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Those making $1,000+/month on side projects – what did you make?

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Re: Those making $1,000+/month on side projects – what did you make?

#61
Lead generation service for mobile developers: iOS Leads - http://iosleads.com & Android Leads - http://androidleads.net

Have an assistant that helps curate freelance/contract positions from around the internet and through opportunities I hear about offline. I'm a mobile developer, so it's an effective side business to be working on.

Many people have scored new clients and worked on interesting projects through the service. Some people find it's not for them. Definitely offer a money-back guarantee if you're working on something digital/saas. No reason to be taking people's money if they're not getting value out of your product.

Another valuable lesson: we did really well with podcast advertising thanks to Release Notes (http://releasenotes.tv/). If you can find a podcast with 10,000 - 20,000 listeners that serves a niche, you should be able to produce a nice return. IMO our landing page is terrible, but it converts quite well.

Re: Those making $1,000+/month on side projects – what did you make?

#63

I sell 6 and 12 month leadership development programs to companies. I make 50% of the sale. At $50/mo per employee on the program, I make an extra $1000/mo at 40 employees. http://LIFELeadershipCorporate.com

Judging from what I've been exposed to from HR departments, this is a seriously underdeveloped area...

(I mean the content, not the selling of it.)

Re: Those making $1,000+/month on side projects – what did you make?

#65
post #34

I wrote a book and video series on Sublime Text - https://SublimeTextBook.com It's done about 80k in sales in 3 months - I'm in the process of writing a blog post about how I did it, what worked and what didn't. It's not inexpensive, but it pays for itself quickly so people are fine with spending the $45 on the book + videos. Feel free to ask questions here so I have content for the post.

That's pretty cool. How did you market it? What's your net looking like(assuming 80k is gross sales)?

Re: Those making $1,000+/month on side projects – what did you make?

#66
post #58
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, that is a lot! What sort of hardware do you need for that kind of load?

That's approximately 2 hits per second. If you're serving static content (or heavily cached) you could handle that with a Raspberry PI. Heck you could probably do it with an arduino. Edit: this depends heavily on your traffic pattern, of course. Super bursty traffic from Reddit, TechCrunch, etc is going to swamp your IO, but CPU will never dominate the equation.

Might as well serve it from Amazon S3 with Cloudflare in front of it.

Re: Those making $1,000+/month on side projects – what did you make?

#68
post #34

I wrote a book and video series on Sublime Text - https://SublimeTextBook.com It's done about 80k in sales in 3 months - I'm in the process of writing a blog post about how I did it, what worked and what didn't. It's not inexpensive, but it pays for itself quickly so people are fine with spending the $45 on the book + videos. Feel free to ask questions here so I have content for the post.

How did you get into writing?

I tried to write blogs and had to write papers for university, but I always struggle.

I have the feeling that some people can produce much text from nothing, where I put my ideas into a few sentences...

Re: Those making $1,000+/month on side projects – what did you make?

#70
post #52
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get 3.7-4 million page views per month from 850k-1 million unique users.

OK, that is a lot! What sort of hardware do you need for that kind of load?

As zrail mentioned below, it's not that much traffic from a load perspective. It's a Java app, so it uses some RAM, but honestly the hardest load to tune for was the inbound spam.

I have a massively overspecced server that I use for this, and many other sites/projects - 24 GB RAM, dual X5670 CPUs, etc... Typically runs at a load average of only 0.5-0.6. Like I said, overspecced:)

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