a few years ago (well, the weekend after my second son was born and i thought: hey, i need more money) i created http://www.facesaerch.com/, basically an alternative interface to googles image search with face filter turned on. the initial version took me 2 days (my son slept the most of the time anyways).
i did some basic SEO stuff (i.e. alt tags for images, a sitemap XML, an auto expanding index) and got some coverage for it on various sites (lifehacker, ...) which was quite easy because everybody loves searching for themselves.
the site is still hosted on a 1 EUR webspace / month and during its best time it had about 54.000 visits a day.
as for the business case: on a site with only images, people click on (google) ads. don't know why, they just do it. so the money was good.
google was ok for it for quite some time (hey, they even covered it on a google code showcase blog) but well i kept pushing the boundaries so i got a penalty (again and again).
now i got about 5000 visits a day from baidu and bing, but it's hard to grow these traffic sources (well that's true for bing, for baidu its mostly the language barrier). it was fun while it lasted, now i just don't care anymore. i keep it around (even though some people would like to buy it) as i might transform it into a real product sometime.
so what the bottom line: building a (SEO) sideproject for passive income is possible, but don't bet on it that it will last forever. oh yeah, maybe also: images + ads = awesome conversion
i did some basic SEO stuff (i.e. alt tags for images, a sitemap XML, an auto expanding index) and got some coverage for it on various sites (lifehacker, ...) which was quite easy because everybody loves searching for themselves.
the site is still hosted on a 1 EUR webspace / month and during its best time it had about 54.000 visits a day.
as for the business case: on a site with only images, people click on (google) ads. don't know why, they just do it. so the money was good.
google was ok for it for quite some time (hey, they even covered it on a google code showcase blog) but well i kept pushing the boundaries so i got a penalty (again and again).
now i got about 5000 visits a day from baidu and bing, but it's hard to grow these traffic sources (well that's true for bing, for baidu its mostly the language barrier). it was fun while it lasted, now i just don't care anymore. i keep it around (even though some people would like to buy it) as i might transform it into a real product sometime.
so what the bottom line: building a (SEO) sideproject for passive income is possible, but don't bet on it that it will last forever. oh yeah, maybe also: images + ads = awesome conversion