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What was your best passive income in 2014?

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Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#231

Post by shawnbaden »

lijjumathew wrote: post #193
rachelandrew wrote: post #55

I keep meaning to write up complete figures but I launched my self-published ebook The Profitable Side Project Handbook in January http://rachelandrew.co.uk/books/the-profitable-side-project Sales from that are well over 10K USD at this point. A lot of that was over the launch week, I've not had a huge amount of time to devote to marketing it over the last couple of months as our main business (which was a side proje…

Great work. For writing books do you use any book editor software of just MS Word ? I am in the process of writing a book and couldn't find a good editor/software. Thanks

I believe Tim Ferriss said he wrote his first book entirely in Evernote but now raves (with others) about Scrivener.

Keep up the good work.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#232

Post by danielweber »

jo_ wrote: post #147
vijayr wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on where you are. In the U.S, interest rates aren't anything to talk about. In India, my dad gets something like 7% (I think it is more for people over 60)

I considered investing in a foreign country bank since I happened upon $20k through some fortunate stock picks. I was advised that this is a _very_ bad idea because of the currency fluctuations between countries. You might earn 7% in India (or 19% in the Ukraine), but if suddenly the transaction rate doubles, you've lost half your money.

Anyone paying 7% is doing so to compensate for risk.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#233

Post by seandhi »

eminkel wrote: post #205
TamDenholm wrote: post #2

Its not yet passive because i choose to spend most of my time on it to make it better, but i bought a cleaning business 10 months ago. I recently took a consulting contract for some additional money for expansion and it does run by itself (in the capable hands of my biz manager), however there are more optimisations i wish to make to it. Its the hardest thing i've ever done, but its at a stage where if i wanted to, i…

Excellent, I just started a cleaning business less than 3 months ago.

I'm actually considering starting a cleaning business, and I'd love to get your perspective. I'm a full time software consultant, and I'm looking for a way to get some semi-passive income flowing. Anyway, if you have time, please reach out to me at sean.d.hi at gmail dot com.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#234

Post by dotnetkow »

tomjen3 wrote: post #207
dotnetkow wrote: post #116

$2-5k per month (after Apple's cut) from my Fitbit mobile app, Fitwatchr: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fitwatchr/id684005201?mt=8&i... . The unique value is Fitbit activity conversion to Weight Watchers points as well as a tougher but more rewarding calorie tracking that is based on real science (Mifflin equation). Effort on my part really depends on me/my current schedule as it's a side project. I admittedly have…

Curious, how long did you spend developing it?

Unfortunately for the first version I didn't track hours (I am now). It took all of last summer (June to August) of nights and weekends. Not too bad considering it was only a few hours per week b/c of being more active outside due to Summer. It's PhoneGap based, so much of the effort wasn't so much writing features so much as learning/figuring out the tools I used: KendoUI Mobile for the UI, PhoneGap Build for building native versions, and Knockout.js. I come from a .NET backend background, so I wanted the new challenge of building an app with frontend tech, not only for CSS/JavaScript practice but also benefiting from one codebase for multiple platforms (iOS, Android, and WinPhone 8).

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#235

Post by jawns »

lijjumathew wrote: post #187
jawns wrote: post #75

I am the author of two books: "Experimenting With Babies: 50 Amazing Science Projects You Can Perform on Your Kid" ( http://www.experimentingwithbabies.com ), which came out in October, and "Correlated: Surprising Connections Between Seemingly Unrelated Things" ( http://www.correlated.org ), which came out earlier this month. One thing I didn't realize when I started pitching the first book was that there would be "p…

Great work. For writing books do you use any book editor/software of just MS Word ? I am in the process of writing a book and couldn't find a good editor/software. Thanks

For "Experimenting With Babies," I used Google Drive for rought-draft stuff, then switched to OpenOffice. By the time you're passing it back and forth with your editor, you'll need to be using something that's compatible with Word, because that's what your editor will be using (assuming you're working with a traditional publisher).

For "Correlated," I used a lot of natural-language generation, so I suppose you could say that my editor was Sublime Text, at least for the drafts. Then ported into Word format.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#236

Post by jain_chirag04 »

vilius wrote: post #34

$5k per month for 18 months in a row. Made a portfolio website for my girlfriend. Got positive feedback, refactored into Wordpress theme and published on ThemeForest. Not 100% passive as I spend 3-4 hours per week for answering support emails. ThemeForest is a perfect place for passive income if you are a website developer. At first it challenges your skills as you need to create the concept, design it and code it. T…

You should try pluginbag.com which offers much more than ThemeForest.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#237

Post by somebodysomeone »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #216
somebodysomeone wrote: post #166

I built an information website (not USA) that now pulls in roughly $8800 a month via adsense. To get to that figure takes about 500k user sessions/month (lots of long tail traffic). Runs on a single medium website instance in Azure, takes about an hour a day in maintenance and monitoring for malicious traffic like scraping that can be a problem for info sites (I've mostly automated this). The initial time outlay was…

>(I've mostly automated this). Can you talk about this? Also, how many ads and what formats/sizes work best for you?

Approached the traffic filtering from a number of directions - I log and background parse the incoming traffic to look for IPs and ranges that are generating excessive traffic, and get notified of issues. From there I can temporarily/perm block them if desired. I also have a script that can temporarily block all Tor exit nodes, as occasionally I get attempted spamming/scraping from there.

For automating scraping/spamming protection, I would consider something like CloudFlare Security though, my own tools are good enough for now, but I would still be vulnerable to a DDoS or a botnet scrape - it's enough to stop one-man scrapers but I'll need something beefier soon.

Ad formats that seem to work best: 728x90 by a long margin. I generally top and tail the content section with a leaderboard ad. I do serve different sizes for mobile etc, but the leaderboard works way better. I've also experimented with skyscrapers and boxes, which performed very poorly (skyscrapers especially).

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#238

Post by mjwhansen »

AlexNeoNomad wrote: post #212
mjwhansen wrote: post #204

Geocodio ( http://geocod.io ) is adding 5-10 new users a day and monthly revenue has gone from $1,000 in just over six months. It's a self-serve product (geocoding US addresses via API or CSV upload), though there is a fair amount of support and continuing development. I've posted this before, but I wrote up some thoughts about things I've learned about launching a side project here that you might find helpful: https…

Can't people just make a request to google maps? Why do they you use your service instead? In what sense is it better (if it is)?

Great question! There are a couple reasons people use Geocodio over or in addition to the major providers, like Google:

* Google's free tier is 2,500 a day. But if you need more than that, you have to sign a yearly contract ($10,000+). Our pricing is 2,500 free a day with additional lookups at $.001 each.

* We don't place any restrictions on our geocodes. The major providers often a lot of restrictions on how you use their lookups, like having to use it with a particular brand of map, can't use it in a backend, can't resell, can't store them, etc. Our lookups are completely restriction free.

* Related, at the enterprise level, we have an option for unlimited geocoding for $750 a month. Major providers usually have a daily limit for their enterprise plans, such as 100,000 lookups a day.

* We provide additional data that people often need along with lat/lon, like timezone, Congressional district, school district, and state legislative districts.

* We're non-developer friendly. We have a CSV upload option (http://geocod.io/blog/2014/04/30/csv/) that lets people upload a spreadsheet of addresses and download it directly from the same dashboard.

A big difference is that we're US-only for the time being. Additionally, it's worth noting that our data is close to Google quality, but not quite. They've embarked on an ambitious, admirable, and expensive quest to map the world and have cars driving around the globe daily. We don't.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#239

Post by somebodysomeone »

baudehlo wrote: post #210
somebodysomeone wrote: post #166

I built an information website (not USA) that now pulls in roughly $8800 a month via adsense. To get to that figure takes about 500k user sessions/month (lots of long tail traffic). Runs on a single medium website instance in Azure, takes about an hour a day in maintenance and monitoring for malicious traffic like scraping that can be a problem for info sites (I've mostly automated this). The initial time outlay was…

That's fantastic income. Is any of that hour a day spent adding content?

Generally no. When I add info it tends to be in bulk (augmenting existing information pages), and then this will be done as a stand-alone project - the info tends to need lots of massaging and making intelligent to give it value.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#240

Post by applecore »

mcdougle wrote: post #154
th1agofm wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I advise you don't focus too much in dividends but spread it in emerging markets, gold and others. In the short term it looks like a bad idea, because you could have more income coming from your dividends, but when a crisis or something hits, it's worth it.

What kind of crisis are you thinking? Because if you're talking something like 2008 again, dividend stocks should be fine -- the market value of the stock will drop, but the dividends should remain stable. In fact, the smart investor loves those times -- it's a great time to accumulate assets. If you're talking something like a collapse of the entire economy, then yes, tangible assets like gold and real estate are mu…

If you're under 40 years old, it's better to invest entirely in growth stocks over dividend stocks[1].

In theory, dividends are a great source of passive income, but with effective yields of 2-3% you'd need a lot of capital to generate any meaningful income, i.e., a $1M investment would pay around $30,000 annually.

Dividend stocks have never performed that well; they never appreciate 10-20x like certain growth stocks, they usually underperform relative to the market, and when the market declines they all go down just the same.

Here's an example: over the past two years P&G (PG) and Coca-Cola (KO), two dividend stock favorites, are up about 20% and flat respectively. The S&P 500 index is up 40% in the same period, Facebook (FB) is up over 200%, and Tesla (TSLA) is up over 700%.

[1]: http://www.financialsamurai.com/better-to-invest-in-growth-s...

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