So I’ve basically just messing around here, trying to figure out, without much experience, how to make some money online. I have a day job, but it’s always the dream to have a little fun on the side and to bring in some money from it. As you can see, I have this shitty blog that nobody reads, but as I understand it, I need to make content first before any search engine will really notice me. Hence, this content is my attempt at making some of that sweet sweet internet money.
I’ve got a few things going on in parallel here. One, this blog, where I don’t expect to really gain any attention from, it’s mostly to document my attempts and maybe provide some interesting tips or stories of failure along the way. If it starts to gain any traffic, then I can use it to redirect any eyes to other projects. Something that I’ve learned already is that Google knows about AI generated content. If I just have chatGPT write articles for me, even though I guide it to do so with interesting points, valid analysis, and actual value, it still gets shut down by google as being low quality content. Lame. So I’ve decided to write my own articles for now. I do like the idea of using the AI generated images for featured images and what not since I can’t draw, and like… how else am I going to get content? Pay shutter shock or something and have THEM make the AI generated images that I use? Nah.
Another idea I wanted to try out was www.BananaCoconut.com, basically a website that sells T-shirts through Amazon Merch. The idea here is that I give Amazon the designs and they handle basically all the logistics of creating, shipping, and returning the items. I’ve bought several of my own shirts through them and it seem to be pretty hands off. They just send me a few bucks every month if something sells. I have a few GPTs that I use to constrain the style of images that I generate for the T-shirts, but actually the main challenge right now is that everyone is so prude. I mean… I’ve been using Dalle-3 to generate my prototype images, but they don’t like any kind of perceived violence or even suggestion of it. As my specialty is anthropomorphic fruits and vegetables, that’s not so much a problem, but it’s difficult to, for example, create a carton of milk and a cookie engaged in a Spartacus style battle. There are some says to “jailbreak” the prompting, but it still annoying. Second issue I’ve encountered is that Amazon is also quite prudish in what they allow past their content filters. I’ve had several designs of cute food items holding things like… chainsaws, or knives, and one time just a banana set off the violation, probably because it just looked like a penis. I know people may have different opinions on what is appropriate, but a cute, happy loaf of bread holding a chainsaw is too much for their content filters? Seriously? Sometimes I can list an image, and it’s approved, but later they take it down after one person buys it. It’s kind of lame.
Like this image, they didn’t like:
And they also didn’t like this one:
But… like I love em. I bought one before they took it down. Not that I support suicide or whatever they’re probably claiming this supports, I just think it’s funny. Anyways, that’s that website. Not getting much traffic yet, but working on that. I’ve tried advertising through Google, Amazon, and Twitter. But similarly, Amazon and Twitter shut down my ads because they’re… not appropriate or something? I let the Google ads go for about 10 bucks, which got me about 30 clicks and no purchases, so that’s kind of disappointing. I don’t think my shirts are bad, since I really like them, I think I just need to figure out how to market them more people who think like me. In any case, unless I can figure out a better way to advertise, that’s a no go.
Next thing I’m trying. So using social media like Twitter (X), Instagram, or whatever, is possible to gain enough followers where the companies would ad share. But realistically, this is nearly impossible to do unless you spend all your time creating content and sitting around posting things. For example, on Twitter, you’d need to have like 50k views of your Tweets daily in order to get a minimum payout, which may be less than $1k a month according to other people on Twitter. This is … incredibly difficult to obtain and the payout seems dismal for the effort. No, there has to be another way to monetize right? So I’ve been just shitting around on Twitter, responding to people, making up Tweets that I think are interesting, etc… Without too much effort, I’ve got like… 50k impressions in the last couple months. I’m not a super interesting person, so I think that’s reasonable for most people to achieve. So I’m not hoping to get ad revenue share from this, I’m actually hoping that people would look at my profile, where I have links to this site and the bananacoconut.com site. I’ve seen in my Twitter statistics that people actually click on my profile when I say something interesting, and I’ve seen in my google analytics that some traffic comes from social media, so I think that’s driving a bit of traffic. I’ve only sold one shirt (then it was taken down due to content policy issues), so I think it’s a reasonable path to advertising, but still not really a super breakthrough I’ve been hoping for.
Another path is through Instagram. My wife has an account, and I’ve been buying her some cute shirts to wear. I’m thinking of creating some content for her and she can also put a link to the bananacoconut.com website in her profile. She’s much more attractive than I am, so … maybe? Sounds weird to be monetizing one’s wife, but she’s okay with it, and it’s kind of fun. We’re going on a month long cruise in 2 days, and I got some of those Meta Rayban sunglasses so I can make some awkward videos of her on the trip to post. We’ll see how that works out, but it’s another potential advertising path. Any way to get clicks through to Amazon might improve profitability, since those are also affiliate links. So anything that someone buys from Amazon after clicking on the link, even if it’s not a shirt that I designed, I would get a small cut of it. For example, the link you saw previously in this paragraph is an affiliate link to Amazon. It shows you that specific product, but if you click through that link and buy something, then I get a small cut, something like 2 or 3% of the purchase price. It’s not much, so volume is needed to get anywhere significant, but it’s another way to monetize.
Finally, I’ve ben writing a book. I know I know, everyone is doing that, but I don’t like books. In fact, I don’t read much at all for pleasure, which I think gives me a unique style of writing, in that I don’t copy anyone since I’m essentially uneducated from that standpoint. I am, however, a scientist and engineering and watch a lot of sci-fi, belong to a cryonics organization, am a pretty hardcore futurist, etc… and so far every single sci-fi story or movie or book has never satisfied my itch for realism. Not that sci-fi has to be realistic, but I appreciate things that make sense, characters that do things that that would actually do, wars and battle that are fought without monologues or characters that are infallible. Like… at the end of interstellar when whatever that shit was, the power of love or something, fixed the black hole. I nearly took a shit and walked out. Or like the “final boss battle” of any sci-fi story is typically a punching match for dramatic effects, even though technology should be so advanced that one or the other would realistically be fried on the spot instantly by the other who sees them first. I could rant on all day about this, but I figure with the AI models coming out that can make videos, that if I can write my story now, that maybe in 5 or 10 years, I can have a model create a movie out of it, just for me, so I can be satisfied, even if nobody else likes it. This is not exactly a plan for monetization, but I’m been exploring the idea of releasing the story out as a series of tweets, or as blog posts, or something where the story would be give out free, but the cost is that the people following the story would have to engage in whatever website, media, or something that I am doing to read it, and I could monetize that.
Anyways, those are the ideas I’m exploring. I’m not quitting my day job anytime soon, but I figure this is a good place to start. Let me know if you have any better ideas and I’ll steal them from you and write about them.