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Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2015?

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Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2015?

#101

Post by Dorono »

andy wrote: post #14

-Advertising affiliate offers from Convert2media. ($1496 profit so far this month) -Adsense/Lifestreetmedia on my Pirates FB app (Adsense: $29 this month. Lifestreetmedia: $47 this month) http://greenrobot.com/pirates -Mopub, Inmobi and Facebook ads on my iOS and Android apps ($14 from Mopub this month)

I want to get into Affiliate Marketing (especially Mobile Marketing) but where ever I look, it seems like just scamming people off their money. Are there any ethical and legal offers you know of?. Not only white hat, I mean really ads that bring something a user wants and want to pay for, rather than the "lose 10kg in 2 weeks ebook".

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2015?

#102

Post by [deleted] »

going_to_800 wrote: post #99
dangrossman wrote: post #71

Improvely ( https://www.improvely.com ) and W3Counter ( https://www.w3counter.com ) have grown to $45,000 MRR. W3Counter is completely passive -- no new code or features in over a year, no customer support load, autoscaling frontend (EC2) and backend (Aurora). Improvely gets feature updates a few times a year and has some light e-mail support load. I also added a single banner ad to each of my open source projects' d…

Mate, this looks like a modified version of piwik, how much is different from it?

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2015?

#103

Post by dangrossman »

going_to_800 wrote: post #99
dangrossman wrote: post #71

Improvely ( https://www.improvely.com ) and W3Counter ( https://www.w3counter.com ) have grown to $45,000 MRR. W3Counter is completely passive -- no new code or features in over a year, no customer support load, autoscaling frontend (EC2) and backend (Aurora). Improvely gets feature updates a few times a year and has some light e-mail support load. I also added a single banner ad to each of my open source projects' d…

Mate, this looks like a modified version of piwik, how much is different from it?

I don't know, I've never used Piwik. W3Counter predates it by a couple years.

Back in the '90s and early '00s, you either had a daily barebones report from a basic log analyzer, or you paid hundreds to thousands of dollars for a license to good analytics software, most of which was just a fancier log analyzer. I never had that kind of money to spend on analytics back then, so I built my own.

My first free "hit counter" with reports service was part of Website Goodies, a site I started around 1996, but didn't have its own domain until 1999. W3Counter was a spin-off of that tool into its own site in 2004.

Google Analytics didn't come about (by acquiring Urchin and making their newest product free) until the end of 2005. Piwik's from late 2007 according to Wikipedia.

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2015?

#104

Post by ggambetta »

Shorel wrote: post #82
ggambetta wrote: post #33

My novel -- in English http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00QPBYGFI and Spanish http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00I1EU1Q0 Sells a couple Kindle copies per week. In terms of actual income, it's negligible. The feedback has been unanimously positive, so my problem is to get it in the hands of as many people as I can. Therefore, if you want the epub/mobi files, just message me (see bio) and I'll be happy to send them :)

Which version of the novel do you prefer ?

I originally wrote it in Spanish, my native language. My English is OK, but probably not as good as my Spanish, especially not when writing something that needs to "read nice" (as opposed to, say, technical articles).

I started translating it myself but the progress was too slow. I hired a translator, who was a native English speaker. The result is OK but not great -- in the end I could have done an equally good job. So I'll probably be writing the sequel in English.

To answer your question -- I believe the original Spanish version is slightly better.

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2015?

#105

Post by callmeed »

vertoc wrote: post #98
callmeed wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Our family sold an ag property this year and I purchased 3 rental properties. Two of them are 3 bedroom condos that I rent to students at Cal Poly SLO. The third is a 3 bedroom home that is a family rental. It's been going smoothly so far. While student rentals seem risky on the surface, I like them because (a) most students (here, at least) are paying their rent with student loans or parents' money, so its fair…

Awesome, I go there! Always cool to here from someone in the area, and interesting to see things from a landlord perspective

I go there too :) just went back to school after a long "hiatus" ... get in touch sometime

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2015?

#106

Post by iqonik »

apdinin wrote: post #19

During my day job I run a full-time startup, but, as a weekend hack a couple years ago, I built an automated email sales tool called Autopest ( https://autopest.com ). I've never done any promotion for it, but it keeps growing on its own organically via word-of-mouth. About a year and a half ago I mentioned Autopest in an HN thread titled "Ask HN: How to start earning $500/month in passive income in next 12-18 months…

"In order to send emails on your behald, "

Spelling error on your FAQ's - nice product.

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2015?

#107

Post by apdinin »

iqonik wrote: post #106
apdinin wrote: post #19

During my day job I run a full-time startup, but, as a weekend hack a couple years ago, I built an automated email sales tool called Autopest ( https://autopest.com ). I've never done any promotion for it, but it keeps growing on its own organically via word-of-mouth. About a year and a half ago I mentioned Autopest in an HN thread titled "Ask HN: How to start earning $500/month in passive income in next 12-18 months…

"In order to send emails on your behald, " Spelling error on your FAQ's - nice product.

Thanks! Fixed... and an extra upvote to you for the trouble.

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2015?

#108

Post by apdinin »

lwhalen wrote: post #95
apdinin wrote: post #19

During my day job I run a full-time startup, but, as a weekend hack a couple years ago, I built an automated email sales tool called Autopest ( https://autopest.com ). I've never done any promotion for it, but it keeps growing on its own organically via word-of-mouth. About a year and a half ago I mentioned Autopest in an HN thread titled "Ask HN: How to start earning $500/month in passive income in next 12-18 months…

This is awesome! As a musician and bandleader, I could absolutely use something like this. Are there any plans to make it work with a standard SMTP/IMAP setup? I don't use Gmail for privacy concerns, and have hosted my own email server for years now.

I can make it work on SMTP/IMAP, but, right now, it requires a custom setup. I've got a couple accounts that pay to do this... but they also have lots of team members using it.

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2015?

#109

Post by webstartupper »

ggambetta wrote: post #33

My novel -- in English http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00QPBYGFI and Spanish http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00I1EU1Q0 Sells a couple Kindle copies per week. In terms of actual income, it's negligible. The feedback has been unanimously positive, so my problem is to get it in the hands of as many people as I can. Therefore, if you want the epub/mobi files, just message me (see bio) and I'll be happy to send them :)

You may want to follow how self published author of Wool, Hugh Howey has sold his books on amazon.

He broke each novel into a four or five book series and sold each book for a dollar. He also made sure to schedule the releases every two to three months. (agile-writing?)

He makes six figures a month on most months [1]

[1] http://edition.cnn.com/2012/09/07/tech/mobile/kindle-direct-...

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2015?

#110

Post by brilliantsob »

akshat_h wrote: post #40
ggambetta wrote: post #33

My novel -- in English http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00QPBYGFI and Spanish http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00I1EU1Q0 Sells a couple Kindle copies per week. In terms of actual income, it's negligible. The feedback has been unanimously positive, so my problem is to get it in the hands of as many people as I can. Therefore, if you want the epub/mobi files, just message me (see bio) and I'll be happy to send them :)

You may consider pricing it higher. I have seen shorts i.e 40-50 page books at 2.99

Amazon KDP has different revenue splits based on price. I think 2.99 is the minimum price for the (much) larger split, which is why so many writers price their books at 2.99.
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