thanks for sharing your journey. Your first project could have succeeded if you scraped only the most popular posts in certain niches and re-promoted them on those channels.

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Yes you're right, I kind of tried to do that, but using a different source (ie. twitter or reddit) other than IG as I felt re-posting something that has just been posted on another account might not work, or be flagged as spammy/dupe content somehow. I also had issues with the "limited lifetime" of some of the scrapped content. Ie. there's a football match this weekend and something funny happened. If I post it in the next few days it's about ok, but too obvious that I'm "stealing" that content from other account, but if I wait for a few weeks before I reuse it, then that post is no longer relevant, in fact is counterproductive to post it as people put comments like: this is too old, etc. It doesn't happen with all posts ofc, but with quite a few of them. I could manually review the content before posting, but that would take time...

So here we are with attempt #3
#3: Building / Buying android games + Admob + Adsense to advertise: In case you haven't noticed yet, I love coding and trying new things, so overtime I've built a few android applications although I'm not an expert in mobile development but still I released a few of them in the playstore. Tried to advertise them in several pages and other "unofficial" android stores but usually they did get many downloads so I didn't even bothered to put ads on the apps. That was ages ago, but then, I have a good friend that loves MMORPG games and we always talked about how cool would be to create our own game... and somehow we got embarked in such adventure. Spoiler that project will be explained in #4, as its' another topic on its own! lol.

Anyway, after that project failed, I got some game development experience with Unity and somehow got that feeling of this unfinished project and I needed to do something about it. I decided to try to do a much simpler game, something that I could do in less than one month. At the same time I was checking out flippa and saw that they resale a few games there and I decided to bid for a few games that I liked and eventually won one of the bids and got the sourcecode of one complete game. They sell those games ready to release, all you have to do is follow a videotutorial to configure your admob account and give them the codes and the developer will even send you the binary ready to upload to the playstore. Did that, although I was more interested in learning how to do certain things in unity than making money with the ads.

Eventually I managed to create my own game from scratch, reusing many parts from the one I bought, and released both games. I tried to advertise them in free websites and that didn't get me anywhere so I decided to try facebook ads and google ads. Putting the minimum bid allowed on the ads still got me some downloads slowly, and that even led to some income through Admob but soon I realised that I was spending way more than what I was making so I decided to stop it and that was the end of it really. Total spend was around 10€ and income generated about 5€.

Lessons I learned:
Same as usual, doesn't matter how cool your app or game is, if you cannot get the exposure it will not get you anywhere, and getting exposure is expensive, or I haven't managed to find a cheap way at least.

There's definitely a way to make money here, if you manage to make a game engaging enough to make players stay and come back to the game frequently enough, then it will compensate the ads investment. Unfortunately my game and the one I bought are casual games that you'll get tired of in a few days at most, so cannot prove the theory and building a game capable of engaging the player would require not only a lot of my time, but also would require to properly deal with graphics, sounds, art, etc. that I don't have the skillset needed to do properly, and hiring someone able to do that would probably take all the potential income generated by the game.
So I haven't given up yet on games development, but it's a bit tough as I need help from people with expertise in other areas and the same time and commitment that I have, and that's hard to find. I do believe this might be more profitable than a website with adsense, since nowadays the usage of adblockers is getting more and more popular whereas afaik you cannot do that in mobile apps. This is just my theory and you just have to look at the title of the post to know how much credibility I have haha.
Finally, to give you the real numbers, something I always miss in those posts "How to make money doing X", in my admob account, at the time of speaking there are a total of 4k+ impressions, 1.5%CTR and a revenue of about 5€. I'm not sure if that's low, high, or normal, and also not sure of how that compares with adsense revenue. I think it depends a lot on the CPM that google "randomly" assigns you.

Regards,
J