What was your best passive income in 2014? • Hacker News Board

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#271

Post by vilius » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 3:37 PM UTC

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #186

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…

What do you charge for your theme? Is that typical? How much of a cut does ThemeForest take from you?

You start at 50% then it increases by 1% for each $2500 you earn. You continue building up like this until you reach 70%.

The interesting thing is that you can't control the price of your theme and it is set at the time of publishing by TF. Price range for WP themes is $35 - $50

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#272

Post by snoonan » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 3:38 PM UTC

patrickk wrote: post #188

snoonan wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if its a good idea to share the exact topics, but generally they are language learning and software training (for example, specific CMSs). I do everything through my own sites and find customers through via free podcasts, free and promoted youtube videos, etc. Udemy's on my list, but I believe in always owning your own brand, customers and leads.

Thanks for the info, I understand completely you don't want to give away profitable niches. > I do everything through my own sites and find customers through via free podcasts, free and promoted youtube videos, etc. Very clever, creative promotional strategy! I would love to read more if you have a blog (again without giving too much of your exact products or niches away). I'm building up a side business currently, a…

Drop me an email! (info in profile).

I definitely want to get around to doing work in Udemy, but I do have to say that they're not as big as, say, Youtube. :) For example, if you have a popular video, that gets embedded and linked to a lot. That builds link juice to your Youtube channel page and main site if write your video descriptions right, then suddenly you are ranking in Google search faster than you would normally. Same for a podcast and episode summaries. Having position and your own users in one channel also lets you ratchet up another by launching to those users. Over time, you build up big lists of people who you can re-launch updates or work with to develop new courses and products. Some people also use the leads to do affiliate marketing, but I personally prefer not to.

Anyway, owning your own traffic and lead list gives you the ability and permission to do that, so it's my approach.

btw, I forgot to mention I do have some free iOS apps to drive free users too. That by itself accounts for maybe 20% of my leads. I haven't touched Android yet.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#273

Post by BryanBigs » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 3:38 PM UTC

imjk wrote: post #252

BryanBigs wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sure - http://freemediagoo.com By end of august I'll be split-testing moderenizing it (it's not mobile/tablet friendly, backend makes it a pain to add content (especially text),etc) - I'm hoping making it nicer doesn't hit the income.

How did you decide on the placement of adds and layout of site? Glad it's doing well for you.

Testing about a year ago. Had a 8x increase in CTR without much drop in CPC, so that was a big win for the site. I think there's more to squeeze out but it was written a long time ago in hobbled-together .asp, and that's not my forte. Someday I'll move it to a different back-end so I can experiment with things with more ease. For instance, I have content (with real words!) ready to go, but sadly the amount of work I'd need to do to hack the code to display it isn't worth it if I plan on changing the code out anytime soon.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#274

Post by dabent » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 3:38 PM UTC

rolfvandekrol wrote: post #87

tjsix wrote: post #44

Not entirely passive due to a small amount of support emails each month, but bringing in roughly $1600-$2500/mo (slower in summer) for niche WordPress themes. That's with virtually no marketing or advertising other than a $5/day adwords budget.

$5/day adwords budget is not 'virtually no marketing or advertising'. That is about the sales of a slow month over the year.

$5/day x 30 days is $150, not $1500.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#275

Post by jain_chirag04 » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 3:39 PM UTC

xemoka wrote: post #264

jain_chirag04 wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Except how could anyone tell? It wants you to sign up before anything? Or at least that's what it looks like, I'm not punching an e-mail address into a form just to see what's behind door number 1 when there's no information for a shopper and very little for a seller.

We are still building the platform and inviting early adopters. We are a team of designers & developers and wants to solve the pain of giving away 50% of our sales on envato marketplaces.

Pluginbag offers 80% to the seller with No Exclusive lock in

Shoppers will benefit from the latest, well managed and quality work of the sellers.

PS: I'm the cofounder at pluginbag.com

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#276

Post by stevenspasbo » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 3:41 PM UTC

opless wrote: post #225

iD3 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

London. The financial district is often referred to simply as 'the city', so force of habit!

I had assumed that, but thought it best to ask :)

I was thinking San Francisco, that sounds about for the bay area too.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#277

Post by vicwhiten » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 3:44 PM UTC

tomjen3 wrote: post #259

vicwhiten wrote: post #124

~80$ a month from ads on http://steamroulette.net

You could make a lot more if you did two things: 1) Remove that under construction thing. Granted it has no gifs, but as a potential user it distracts me. 2) Describe what value I can get from using it. What problem do you solve?

I actually realized I never pushed out my new version haha, thank you for pointing it out! Just deployed it.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#278

Post by vilius » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 3:45 PM UTC

johnward wrote: post #36

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…

Is this all from a single theme? What percentage are you at? I've contemplated converting some of my custom WP themes to sell on ThemeForest but I didn't think it would be worth the time. edit: I often wonder if it would be worth it to try to compete with theme clubs. They seem to make a killing on recurring revenue and release a couple of themes a year.

Yes, it's from single theme. I'm currently at the highest rate of 70%.

There are a couple of high-selling authors on TF that established their theme clubs. They build up customer base using TF and then invite people to subscribe for a yearly fee to get access to all of their themes plus the ones to be released. I guess after you reach certain amount of customers such model is much more profitable.

Eg. http://www.themezilla.com/ and here's a link to their TF profile http://themeforest.net/user/OrmanClark

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#279

Post by vijayr » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 3:47 PM UTC

BryanBigs wrote: post #179

jacksworker wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you share url?

sure - http://freemediagoo.com By end of august I'll be split-testing moderenizing it (it's not mobile/tablet friendly, backend makes it a pain to add content (especially text),etc) - I'm hoping making it nicer doesn't hit the income.

Where do you get the photos from?

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#280

Post by rk0567 » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 3:48 PM UTC

mrfusion wrote: post #266

rk0567 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. I tried once but didn't get any response. I submitted there and received some feedback though.

I know on build me a pc (forget exact URL), they have a standardized format they paste in. I wonder if you outputted that format, maybe they would take it up?

Thanks. I'll check out.