C

Chasing the Wrong Thing?

About a week ago, a small voice nudged me toward an idea: set aside my current online projects and build something slightly different—a directory website for people in Japan looking for dog-friendly campsites. There are plenty of camping directories out there, but I’ve never found them particularly useful. Sure, I can filter by location, price, or accommodation type. But the question I really need answered—can I bring my dog?—is often nowhere to be found.

Oddly enough, most of Japan’s well-maintained campsites do not allow pets. This is bizarre when you consider the abundance of wildlife already roaming these places—birds, deer, raccoons, snakes, frogs, even stray cats. But Japan loves arbitrary rules, so there’s no point arguing. Instead, I decided to apply some of what I’ve learned about “making money online” by collecting campsite data from Google Maps, processing it with ChatGPT, and presenting it in a format that makes sense for the local market. Development cost so far? Around $250 in API fees and four days of work—more than I’ve spent on any previous project, but perhaps a worthwhile investment.

Over the past four months, most of my evenings have gone into studying what it takes to build a profitable website today. This has involved reading the occasional self-congratulatory article on an “SEO Guru’s” website, but most of the information has come from highly-visible, quietly-speaking people1 on YouTube. I’ve tried my hand at SaaS products, but they never attracted much interest. I’ve created tools for small schools, only to be told that Excel and manual workflows are “good enough.” I’ve dabbled with Etsy, but the platform’s pricing is unsustainable for non-Americans. Even long-form articles haven’t yielded results. Time and money in; nothing out.

So, are the YouTubers promising easy online income lying?

Not quite. Anyone can earn a living online—but that doesn’t mean everyone will. Some succeed, many don’t. After watching innumerable “how-to” videos, I’ve noticed some common omissions: the time commitment before any income shows up, the relentless grind on social media, and the financial cost—and absolute necessity—of ads. When these realities are mentioned, it’s usually in passing—like it’s perfectly normal to burn through $500 a month on advertisements for half a year with complicated A-B test patterns and before seeing results.

So, if you’re planning to start an online business, go for it—but be ready to put in serious time and money, especially if you’re starting from scratch without an eager audience.

That said, listen to enough of these content creators and you’ll start to hear what they’re not saying directly. Their discussions about algorithm changes, SEO strategy shifts, and social platform volatility reveal just how much effort it takes to stay relevant. I’ve rolled my eyes at many SEO “experts” for years, having encountered too many snake-oil salespeople claiming secret formulas—but the fundamentals do matter.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe: if you want that dream of passive income from lists, calculators, or lightweight web games, it’s possible—but you need to be in it for the long haul. Think years before revenue, not months. There are exceptions, of course—truly useful or unique tools can gain traction quickly. But if you’re entering a saturated market, particularly in English, expect a steep climb.

This brings me to something I’ve only come to appreciate by living in Japan: the web looks very different outside the English-speaking world. Most of my online life is in English, but when I need something local, I turn to Japanese websites. And these are often cluttered, text-heavy, and visually overwhelming—designed for density over clarity. Key phrases are embedded in images, making it difficult for search engines to understand the page content. As a result, even major search engines return irrelevant results for many Japanese-language queries.

That’s the opportunity.

By creating sites that are cleaner, faster, and more search-friendly—even if they contain the same core content—it’s possible to climb search rankings quickly. That’s exactly what I did with my newest project: Kikk.

Originally, Kikk.me was going to be a collection of word and guessing games with light social integration and some unobtrusive ads. People with ad-blockers would still be able to play, while others would see everything. But last Saturday, I was compelled to change direction. I put the games aside, paused work on my education-focused tools, and built something brand new for the Japanese market. By Thursday, the site was live with 4,500 fully searchable and indexed campsites. Google was notified—and within hours, they started sending traffic. I received six clicks from 19 impressions on day one.

To put that in perspective: my educational projects took over three months to build at 6+ hours seven days a week, followed by 3–5 hours of writing every day for six weeks before they reached six visitors. Kikk.me did that in less than a day. Friday brought nearly 20 visitors, and Saturday doubled that number. Better still, server logs show people sharing the site on social networks and in chat apps. A week ago, Kikk.me didn’t exist. Now, it’s helping real people solve a real problem.

I didn’t expect this. But I’m glad it happened.

Of course, launching the site involved more than just stuffing Google Maps data into a database. If you’re considering building a site or boosting traffic to an existing one, here are a few things that helped me get results quickly:

  1. Ensure your sitemap.xml is complete, readable, and includes lastModified and frequency values so search engines know how often they should return.
  2. Register with Google Search Console and submit the sitemap.xml file.
  3. Register with Bing Webmaster Tools and submit the sitemap.xml file — though, honestly, I haven’t seen a single visitor from Bing to any of my websites this year.
  4. Implement JSON-LD or Microdata tags as outlined on Schema.org.
  5. Test your structured data with Google’s Rich Results Test. Note that Google often disagrees with Schema.org specs in practice, so be ready to modify that JSON-LD structure.

Items 4 and 5, in particular, have made a noticeable difference in search visibility.

In the week ahead, I plan to duplicate Kikk’s early success with another directory site aimed at solving a different local challenge. If the pattern holds, it might be possible to earn a modest but steady income from these kinds of projects. I’m not chasing the massive numbers shouted from rooftops by self-proclaimed millionaire YouTubers who seem to have enough time and generosity to share their knowledge but, if this work helps cover a few bills, Ayumi and I will have fewer worries—and that’s a win in my book.

  1. There are some really loud “Make Money Online” people on YouTube, and they’re annoying as hell. 10,000 words into a video, you finally hear what they’re going to talk about. 50,000 words later, they didn’t actually talk about that thing at all.