newbies: trying to make a buck on the net

...but you can't code?

[rfung]

I'm a developer in the sense that I can code functions, but I can't design. In view of that, I went to a site (scriptlance, elance, and others of the same ilk) to find a designer.

Well, I happened to look at the other projects and lo and behold, you could get a site like Webmasterworld designed for like $100-$500 bucks. Maybe its a bit beyond the scope of affiliate marketing, but these days,any site can be adsense'd and AM'd :)

My point being - if you've got an idea, but you can't program it, contract someone to do it for you. Programming is such a commodity these days that if you can't invest say $300 (and this would be a fairly complex project judging by the bids i saw) for the potential to earn multiples of the above, I'd say that you're a liar and I'd point to you that hosting can be $5-$15 a month, and the burgers you eat at your local joint probably add to just as much in a couple months. And the bottom line - if you dont know how to program, how long will it take you in terms of 'man hours' to learn it? how much in opportunity cost are you sacrificing?

Not only that, I'd urge anyone to go check out what kind of projects are being requested, from picture ranking sites to forums - those are great potential ideas and someone obviously believes enough in the idea to have it contracted out.

Of course, in order for you to commission something to be programmed, you need to have an idea, and that's another story alltogether ;)

[brickwall]

Hey Rogerio,

A clueless web promoter who thinks Iam some sort of a big time online earner is offering to sell me his newly built OsCommerce based software e-store for 10k. Useless name, about 2 backlinks, PR0, almost zilch traffic. Besides the fact that I can't afford it, I do know I can get a datafeed from a software dropshipper and have a same project bidded at scriptlance or elance with a title "customize OS commerce for this datafeed" and get bids of maybe less than $300 in about 2-3 hours.

What should I tell this guy? He said it costed him just about 10k to build the site?

;)

[tsinoy]

brickwall, tell him you have a better site and you can sell it to him for 20-30% of the cost of what he paid for his site...

see if he buys it from you... if he does(I doubt it).. you can go to the sites rfung mentioned and have it built... :) if he doesn't why would you buy his site? :D

[brickwall]

Pareng tsinoy,

it was suppose to be a funny anecdote ... =)
oh well, I guess I should stop trying to be funny and act more like a serious programmer that I am. =(

[wsp9]

It's not a bad idea to learn something new. With my first site, I was tempted to pay an SEO expert 10K for their services but opted to learn some of that myself so that I could apply it to other sites down the road and not be so vulnerable. As far as the website development goes, I would never outsource that. I'm sure there are a lot of people on elance and other sites just fishing for ideas.

[tsinoy]

brickwall.. yeah I know...

[derekwong28]

Unfortunately, there are pretty bad people around. We bought a site in which the previous owner left a backdoor through which he can shut down the site at will. This is so that he can extort money from us in terms of adminstration fee. If you outsource, you really must be extremely careful.

[miwilliam]

Brickwall, in my opinion, that guy is giving you a crock of baloney. why would he sell you a site for 10K when it cost him 10k to build it.

Something doesn't smell right.