Huge traffic generator ~ how to continue from here?

[teocns]

I am 22, web and software engineer with a lot of expertise in IoT.
Been freelancing and working with various startups while doing side hustles since I was 17, so I thought of starting up my own online business for the 2nd time.

Recently I had been laid down from a company that monetizes job advertisements after I developed an enterprise crawler, a guided tool that crawls around 2M job schemas a day from 5K+ websites.

Business idea
The aforementioned startup dresses up with a blogging / social media side. So I thought, let me replicate the business, but by splitting it between jobs and newspaper and monetizing with ADSense.

I looked over domains, and found dailytopic.org for mere 7$.

What I have
At this point, I have the job scraping and processing automation done.
I also have an article rewriter that I made for another customer in the past, which I could also recycle and integrate it into this business.

Pretty much the 80% of the backend infrastructure that produces content is there. The reason I am not saying 100% is because it needs to be re-compiled in a cheaper-to-deploy version, since clients had big pockets and did not really care.

Challenges​

1. I am currently not affording a lot to invest, probably a few thousands.
2. I am not an expert in SEO and Adsense for instance. I know there's constant issues if best practices are not followed.
3. A lot of work, which without being shared makes me demotivate. I love to work in teams, so I would appreciate someone that collaborates on the project.

How should I approach the business from here?

 

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[Jobless]

What is investment required for?
Are you sure only 20% remains for the content production? If so, what is the issue?
What other works remains to be done?
You may have technical experience, but did you get insight into the competitor's monetization and the profitability?
If they did/could not keep you hired, was it actually profitable?

 

[teocns]

What is investment required for?
Are you sure only 20% remains for the content production? If so, what is the issue?
What other works remains to be done?
You may have technical experience, but did you get insight into the competitor's monetization and the profitability?
If they did/could not keep you hired, was it actually profitable?

Thanks for the interest to help!
Let me go through each point one by one.

1. What is investment required for?
Infrastructure. Costs include Proxies and AWS (Redis, EC2, ELB, CloudFront, DynamoDB, MySQL)
I suppose the business will run unprofitable for a few months due to ranking and such. I am not sure how much of this I am going to cover alone.

2. Are you sure only 20% remains for the content production? If so, what is the issue?
Yes, I am sure. The automation part is done 100% in fact, but there's a catch on the newspaper side: never trust article rewriting. There must be a redaction team reviewing content. This can also fall under costs.

3. What other works remains to be done?
As specified, Website, SEO, Marketing. The "website" is a wide area concept, which implements the whole idea of the business. It requires a little of brainstorming and conception of the vision and idea.

3. You may have technical experience, but did you get insight into the competitor's monetization and the profitability?
Profitability is as simple as subtracting costs from adsense revenue.
Profit = Adsense Revenue - (AWS + Proxies)

4. If they did/could not keep you hired, was it actually profitable?
The startup has ~50 employees, and adsense is their only monetization source, which mostly comes from the crawler produced content. I had been laid off mostly due to work ethics mismatch, as the project was done there was no more need to keep me on a payroll. I was not really hired, was rather an independent contractor.

Profit wise, I can tell you that ~100M constantly active job advertisements produce around 6 figures monthly.

 

[Jobless]

Thanks for the interest to help!
Let me go through each point one by one.

1. What is investment required for?
Infrastructure. Costs include Proxies and AWS (Redis, EC2, ELB, CloudFront, DynamoDB, MySQL)
I suppose the business will run unprofitable for a few months due to ranking and such. I am not sure how much of this I am going to cover alone.

2. Are you sure only 20% remains for the content production? If so, what is the issue?
Yes, I am sure. The automation part is done 100% in fact, but there's a catch on the newspaper side: never trust article rewriting. There must be a redaction team reviewing content. This can also fall under costs.

3. What other works remains to be done?
As specified, Website, SEO, Marketing. The "website" is a wide area concept, which implements the whole idea of the business. It requires a little of brainstorming and conception of the vision and idea.

3. You may have technical experience, but did you get insight into the competitor's monetization and the profitability?
Profitability is as simple as subtracting costs from adsense revenue.
Profit = Adsense Revenue - (AWS + Proxies)

4. If they did/could not keep you hired, was it actually profitable?
The startup has ~50 employees, and adsense is their only monetization source, which mostly comes from the crawler produced content. I had been laid off mostly due to work ethics mismatch, as the project was done there was no more need to keep me on a payroll. I was not really hired, was rather an independent contractor.

Profit wise, I can tell you that ~100M constantly active job advertisements produce around 6 figures monthly.

Great answers, you clearly know more than required to make it happen. I am sure it will take some time though before you gain enough momentum.

Have you looked into purchasing your own infrastructure to run it on? Maybe this is not possible, but the proxy and AWS costs can be a lot in the long run.

Can you implement other methods of monetization in addition to Adsense?

Do you know any of the other contactors that used to work for the competitor, that would be willing to join your team?

 

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[harlansjobs]

Good for you that you know which direction you want to take your enterprise. Let me ask you this.
Have you actually done enough research to determine if there is a big enough market for your enterprise or are you being like the Field of Dreams movie and building something and hoping they will come?

Now you mentioned that you are looking into advertising through Adwords. Expensive and you can lose your shirt. Have you thought about first finding out where your audience/ user base congregates? Are they in a forum dedicated to that particular field? Can you find them in LinkedIn groups?

Once you have found where they are, join, talk to them, give value, ask questions, answer their questions. Show them you have the solution. Then when you have demonstrated a proficiency in understanding them, start your own group. Once these people are clinging to every word you say, then direct them to a landing page/opt-in page to capture their emails.

Continue to communicate with them and build the product around their needs. They will buy anything you offer them because they know that you will solve their problem. And you never spent a dime on advertising.
Just my humble opinion.

 

[teocns]

Do you know any of the other contactors that used to work for the competitor, that would be willing to join your team?

I do. Some of them even provided me with internal tools, but they refused to join the business due to the complexity and efforts required. They lack of hustle sentiment.

Have you looked into purchasing your own infrastructure to run it on?

What do you exactly mean by that? Running the crawlers on my own servers require an useless effort. Plus it wouldn't be scalable. The crawler automatically scales (between 1 and infinite EC2 servers, on-demand), using spot fleets and provisioned costs (especially in the newer version). I am depleting all the payload that comes from unnecessary logging and statistics which was consuming a lot of $$ in storage DynamoDB, which is where most of the costs came from (like 700$ daily). The reason this data was required was for pure data science reasons: to analyze and study websites in-deep. The goal was to scrape as much possible, not as cheaply as possible.

Have you actually done enough research to determine if there is a big enough market for your enterprise or are you being like the Field of Dreams movie and building something and hoping they will come?

That is a good point. My business offers nothing special. It's "just another metasearcher".
Let me tell you the kicker: private companies, like biopharmas and such often post their job offers under "careers.xxxxx.com". Those jobs often don't appear on linkedin, glassdoor and such. The real kicker is indeed the fact that we aggregate all these jobs coming directly from the original source.

I have never mentioned Adwords or even wanting to advertise with it. Most of the traffic should come organically. That is, because google indexes your jobs and you're searchable on Google jobs (try g-searching "jobs near me").

The plan was to invest purely into backlinking.


What do you think?

 

[eramart]

Would Google even approve that kind of project for Adsense? I've heard that their requirements are getting more and more stringent.

From their FAQ:
"You should take care when using external resources such as articles on other sites or embedded videos. It's really important that you contribute your own original content, whether it's specialist knowledge, improvement ideas, reviews, or your personal thoughts. As stated in the Google Publisher Policies, Google ads may not be placed on sites with scraped or copyrighted content. This is a policy violation and could lead to you having your ads disabled or your account closed."

 

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[teocns]

Would Google even approve that kind of project for Adsense? I've heard that their requirements are getting more and more stringent.

From their FAQ:
"You should take care when using external resources such as articles on other sites or embedded videos. It's really important that you contribute your own original content, whether it's specialist knowledge, improvement ideas, reviews, or your personal thoughts. As stated in the Google Publisher Policies, Google ads may not be placed on sites with scraped or copyrighted content. This is a policy violation and could lead to you having your ads disabled or your account closed."

Well you have a good point. It requires indeed a lot of attention to not get flagged in the process. But if others are doing it and monetizing it, then it pretty much exists, and it works. For the originality topic: try googling "jobs near me". You'll find some jobs on different websites:

 

[eramart]

Looks like you've put a lot of thought into this. I think the only way you can advance now is by doing - nobody really can tell you if this will work out or not. Try to take advantage of AWS Activate program.

 

[teocns]

Looks like you've put a lot of thought into this. I think the only way you can advance now is by doing - nobody really can tell you if this will work out or not. Try to take advantage of AWS Activate program.

Yes I have! I am pretty much confident of the POC. I have got the AWS 300$ credit plan active already. I feel like I am just behind with someone to contribute on the "facade" of the business while I'm doing all the back end stuff. Not sure how and where to find people interested in a joint venture.
I hope not to be overconfident on my ideas

 

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[teocns]

Is the topic dead?