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

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#371

Post by the906 » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 6:25 PM UTC

BryanBigs wrote: post #136

$1000/month from adsense on my free background picture (no attribution required, use it for whatever you want) website. Kinda looks like crap, but I'm afraid to touch it because it's such a steady-eddy producer. I add a picture every month or two, and get <10% of my traffic from direct search. Has so many links from Uni's and articles on where to find free stock photos that traffic just rolls on it.

You make 1000 a month from this site? I'm very impressed. I feel like I should be doing something with the gigs of photos I have sitting on my computer now...

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#372

Post by malchow » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 6:34 PM UTC

anonu wrote: post #270

Wrote a basic strategy to sell call spreads and put spreads on various index ETFs. I only sell near-dated stuff 50% returns on your capital. Not exactly "passive" - but with enough tweaks to the strategy you can get this to run with fairly minimal input time.

What platform do you use to automate the trading? I was always surprised that innovative companies like Interactive Brokers never invested in a simple to use scripting language that would allow people to try out ideas out in the markets.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#373

Post by zizzer » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 7:02 PM UTC

dusing wrote: post #249

My business partner and I started Snow in Seconds ( http://snowinseconds.com ) on the side, 6 years ago. It is a powder thats been around for decades (used in diapers) but when you get it at just the right grain size it looks, and feels like snow when water is added. We found a good source, designed a professional looking brand, made a TV spot (kinda), bought some search ads, and boom, predictable income. Sales are o…

You might want to edit your login page (http://snowinseconds.com/account/login) it still has some Lorem ipsum on it!

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#374

Post by pond_lilly » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 7:08 PM UTC

KurtElster wrote: post #358

In my best month, I did $3.3K in AdSense. No idea is stupid if you can monetize it. To explore projects outside of clients’ demands, we began a Labs initiative in March 2012. Think of it as a palate cleanser between client work. It's resulted in about ten completed projects. The formula is pretty simple. Find a problem, build a website to solve it. If it can be done in an afternoon, we don't even think about it. We j…

I do not get it, you take someone else's work (photos), put few stupid lines on it and make some $$$?

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#375

Post by rwhitman » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 7:08 PM UTC

ryanfelton wrote: post #285

I built an niche e-commerce marketplace called http://doleaf.com . Independent Nurseries and Garden Centers (the sellers) sign up and can instantly upload their items for sale directly to customers expanding their sales region of their niche products from just their neighbored to the entire USA. Since its niche customers who are looking for specific items customers find the site fairly easy through search. The site i…

Important rule of ecommerce order conversions - never require an account signup / login before getting to the checkout screen from cart. And allow guest checkout. I'd take a guess you are hemorrhaging sales because of this

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#376

Post by TamDenholm » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 7:26 PM UTC

euroclydon wrote: post #138

Here are the all time sales figures for http://www.makecupcakewrappers.com They've been pretty bad the last few months. I think it's because the server was overloaded and response times were getting really bad. It was running on a GoDaddy $70/mo VPS with IIS, SqlServer. But that server was also hosting an Umbraco site and a WordPress blog. The PHP process was taking up 99% CPU nearly all the time. Now I have it runni…

You may be able to find someone on oDesk or something to make a bunch of designs without you having to do it, might be worth paying for a long term gig which will give you fresh content you can use.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#377

Post by vlucas » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 7:29 PM UTC

ohblahitsme wrote: post #324

vlucas wrote: post #157

I created http://jscompress.com/ several years ago as a simple online JavaScript compression tool that can also combine multiple files into a single output (and guarantees they will be compressed in the order input). It's been making around $200-300 per month for several years, and this year has jumped up to $300-500 per month. This is only from Google Adsense: http://cl.ly/WobJ - I also always get a nice holiday spi…

That's great! Did you do any advertising to get it going? How long has it been around?

Zero advertising. All I did was link it from my blog and a few other websites I own and tweet about it a few times. I imagine the strength of the domain name and the keywords on the page help a lot. It's also been linked as a useful tool on many highly trafficked and well respected blogs, so it's got some very good credible link juice going for it.

Honestly I just created it for myself back before Grunt, Gulp, etc. after searching for some simple online tools and not finding any that allowed uploading and combining multiple files together. The first version was PHP, and I switched it to a node.js app in 2011 after Uglify.js came out (there were a lot of problems with the PHP library I was using).

I created the website in 2008, so it's been going for quite a while, collecting backlinks and traffic ever since. I am not looking at the reports right now, but I believe it made less than $200 the whole first year I had ads on it (it didn't always have ads).

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#378

Post by passive_ish » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 7:30 PM UTC

sixpenrose16 wrote: post #330

passive_ish wrote: post #153

I built a B2B SAAS app about 18 months ago. I neglect it now, as I took a full time job (living in NYC isn't cheap, and I needed a better living situation). It brings in about $1,800-$2,400/mo. I'd sell it if I had a buyer.

How can I contact you?

hn.b2b.saas@gmail.com

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#379

Post by vlucas » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 7:31 PM UTC

caspercrf wrote: post #333

vlucas wrote: post #157

I created http://jscompress.com/ several years ago as a simple online JavaScript compression tool that can also combine multiple files into a single output (and guarantees they will be compressed in the order input). It's been making around $200-300 per month for several years, and this year has jumped up to $300-500 per month. This is only from Google Adsense: http://cl.ly/WobJ - I also always get a nice holiday spi…

Do you advertise or do you get customers organically?

No advertising - 100% organic. The strength of the domain name and the keywords on the page help, and it's also been linked as a useful tool on many highly trafficked and well respected blogs, so it's got some very good credible backlinks, and is quite popular.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#380

Post by dsizemore » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 7:44 PM UTC

I make $200+ with Adsense and BuySellAds from http://www.logogala.com.

It's been online for around eight years or so now. I typically work on it maybe 15-20 minutes a night or every other night uploading new designs that have been submitted.

Currently planning to re-develop it and make it so designers can sign up and manage their own profile and designs but I'm a little afraid to touch it and end up losing all of the little bit of money I'm currently making.