I would disagree. I've found a lot of people - especially in tech - have this mindset. The opposite is true, most notably due to the success of giants like Facebook (for people clicking on ads) and huge affiliates like RetailMeNot (a public company).

The difference is that the most successful affiliates have realized the right call to action is _value_ (for white hat) or that they can use the "magic pill" (for black hat), and as such the market has changed drastically.

> But if you are adding links and talking about products solely because you want those nickels from someone clicking it, you are not helping your audience, and they know it, and they will react accordingly.

Why does wanting the commission also entail not helping your audience? You're making a conclusion that isn't valid here because you assume that 100% of affiliate links (because they are placed to earn money) add no value for the visitor. Smart affiliates know that if you want the commission, you have to make it valuable.

I think you may have accidentally skipped this part from codingdave's comment:

>>> What I mean by this is that whatever your site is, if your audience has a legit interest in specific products, and the next logical step in their personal workflow would be to buy something, go ahead and put in some affiliate links. It makes sense, and everyone gets what they need/desire.

I made very little money for years and had just about given up until Panda 4.1 and Penguin 3.0. Since then, when I write well, Google is sending traffic my way, and my traffic and income have been steadily increasing by 20%-30%/month. I now have the incentive to keep adding more high quality content to my blog.

Prior to these Panda/Penguin updates (Sep/Oct 2014), I can totally understand why so many attempted to do what the author did. It made more money. Even if Google algorithm changes or Affiliate changes shut you down, jumping to the next thing seemed to work.

Hopefully Google is ahead of the curve once and for all, providing greater incentive to create great content than game the system.

The conventional wisdom with blogs has always been that the way to success is more frequent short posts rather than less frequent long ones, and that still seems to be the case. I don't really care much, since I don't run ads and my goal for my blog has never been to capture a large audience anyway, but more readers would always feel better than less.

heartbleed bug what you need to know

Your post (http://jasonlefkowitz.net/2014/04/the-heartbleed-bug-what-no...) was buried. I gave up looking for it after the first 6 pages of google results.

I'm not sure why you're ranking so badly for this article. The only idea I have off the top of my head is that you have a very wide variety of content. Google tends to prefer sites focused on one topic, or perhaps just a few.

I never wrote about youth baseball on my blog until last year. The first 2 articles I wrote got virtually no traffic from Google for 8 months. A couple months ago I started writing more in depth articles about baseball. I'm now getting a significant amount of Google traffic for those same two articles - one of them is over 10 visits a day. That's still pretty small compared to my blockbuster posts (my top post on best browsers gets hundreds of visits per day). But baseball is growing, because Google is (algorithmically) beginning to believe that I'm some kind of authority on youth baseball, based on a growing concentration of quality content.

So - my guess is that you would get more traffic if you wrote about fewer topics - or perhaps split into several blogs, each with different topics. I should probably do that as my various tech topics have nothing to do with baseball.

...I basically maintain a blog just to keep notes for myself about current things that I am working on. Each post is short and to the point. The titles are not "click bait". I figured that if I needed it someone else might as well and I am leaving it up to the search engines to figure out relevance.

...funny thing is it gets decent traffic and next to 0 on monetization. I allow Google to place ads so that the url rental is free.

Next to no traffic prior to Panda...pretty decent traffic for the topics (some are very specialized and esoteric like a specific bit of code to extract a Sales Order from Quickbooks Enterprise).

"I’ve always had some type of entrepreneur trapped inside me. [...] I decided I’ll start a blog and make money via AdSense ads."

This is not the thought process of someone with the competence to know how to learn effectively. It sounds like someone who just wants to be a cog in a money wheel, both learning as little as possible and creating as little value as possible.

It is especially telling that they think their age is somehow relevant in the picture of how much money they are making or what their credit limit is.

Overall I think HN is being too harsh. This is a person taking a rather honest look at himself and giving us a glimpse into his life that also happens to capture an interesting history of the Internet.

(A) Everybody and their mothers will think the same thing and

(B) that equation doesn't have any value production in it, and

(C) what happens when the fad dies?

It is a wholly selfish act, and I think it's worth the harshness. Not every mistake is redeemed by a sob story. Some are just not worth making in the first place. (Especially when they are very old and common mistakes.)

> very old and common mistakes

That's human nature and storytelling.

Affiliates are often very secretive because the barrier to entry is extremely low, and as such they don't want to reveal what they do or how. That he took that step, even in retrospect, to post it publicly is to be commended. Why not reveal the workings and the lessons he has learned? Let's value it for what it is.

I welcome posts like this. What I have read too much of is success/fail stories that leave out the most important details; number one is daddy gave me the money to start my risky business(that business could be anything). Number two is ripping off someone's idea--blatantly(without any remorse, and continue to justify their slimy behavior until they die). It amazes me just how selfish/sadistic some people, even family and friends can be when it comes to money.

I have a successful sister who constantly wonders why her mother and brothers never call--it's beyond pathetic, and she doesn't have a clue to why there's no one left. Actually, she knows, but the denial is thick. We grew up poor, so I know that feeling of desperation, but screwing over people repeatedly--adds up.

I don't know this guy, but at least he was honest. To guy's who don't have a rich family, or a license to steal; if you make money--it seems like late 20's through your thirties, hang on to it. Don't throw it away on living like Rapper. It will eventually dry up for so many of us.

I know it's hard. You have hormones that literally shape your view of reality. Those hormones will go down. That woman you are so trying to impress will change. If you have a fear of death, that fear goes down as you age. I'm not giving advise. I just releate to this guy's financial journey.

In that same time period he could have founded real startups with real products. Instead, he got 10 years of putting his blood, sweat, and tears into bullshit money making schemes.

However, I do agree I would have better spent those years thinking about how I could solve people's problems instead preying on their insecurities.

I think what people here are saying is that given the obvious level of effort you (I assume you're the author) put into this, you could have put serious dents in a few patio11/rob walling style saas or other small product businesses. I understand there's money to be made chasing various arbitrages in online advertising, but those get plugged over time. Plus a product business would make me feel better about what I spend all day doing.

I've also read about people making serious money from advertising; it seems like the time investment to understand all that stuff is big enough that it could help you understand a small business instead.

Here's some stats (top-level, very approximate) from my own experience:

* Number of campaigns created & stage 1 testing: 500+ * % to stage 2: ~25% * % from stage 1 to 2: 20% * % from stage 2 to "success": ~50%

In the end, I'd say that roughly 5% of my affiliate campaigns were successful. Success is defined as eventually returning the test budget * 4.

The key was that if I got a campaign to stage 2 I had a very high likelihood of profit. Literally 50% of the stage 2 campaigns became successes (most stage 2's broke even close to it).

Of those successful campaigns, only 10% of them generated 90% of my profits on average. The end result is that ~1% of all the campaigns I made made 90% of the profits, which is quite accurate.

Over the span of 7 years of being a full-time affiliate (excluding the part-time years) 12 campaigns were the main money drivers.