- eBiz Insider
- Posts
- 😵 This simple crossword site earns $7800/month
😵 This simple crossword site earns $7800/month
Welcome to a fresh edition of eBiz Insider, my free newsletter packed with tips, insights and opportunities to build your online business.
Today...
$7,800/Month Solving Crosswords
An Encyclopedia for Making Money Online
His Unoriginal App: 13 Weeks to $2000/Month
17 Months After Starting His Amazon FBA Business
Warren Buffett: 2 Questions And a $5 Billion Mistake
300K Monthly Visits From Free Tools (Build With AI)
$0 to $27k in 8 Months
Did someone forward this to you? → subscribe here
$7,800/Month Solving Crosswords
Check out NYT Crossword Answers 😵
It's a simple site that provides answers to the New York Times' crossword puzzles.
The site apparently gets 1.4M visits each month 📈
Looks like the only monetization going on is via display ads.
Per Google’s official Adsense calculator, a site with that much traffic in the Arts and Entertainment category – and with most visitors coming from North America – would be earning about $94,000/year 🤑
The site has been around since 2017. Best I can tell, it’s mainly run by a guy named Nate Parkerson, although there are multiple authors on site.
The site ranks for keywords like…
nyt crossword answers
ny times crossword solution today
[Something] crossword clue
The pages for the latter seem to be generated via programmatic SEO.
Examples…
Altogether, Google has indexed 195,000 pages on the site 🤯
Fascinating to me that a simple site about crosswords can earn someone a good living.
But, of course, only after they've stuck with it day-after-day for several years.
Reminds me of the $1 Million Sudoku YouTubers we profiled a while back.
Oh, and worth noting that NYT Crossword Answers likely isn't even the most successful site in its niche.
All of these competitors seem to get significantly more traffic 👇
So don't be discouraged if you see big competitors in a space you're interested in.
If the market is big enough, there should be plenty of room for you to succeed as well 💪
🔎 display ads | permalink
An Encyclopedia for Making Money Online
Today's email is brought to you by Proven Amazon Course 👈
That's the top-rated Amazon course on my site, with 30+ glowing reviews from students 🤩
One student calls it…
An encyclopedia on making money by using the internet creatively… The wealth of information and kindness in that group is next to none. I had my account for about 5 months and ended the year at $64k.
Lots of Amazon courses are super-expensive and underwhelming. Proven Amazon Course is the opposite, with the price set at only $39/month and offering a ridiculous amount of value.
His Unoriginal App: 13 Weeks to $2000/Month
I reached $2000 MRR using vanilla HTML, CSS, JS…
I still have no idea what Typescript, Kubernetes and other alien technologies are
💬 The blurb for Talknotes…
Turn hours of note taking into minutes. Just speak, and let the AI transcribe, clean up and structure your voice.
From Nico’s Blog…
Got the idea when trying to use Google Docs audio transcription, but it sucked. So, I made a quick prototype, then soft-launched TalkNotes.io on Twitter.
After his August launch…
I added it to every single startup [and AI directory] I could find. I didn't even make a list, I just checked competitors' backlinks + google + some I knew and spent 2 hours filling forms. Ended up with 1000 users from that + Twitter
🤧 But then…
I got super sick and was completely unable to work for a week. Still recovering. Made $1500 of sales in total. Not incredible but not bad.
Nico wrote elsewhere…
There were days I didn't even want to get out of bed because it felt like crap 🥲
The #1 thing that helps me go through it is to do at least ONE little thing per day:
– Write one post
– Add one tiny feature
– Fix one bug
After reaching $100/month, he wrote…
I switched from one-time payments to a subscription model and raised the prices.
Sales took a massive hit from that, from $150/day to $0 🥲
But it was necessary to grow the app. Recovery is super slow, but now I have recurring revenues.
💡 The strategy is to start with as little friction as possible to test the market, and push more to see how far you can go until you find the “balance point” between volume & price
We previously covered a similar app called AudioPen, which made $15K revenue its first month, built with no-code 🚀
Seeing Talknotes hit $2000/month I can't help but think: you don't need an original idea to be successful, the market is often big enough to support multiple businesses doing pretty much the same thing.
With that in mind: could you build your own version of a product or service that already exists? 🤔
Maybe put your own twist on it or target a slightly different customer?
Last words from Nico…
I'm someone who likes to move fast, so I had constant doubts about the app.
You can't know if a product will work. But you can get some hints: If users are happy about the product, it's a good sign. If they complain when the product crashes, it's also a good sign.
HOWEVER: If you get absolutely 0 positive feedback, 0 user, 0 sales after working on the product for a whole month, maybe 1) It's not a product for you 2) People don't care.
In both cases, it's time to move on.
Btw, I should note that Talknotes was not Nico's first rodeo. He previously built and sold an app for $65,000 💰
17 Months After Starting His Amazon FBA Business
🗂 From the archive, published February 2023…
Here’s a low-key video from an Amazon seller with an impressive 🇱🇹 Lithuanian name (Gediminas Simkunas) and an even-more-impressive 🏴 Scottish accent…
The video is from December 2022 and Gediminas says he’s been selling on Amazon for about 17 months.
As usual, he doesn’t reveal what products he’s selling 😭
His numbers for November…
Revenue = £12,672 ($15.3K)
Profit = £2,400 ($2900)
Profit Margin = 19%
Apparently his revenue was 2x from the previous November, so things are picking up 📈
However, Gediminas has been putting all his profits back into the business…
I haven’t personally paid myself anything yet… I have a full-time job, [Amazon FBA] is my part-time hustle… but I actually see this turning into a real opportunity to become a full-time Amazon FBA seller.
So make no mistake: it takes quite a bit of time and effort to build up a truly profitable business on Amazon.
🔎 amazon fba | permalink
Warren Buffett: 2 Questions And a $5 Billion Mistake
💬 George Mack tweets…
In 2001, Warren Buffett gave a talk at the University of Georgia.
He asked them the most Warren Buffett question ever:
• If you could invest in a friend and get 10% of their income for life -- who would you pick?
Once the students answered the question, he then asked this:
• Why would you invest in that person?
• What character traits do they have?
Now they have a list of character traits to adopt.
Shortly after this, Buffett asked:
If you could short a friend's earnings, who would you pick and why?
Now you have a list of character traits to avoid.
I believe this is the full talk on YouTube 👈
In that talk, Buffett also says at around the 29:30 mark…
The biggest mistakes I've made by far are mistakes of omission and not commission… it's the things I knew enough to do, they were within my circle of competence, and I was sucking my thumb. Those are the ones that hurt, they don't show up any place.
I probably cost Berkshire at least $5 billion.
He's referring there to a business they could have bought for significantly less than its value, but didn't.
It was the inaction that cost them 😩
Reminds me of that cliched old Mark Twain quote…
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
Cliched, but true.
What will you likely regret in 20 years if you don't take action? 😕
300K Monthly Visits From Free Tools (Build With AI)
We've featured Tim Bennetto in this newsletter before…
He recently tweeted…
Pallyy's free tools get 300K visits/mo.
Pallyy is a social media scheduling tool, check out their free tools here 👈
Free tools are a great way to get traffic to your product.
👇 Tim shares how to go about it…
[To] Find keywords
I'll be using AHREFS for this.
Next, enter a tool related keyword eg. "generator" and also a keyword in your niche eg. "instagram"
You can also use the * as a wildcard ending.
Other keywords you could try: "tool", "convert", "maker".
(Btw, you could do this with any decent keyword tool, not just Ahrefs)
Tim continues…
Find low DR keywords
Look for keywords with a low DR, under 20.
Make sure it also has at least a few hundred searches.
Once you've picked a good keyword…
Build your tool
The keyword will be the SEO title of your page, so build a tool that does exactly that.
Can just be a very simple tool, usually I'll spend 1 day max building it.
You could use AI to help with the build. Big advances lately with GPT-4 Vision 🤖
TLDRAW is a design canvas tool (OpenAI API Key required) that uses Vision. It lets you design your tool and outputs the code.
Ken Schumacher shows how he used it to build a ping-pong game just by drawing it 🤯
Back to Tim, and the final steps after you've launched your tool…
Submit [the URL] to Google Search Console.
Promote it.
Repeat
I've built over 20 free tools so far. The more the better.
You could add these types of tools to your blog / SaaS / agency / whatever site to get more traffic, leads and build trust.
Or you could build a tools site and monetise with display ads 🤑
A couple of examples of that…
$0 to $27k in 8 Months
🗂 From the archive, published December 2021…
Someone named Easlo has done that this year, creating and selling Notion templates, courses and resources.
Easlo started with no products, no followers, and no email list. Now he has 27 products, 19k followers, and 2000 subscribers.
It seems the key for Easlo was joining Twitter and becoming active in the Notion community on there, giving away lots of free advice and templates.
It still took him several months to get to $1000/month, so this isn’t exactly an overnight success story. Even with $27k in earnings in 8 months, his “hourly rate” probably works out to less than $15.
But revenue is surely flowing easier for him now that he’s over the hump 🤑
Related: Twitter MBA, a pay-what-you-want (even $0) course by Blake Emal
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. Looking to build an Amazon business on a budget?
Then check out Proven Amazon Course (or read 30+ reviews here) 🤩
What did you think of today's email? |