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Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

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Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#171

Post by euroclydon »

webbie wrote: post #162
euroclydon wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth noting that Bingo Card Creator is very amenable to organic SEO. Not only that, but the process of SEO actually expands the product offering at the same time. That's the beauty of it. Creating a new bingo card is as simple as pasting a bunch of related words into a form and maybe a description paragraph, but now you have a new page full of words (hello Google) and you've increased the real value of the prod…

User generated content is one way to grow content footprint at scale, you just have to invest in seed content and then moderation. My site (also in education space) http://www.TestDesigner.com has about 150K pages indexed in Google with 90% of the content coming from users. SEO is not just about content though. Huge part of Patrick's success comes from link building via his very popular blog and his personal brand, t…

I like your site. Can we talk offline? You don't have an email address in your profile.

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#172

Post by tnorthcutt »

patio11 wrote: post #132
kp27 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2 Q's: 1. "Find or create one proprietary data source" Any other examples & how do you monetize on this? 2. "you want passive options but more active options, like selling consulting, are things that might well fit" You're doing a great job at it looking at your year in review, but don't you need an established name with years of blog/material to get these sorts of rates? Thank you!

1a) "Hey data.gov, what information do you have available?" http://catalog.data.gov/dataset?groups=consumer9350 The very first data set is health insurance estimates broken down by zip code. There's a super-lucrative market for you, but that one might be a bit competitive for you trying to crack it in 2013. Let's see, scroll down a few results... ftp://ftp.cfda.gov/datagov/programs-full-datagov.csv That's a full list…

If you hypothetically had a successful side project, that can probably be parlayed into "I could do something like this for you, where it will be substantially more effective because it will take advantage of the X, Y, and Z advantages your business has that mine didn't."

This.

If you have a side project that's bringing in, say, $5000/year, and you do a few things to it such that it's now bringing in $5250/year, you've boosted revenue by 5%.

Now, go find a prospective client with a business bringing in $5MM/year, and explain to them how what you will do for them has the potential to increase revenue by $250k/year. Sure, it might not scale 1:1, but boosting it by even $100k/year should justify paying you, oh, $50k for the engagement.

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#173

Post by smartician »

tocomment wrote: post #170
smartician wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was my strategy for the past years, except the muni bonds are just one egg in the basket. I also hold business development companies, REITs, a high dividend stock ETF, corporate junk bonds (US and international). Right now I'm earning around $1,200 per month from $200k principal.

What REITs do you like? What are the most pressing risks you see with REITs right now?

If I could only buy one, I would choose RWO. Relatively low fee (0.5%), both domestic and international exposure. But it "only" yields 3.75%.

For more of an income play I'd look at IGR (yields more than 6%, trades at a 7.5% discount currently).

Another one I'm watching is "O".

Risks: Prices can swing wildly due to any number of reasons. Rising interest rates can depress real estate prices in the near term. Income should stay fairly stable though in my opinion, so I'm taking the long term view and try not to obsess about daily price volatility. I wouldn't put more than 5-10% of my capital into REITs.

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#174

Post by tocomment »

smartician wrote: post #173
tocomment wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What REITs do you like? What are the most pressing risks you see with REITs right now?

If I could only buy one, I would choose RWO. Relatively low fee (0.5%), both domestic and international exposure. But it "only" yields 3.75%. For more of an income play I'd look at IGR (yields more than 6%, trades at a 7.5% discount currently). Another one I'm watching is "O". Risks: Prices can swing wildly due to any number of reasons. Rising interest rates can depress real estate prices in the near term. Income sho…

Thanks. What do you think of PMT? I can't get past the 11% yield. I guess there are some pretty big risks there to justify that yield?

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#175

Post by smartician »

tocomment wrote: post #174
smartician wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I could only buy one, I would choose RWO. Relatively low fee (0.5%), both domestic and international exposure. But it "only" yields 3.75%. For more of an income play I'd look at IGR (yields more than 6%, trades at a 7.5% discount currently). Another one I'm watching is "O". Risks: Prices can swing wildly due to any number of reasons. Rising interest rates can depress real estate prices in the near term. Income sho…

Thanks. What do you think of PMT? I can't get past the 11% yield. I guess there are some pretty big risks there to justify that yield?

Looks like PMT is an mREIT (mortgage REIT), so instead of physical properties they buy mortgage loans. Different ballgame in the same stadium, so to speak. There are others: AGNC yields 20%, CYS 16%. I used to have an ETF that holds a portfolio of these (REM), which might be a good way to diversify as they all have slightly different strategies for investing and hedging. I got out recently, it's just too unpredictable. These funds achieve their high yield by being leveraged 10x-20x, so any impact from external factors like interest rate spread and policy changes is highly amplified.

Though I still have some exposure to the sector through other funds like AWP and SDIV.

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#176

Post by JoachimSchipper »

captainbenises wrote: post #125
scw wrote: post #78

A service I'd pay for: Mailing list management that doesn't suck, and isn't Google Groups. Something that can be backed up, and has a web interface. Mailman is still king in this niche, and I'm not entirely sure why.

This is a good idea, surely someone has already made a good mailing list tool?

Zed Shaw's http://lamsonproject.org/ looked interesting, last time I looked at it. (If you forgive it for pretending all the world is UTF-8, which it emphatically isn't.)

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#177

Post by trafficlight »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #147
Tichy wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"you are looking for a MS Excel spreadsheet which has ever been mailed by Bob to Cindy" That's how I (unenthusiastically) described my job as a Java developer in the first decade of the 21st century. Not sure if by now all Excel sheets have been "consolidated". In any case mobile apps seem to be the current wave.

Not sure if by now all Excel sheets have been "consolidated". Pardon me while I wipe tears from my eyes. Not only are there plenty of spreadsheets still wandering about, but I wouldn't be surprised if many decade-old Java applications have reverted to spreadsheets, formally or under the table. ("Officially we have this website, but since the website guy left the company John actually tracks the definitive list of rec…

The local gas station/convenience store I go to regularly has a PC on the front counter that always has a spreadsheet up. I believe that's how they do their cash flow.

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#178

Post by skarmklart »

webbie wrote: post #162
euroclydon wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth noting that Bingo Card Creator is very amenable to organic SEO. Not only that, but the process of SEO actually expands the product offering at the same time. That's the beauty of it. Creating a new bingo card is as simple as pasting a bunch of related words into a form and maybe a description paragraph, but now you have a new page full of words (hello Google) and you've increased the real value of the prod…

User generated content is one way to grow content footprint at scale, you just have to invest in seed content and then moderation. My site (also in education space) http://www.TestDesigner.com has about 150K pages indexed in Google with 90% of the content coming from users. SEO is not just about content though. Huge part of Patrick's success comes from link building via his very popular blog and his personal brand, t…

Contact me as well, please :)

info@howtofindsaasideas.com

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#179

Post by wojt_eu »

josscrowcroft wrote: post #114
martinkallstrom wrote: post #42

Here is a problem that I would pay a subscription for a great solution to: Cron as a service. Sometimes when you set up a simple codestack on Heroku or Parse or similar, it would be great to be able to specify a web hook that should be called repeatedly just to run maintenance code, summarize scores, clean up logs etc. If you have root access you can set up cron but this is not always the case, and I think it would b…

I use Pingdom's 1-minute monitoring for this, which is included on the Free plan. No joke, it hits up my pseudo-cron Task Processing route which fires up and reschedules all tasks needing doing, and it never fails. And it provides uptime and failure reports on my scheduled tasks!

never underestimate the power of duct tape

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#180

Post by jbrooksuk »

helen842000 wrote: post #169
jbrooksuk wrote: post #46

I've also been thinking of the exact same thing myself, something which will generate enough profit to pay off bills, buy something nice and invest a little in growing the idea. Recently I've been working on https://www.emlipo.com which was scrutinized by HN for essentially being "little code nobody would pay for". So I've not really wanted to work on that now. Still, there will be something out there I'm sure. By th…

Hey, I couldn't find your previous emlipo submission, I was going to post feedback there. It looks useful! I have a few blogs and getting spam addresses is a pain! It took me a while to understand at first. I think the key word that's missing from your tag line is 'address' as it currently says 'verifies that an e-mail exists' I immediately thought that was referring to searching for a specific e-mail message in an i…

Thanks! I've taken your feedback on board and shall start implementing it all :)
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