My goal was to break $1k / mo by the end of this year. Last month I not only broke that goal, but more than doubled my next highest month.
Retailmenot was part of the inspiration for the site - I always found pizza coupons on their site to not be very accurate.
Now it's almost entirely promoted by other people sharing links on twitter, reddit, slickdeals, etc. About a month back it got posted to '/r/YouShouldKnow', and got ~3k 'upvotes'. Didn't notice it was posted until I saw the big spike in traffic when looking at the stats for the day.
More recently I've been testing out reddit ads, but I need to work on my targeting (my ctr has been ~0.7%). Paid advertising is a bit challenging for a site like this since revenue per user is on the low side.
Plus we are pretty lazy when it comes to that
I'm attempting to get it adopted at my workplace as well. The major point that seems to get the bosses interested is being able to host it ourselves (for free, it's open source) easily in the case that we outgrow the hosted version.
I ended up getting a SealLine shoulder bag which are pretty pricey but excellent.
It's a project management app for freelancers and small businesses. Hopefully one day soon it will be more than a side project.
Wish I could say that I have had enough time to go through them both...
I built the blog after I bootstrapped and sold my first tech company. I talk a lot about growing your business/startup, and especially about all the failures I had while building my businesses. It became popular (1.2 million unique visitors last year alone.)
I've now been blogging there for just over 6 years. Today I'm more focused on my startup, so my blog isn't bringing in as much income as it used to (though it's still over $1,000/mo.) My best month was over $24,000 in income.
My ad service provider is going out of business on 12/31, so over the next few weeks I'll pick a different ad software program and/or ad service provider, and I'll then be able to track stats better.
I've been running it while traveling the world for 3 years non-stop now. Check out my AMA on reddit if you're interested: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1rneli/ive_been_travel...
It's a service that solves SEO for javascript driven websites.
For the most part, Google can't crawl sites that manipulate the DOM using javascript (AngularJS, Backbone.js, Ember.js, etc). The solution is to use a headless browser to make html snapshots for all your pages and serve those to Google instead of the page that requires javascript.
This turns out to be a bit of a pain in practice. So, BromBone does it for you. It generates, hosts, and updates the html snapshots. When Googlebot visits your site, you proxy the snapshot from BromBone and serve it to Google. Now Google can see the same thing your users see.
I got to my current rev with a mix of self service plans and enterprise deals.
Via album sales, Spotify streams, iTunes, etc, all done through TuneCore (https://www.tunecore.com).
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.benhirashi...
Certainly not hi-tech but valuable to our membership and increases by at least 10% each year.
We don't run any keyword advertising but in the past year I we started selling advertising space in 12 month plans which has supplemented income.
Facebook has taken a bite out of our daily posting figures but it has made no difference to traffic/income. Facebook can't compete when it comes to delivering old content.
There are several associated niches to ours which don't have a centralised web site, much potential, you do however need a good knowledge of the subject matter and time to build the community.
It is a shopping cart service developed for developers and web design agencies.
This is the a side project we have with the team @ spektrummedia.com.
We are up and running since last August, we won the site of the day on Awwwards.com back in August and then we have a lot of traffic and we are getting new customers everyday.
2. Network of content sites monetized with ads
It's a SaaS providing A/B testing for mobile apps that started out as a side project.
