Ask HN: how to get revenue from my site

You said you sold only 6 exercises to 3 people. And yet you have 130 people a day. Assuming very healthy conversion rates (say, 0.5%), you need roughly 2000 visitors before you sell 1 item. In short, you need to ramp up your traffic. You can do this organically, or you can buy ads.

You clearly do have an audience however, given your ability to get up to 4000 visitors per day when an exercise is released.

So what to do? Put what I just said to a test: charge for your next exercise. You should get at least 1 sale. From then on, experiment with your price points.

I think you have everything in place, you just need to test things and ramp up traffic. Calculating backwards, you roughly need about 100k people visiting before you can conclude whether charging money works for you as a business model.

Of course you can start with a much lower expected conv rate, and probably should

TL;DR I think you quit too early

Web security is a huge and growing pain for loads of people - loads of people with money. You are teaching incredibly valuable skills to people, who can sell those skills to people with money.

If you get over your hangup of selling, there's no dearth of places or ways to sell and distribute good content. A small list off the top of my head:

1. Write to people you know personally or even just online - asking if they are interested in learning what you teach, or if they know anyone else who might be. It works.

2. Udemy

3. Write a good blog post on security every week and post it here.

4. Build an email list with a weekly web security newsletter.

5. Go on security podcasts to discuss the latest security goofups on major sites. If there aren't any security podcasts, start one.