Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2018?

What are the courses? How do you market?

I make anywhere from $100 - $300 a month, once over $450 when someone bought a Rolex. I came across the niche browsing reddit's r/watches. There are a lot of watch blogs and websites, but almost nothing devoted just to watch bands & straps. It turns out a lot of people have an old watch they'd like to fix up because the strap broke.

The research wasn't very hard. I bought some straps and installed them to get the hang of it. Its actually very easy, and now they make quick release straps, so you can change out your strap every day if you want. Mostly it's a fashion blog, so the companies do the work for me by putting out great photography.

I've been doing it about a year and a half. The first 6 months I hardly made money and almost gave up, but then I wrote a popular article and managed to rank quickly and and people purchase watches through it.

I don't really do keyword research. Most of my money comes from two or three articles, one of which is about a particular watch. So I could write more articles about other watches when I have the time. But I have a full-time job that I love, so I only do this for fun. I've done some advertising on Pinterest that seems to have been useful, and Pinterest itself brings in visitors.

I used to write a lot of content but got a new position at my full time job that's been taking up a ton of time. When things settle down I'll write more. Other people hire writers, I'm not sure about that just yet. I don't do reviews, mainly because I didn't want to handle the shipping of bands back and forth. Seems weird to keep the review bands, although plenty of companies have offered free bands I've never accepted any.

I'm an Amazon affiliate, and also Etsy & Jomashop (a popular online watch seller) and one or two others that I've never got a sale from. I usually don't get compensated from featuring independent strapmakers, unless someone buys through Etsy. But they provide the interviews and a lot of great photography, so I basically feature them for free. The blog would be boring otherwise and they're very talented artists and fun to work with. Check out Combat Straps (https://www.combat-straps.com/GALLERY.html) or Jones in Tokyo (https://www.etsy.com/shop/JonesInTokyoLeather) and you'll see what I mean.

I'm not interested in my own straps or watches, there are enough people doing that already so I'll stick with my quiet little niche. My website is just a WordPress theme.

Hope that helps. Check out the reddit link for r/juststart. It really is very informative and fun. This is my second business. The first one was an iPad travel magazine that failed miserably and never made a profit, but was also a lot of fun.

About $2000 a month of pure passive income coming in from a diversified index fund portfolio (us + international + reit + small cap value) under the form of dividends.

It’s somewhat more consistent than the appreciation/depreciation of the underlying securities due to the recent volatility, and I get the distribution straight into my bank account, which I usually just reinvest since I have a full time job that easily supports my expenses.

Dividend yield based on the current high valuations is pretty low though, I believe for my portfolio is around 2%, but hopefully in the long term that’ll be just a small portion of the returns.

I struggled with this thought for a while, specifically the decision between putting significant effort into revenue generating side projects (I have ideas for a few saas services and a couple domain-specific books that I would likely be qualified for writing), or giving all my intellectual power to my employer and getting a higher compensation than people who have stuff going on on the side (on average, that is).

I opted for the second, so I haven’t done even a single side project in my life and have completely focused on my full time job. It allowed me to quickly grow my net worth and now I’m in the 7 figures after 8 years of full time work, and the effect of having large assets invested in index funds can be felt now.

So, I humbly think my “strategy” is also a form of “passive income through talent, wit, or execution”. I’m 100% sure that if I dabbled with side ideas and put in the hundreds of hours required to write books, courses, ... I wouldn’t have been able to obtain the impact I had at my job, so my net worth would be significantly lower.

As I said though, I thought about it a lot so I haven’t necessarily come to the conclusion that it’s the best thing to do, there are certainly other factors that go in side projects, such as personal satisfaction, pride and sense of ownership, which are only relative when contributing to an employer.

https://piln.xyz/ has earned me 918 satoshis so far.