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Make money writing excellent documentation for open source projects??

by carlos123
2 replies
It dawned on me today that there is a glaring need, a real vacuum, with respect to quality documentation for open source projects. Not all mind you but for many popular one's there still is.

If I were to register a domain and create copyrighted documentation of an excellent quality for a given project and slap Hostgator affiliate links within it as a way of having people support more such documentation (and saying so on the site)..do you all think this might be a good way to make some affiliate income from Hostgator?

Can anyone think of any other way to make money from this approach?

Just wondering.

I am not too concerned about letting this idea out as excellent technical writing is not easily duplicated not to mention that there are many thousands of open source projects that could use better documentation though some, who shall remain un-named , are far more popular than others.

Carlos
#documentation #excellent #make #money #open #projects #source #writing
  • Profile picture of the author Ralph Moore
    I have often thought that there is a huge vacuum there.

    Or at least room for more for many products. How about well written documentation augmented with video for certain parts?

    Many, many ways to market that if the market (business?) will respond.

    Get out your favorite keyword tool...
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    • Profile picture of the author carlos123
      Hi Eagle,

      Thanks for your encouragement! Never though about adding video. I'll have to think about that. Videos might distract and keep people from clicking on my Hostgator affiliate links.

      See my idea is to aim, if I do this, to write outstanding documentation for some major and very popular open source software products that from the forums and otherwise show a clear indication of not being well documented.

      Put that documentation on a domain. Slap a non-open office copyright on it (so that the project cannot just take it and slap it up on their site) and then wait for Google to index it.

      Talk about backlinks!

      And nice affiliate sales of something like Hostgator.

      It would be like Apache not having good documentation and me writing it up but putting it on my own site (Apache has outstanding documentation by the way).

      Sounds like a winning combo to me.

      A way to get great documentation and to catapult worthy open source projects while making a modest sum from affiliate sales myself.

      I can't see any downsides to it really.

      Come to think of it I could even write an ebook and give it away and accomplish the same thing.

      Carlos
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