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- 🤢 This ugly one page affiliate site earns $5000/month
🤢 This ugly one page affiliate site earns $5000/month
Welcome to a fresh edition of eBiz Insider, my free newsletter packed with tips, insights and opportunities to build your online business.
Today...
Ugly One Page Affiliate Website = $5000/Month
50% Off The Affiliate Lab
Learned This Skill In His Car, Now Earns $100,000+
Passive Income Makes No Sense
$119K/Month Explaining Complex Topics Simply
This Free App Earns Him $4675/Month
Time Billionaires
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Ugly One Page Affiliate Website = $5000/Month
Jeremy Grosser built DiskPrices.com, an extremely simple one-page site with up-to-date prices of hard drives for sale on Amazon.
According to a recent profile, the site makes $5000/month via the Amazon affiliate program 🤑
Jeremy writes…
Back in 2015, I wanted to build a NAS [Network-attached storage] for backups at home.
I found the shopping experience for hard drives on Amazon extremely frustrating. You can only view 10 search results at a time. The first dozen results are sponsored listings.
So…
I decided to write a Python script to find all of the hard drives on Amazon, figure out their capacity, then sort by price per GB.
To do this 👇
You need an access key to use the API which is only available through the Amazon Affiliates program. So I signed up.
But…
Amazon won’t give new affiliates access to the Product Advertising API until they’ve referred at least three sales.
So my Python script turned into diskprices.com. I built a list of hard drives in a spreadsheet and sorted them by price per GB.
A few people clicked my links. Armed with an API key, I was able to programmatically generate the listing and keep it up to date.
The site now gets ~80,000 visits per month (source) and ranks for keywords like…
hard drive prices
disk prices
hard drive deals
📝 Jeremy writes…
People link to diskprices.com from blogs, reddit, hacker news, and other forums pretty regularly, which has helped the search ranking.
I'm not a fan of paid ads or SEO tricks, so I just let things happen organically.
I suspect there could be opportunities to create other sites along these lines.
Maybe one for cameras, smartphones, or some other high-priced electronics? 🤔
The coding side of things would be much easier nowadays with the help of ChatGPT.
But be aware: Jeremy recently had an issue with Amazon Australia…
Fortunately that got resolved, but it highlights the risk of depending so heavily on one affiliate program 😕
50% Off The Affiliate Lab
Today's email is brought to you by The Affiliate Lab.
That's a well-reviewed affiliate marketing course, earning a 4.7-star rating with feedback from 50+ students 🤩
From today thru Monday, get a massive $500 discount on the training via this link 👈
Give it a look if you're interested in blogging, affiliate marketing, or SEO.
One reviewer told us…
For the training, it blew my mind how much testing can help SEO. It wasn’t filled with generic information but with data-backed studies. I’m currently earning multiple 5-figures a year from a portfolio of blogs I’ve built, so it was well worth the investment.
Learned This Skill In His Car, Now Earns $100,000+
Web developers that often build websites for more than $5,000 a piece, what does your business look like?
💬 Which prompted a response from Ryan Postell…
I started out by teaching myself web development in my car while I did Uber.
In between rides I was coding and watching tutorials and doing online self paced bootcamps.
After about a year and a half of that I got good enough at it to start freelancing.
And here I am 5 years later with a full time front end developer job and I run my agency that makes 6 figures a year working it part time.
Looks like Ryan's agency is Oak Harbor Web Design.
How he gets clients…
In the beginning I just cold called from google and yelp. Then after about 30-40 clients the referrals started to come in and my website was ranking well locally. Now I get all my work from my website and referrals.
Btw, Oak Harbor is a small city in Washington, USA. Population ~25,000 🇺🇸
By naming his business the way he did and building up a bit of a reputation, Ryan now ranks #1 for keywords like web design oak harbor.
He also has this article ranking #1 for hand coded website 😎
Yes, Ryan hand-codes client websites rather than using something like WordPress. He says the appeal of a hand-coded site is the speed and security.
He adds…
I made my own templates in HTML and CSS that I reused for clients whose business suited the design. This cut my work dramatically. Why reinvent the wheel?
Regarding pricing, Ryan reveals…
I sell static brochure sites for $3500. 5 pages. Every page after that is $100 per page. $500 fee to add a blog. Shopify e-commerce sites start at $8k…
Here’s an example of an $8k site: madscientistbbq.com
An example of a $6k site: striveptwellness.com
And a $3500 site: realdealpainting.net
Really impressive how Ryan went from driving an Uber to now having a thriving web design business, all thanks to those skills he learned between rides 💪
What skill could you start building in your spare time?
Even if it's only 30 minutes a day, that adds up to 182 hours in a year. Enough time to go through a few courses and get good enough to start taking on simple client projects.
🔎 freelancing | permalink
Passive Income Makes No Sense
🗂 From the archive, published June 2021…
From a book called The Road Less Stupid…
Passive income makes about as much sense as passive health or passive relationships.
You would scoff at the idea of a passive weight loss technique or a passive gold medal in the Olympics or a passive marriage.
But financial shamans write hundreds of these books every year counting on you to lurch to the door marked “Something for Nothing.”
Next time you see someone selling a course that promises to get you quickly earning $10,000 a month starting from scratch, apply the same claim to sports and see how ridiculous it sounds…
“This course will teach you how to become a pro tennis player in 6 weeks, even if you’ve never picked up a racket before!”
🙄
Related: the truth about passive income
$119K/Month Explaining Complex Topics Simply
Boot.dev is a gamified platform to learn backend development, founded by Lane Wagner in 2020 🚀
Ayush Chaturvedi recently tweeted, while sharing a graph of Boot.dev's revenue from Indie Hackers…
This is one of the most impressive revenue growth charts I’ve seen in a while.
Look at the growth in the last 4 months 🔥
From $23K in June to $77K in September.
And as of this writing, they're up to $119,000 in monthly revenue 💰
Lane shared in a post from Feb 2022…
Having a large audience was my unfair disadvantage.
I started blogging about code in 2018.
The feedback that I consistently was getting from readers was along the lines of "Thanks, you have a talent for explaining complex topics simply.”
But…
The one thing I never understood well enough: The members of my audience had almost nothing in common.
And…
Sounds like Lane eventually solved that problem 🥳
A few months later he wrote…
After 2 years, we've hit $5k monthly revenue
We've learned this year that:
– Our best customers already have some form of higher education
– We should focus entirely on the backend niche
– We need to describe our uniqueness in a more concise way
– Advertising our opinions sets us apart in a crowded market
They were only at $5k/month then, but I reckon they'd already laid the groundwork for $100k/month and beyond 📈
Back to Ayush’s tweet, he adds…
[Their] Top Channels of growth
– Podcast and YouTube appearances
– Sponsoring creators
– Organic [SEO Traffic]
Their social traffic is 90% YouTube.
This would be a mix of podcasts, YouTube interviews + sponsoring creators
One interesting video I came across: Lane doing a free 10-hour course on FreeCodeCamp’s YouTube Channel.
That video has 370K+ views 👀
That's the kind of thing that has probably gotten Boot.dev a bunch of new paying customers.
Which has me thinking: could you partner with a big educational YouTube channel in your niche? 🤔
Maybe you could emulate Lane's approach with FreeCodeCamp, provide lots of value for free, build trust, establish your expertise, and get the word out about your product or service.
This Free App Earns Him $4675/Month
Paperback is an ad-free book/comic reading app for iOS, developed by Faizan Durrani 🇵🇰
From Faizan’s LinkedIn…
Self-taught; 22 year old; Programmer from Karachi, Pakistan.
Looks like he’s been working on Paperback since 2020.
As of this writing the app earns $4,675/month via Patreon 🤑
Judging by his LinkedIn, Faizan seems to have a full-time remote job and probably works on Paperback in his free time.
Someone commented on one of his Patreon posts back in 2021…
After the news that Manga Storm will no longer be supported. This is like an oasis in the desert.
Manga Storm was another app for reading comics and I’m guessing that’s what prompted Faizan to build his app 💡
Unclear how he got traction, but I'd guess it was mostly social traffic from places like YouTube, Reddit and probably online comic communities.
The Paperback Discord community has 50,000+ members, so less than 10% of them pay to support the app via Patreon, and it sounds like most of the supporters are only paying the minimum $1/month.
So what we've got here is a niche comic reading app for iOS by a kid in Pakistan. About as niche as it gets.
And by the way, the median salary in Pakistan is apparently less than $300/month, so Faizan is likely living large in Karachi 😎
A prompt for you: do you know of any popular products or services that are being discontinued or no longer being supported?
If so, there might be an opportunity there to build a nice little niche business 😍
Time Billionaires
🗂 From the archive, published February 2021…
Paraphrasing Graham Duncan on the Tim Ferris podcast…
People don’t really understand the difference between billionaires and millionaires. A million seconds is 11 days. A billion seconds is slightly over 31 years.
20-year-olds probably have two billion seconds left. But they aren’t relating to themselves as time billionaires.
A good reminder that time is our most valuable asset.
Every old rich person would love to be young and broke.
…
Thanks to Fardeen Khan for helping me write and research today's newsletter.
Hasta la próxima, rock on with your legendary self 💪
Niall Doherty – Canillo, Andorra
eBiz Facts (follow on twitter)
P.S. Interested in blogging, affiliate marketing, or SEO?
If so, check out The Affiliate Lab, one of the highest-rated courses I've reviewed. Use this link for a $500 Black Friday discount 👈
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