crews

Background#

As a programmer, I naturally want to increase my passive income. Recently, a colleague told me that he started a website that receives 3,000 visits per day and generates hundreds of dollars in advertising revenue each month. This got me thinking about a lot of things.

Working essentially means exchanging our time for money, even though we continuously learn new skills in our jobs. But the basic principle remains that time is equivalent to money. If we want to increase our income, we can only do so by either increasing our working hours or increasing the value of our time. However, these methods cannot escape the limitations of work itself. If we can find a passive income stream, can our lives become better?

So, I spent a weekend creating a promotional page, trying to create an affMan and start a passive income project. Here, I want to briefly share the entire process and the experiences I gained.

What is affMan#

Here is a quote from someone else's description:

AFF stands for Affiliates, which means "to join" in Google Translate.

The role of AFFMAN is to help merchants promote products and earn profits from user consumption.

To put it more bluntly, it's an advertising person with a salary.

What is currently trending? It must be "chatGPT". Since the release of GPT, it has become the hottest trend on the internet. Whether it's the supplier OpenAI, the intermediaries, or the programmers on GitHub, as long as they encounter GPT, they can gain traffic. With traffic, there is naturally money. Pigs standing at the forefront of the trend can take off.
The most classic examples of making money from "chatGPT" are:

1. Selling "hoes" directly, acting as a tool carrier.
2. Selling secondary packaging services.
3. Selling tutorials (cutting leeks).

A more specific example is that to use GPT-4, you must subscribe to ChatGPT's PLUS service. However, subscribing to PLUS is not easy because it involves payment and other issues. Currently, subscribing to PLUS requires the use of a virtual credit card and a series of operations. This makes subscribing to PLUS a challenging task, but GPT-4 is a very useful tool. Many people want to subscribe to PLUS but don't know how. Therefore, a complete tutorial on how to subscribe has become an entry point for traffic.

In this example, the author promoted SMS cards, Ouyi, and dePay virtual credit cards through an article on "How to Subscribe to GPT-4 PLUS" because these steps are necessary to subscribe to PLUS. Since domestic users cannot have US credit cards, they can only use these virtual credit cards. The author was able to successfully write an article to promote this issue. Can we also try it? Recently, OneKey has launched a competitor called "OneKey Card" by a well-known and powerful hardware wallet company. We can try using it to subscribe to GPT-4 PLUS service.

Then, with a series of operations, our promotional page was created: How to Open OneKey Card

Building a Static Page#

Since I had previously built my own blog site, Program and Romance, it was very quick to build a simple static page this time.

1. We used Hugo as the static page generator engine, and the documentation itself was written in markdown syntax. This syntax is widely supported and allows us to publish content on different platforms.
2. We chose Vercel as the service provider, which can quickly deploy static pages and usually does not require payment for small users (as long as the daily number of visits does not exceed a certain limit).
3. In order to better utilize search engines, we spent $2 to purchase a related domain name, onekey.wiki. This increases the likelihood of our content being indexed by search engines.

Starting from scratch, it took about three hours to publish such a static page. Afterwards, we spent some time polishing the content and porting it to our own static page. The whole process took up most of a Saturday. Of course, things don't always go smoothly.

Several problems occurred:

1. Errors occurred when deploying, and the local and online versions were inconsistent.
2. Slow website access in China, later found to be a CDN issue. Many CDN sources for static resources have problems in China, so they need to be replaced. Currently, I replaced them with Byte's CDN sources, which have been tested to be fast.
3. Issues with tracking, later found that Google's tracking was not added successfully.

When creating static pages in the future, everyone must pay attention to a few points: the source of CDN static resources must be stable and accessible both domestically and internationally. It is best to choose an image hosting service to reduce the load on the server.

Data Situation#

Creating a good page is just the first step. Getting users to register is what we are most concerned about.

The logic is as follows: first, attract traffic, then attract users who meet the requirements to register, meet their needs, and at the same time achieve our goal (promote registration).

For programmers, this part belongs to the "operational" side of things. Usually, this is not part of our job. Therefore, I could only start with the most basic methods, such as tweeting, replying to official tweets, and improving the page's SEO by adding descriptions and keywords. Of course, these are the most basic ways to handle it. If we want to do better, we need to continuously learn and improve.

The final data: 17 registered users, of which 3 completed recharges.

The results may not be as satisfactory, but this attempt allowed me to learn knowledge beyond my job skills. The process is more valuable than the results, as it allows me to better cope with similar challenges.

Also, feel free to check out the article I wrote about how to subscribe to GPTPLUS. If you need to recharge, you can contact me, and I can help resolve any related issues.

Article link: How to Subscribe to GPTPLUS.

Conclusion#

Next, let Google search engine help with traffic, and I may not spend too much time on it. So, I will also write an article to record what I have done, which can be considered as a conclusion.

Through this process, I have learned:

1. The power of traffic trends (various cases).
2. Consolidated front-end knowledge and full-stack technical skills.
3. Tried to understand the concept of "operations" and content SEO concepts.