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Let the adventurous journey begin: Passive Income

patrick-wied.at

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Re: Let the adventurous journey begin: Passive Income

#11

Post by ssharp »

To OP, I wouldn't feel so bad writing about this: "I decided to give passive income a shot and I’m going to write about my experiences (yep, like almost everybody these days)".

My request is to be open and stay on top of the writing, even if things don't go well. If you're marketing the articles, market the "I lost" articles as much as the "I won" articles. If passive income is myth, as was commented on previously, part of the myth comes from only seeing positive results. There is a lot to be learned from failures.

That said, I hope you hit your targets and goals, but if not, I want to hear about it!

Re: Let the adventurous journey begin: Passive Income

#12

Post by pa7 »

reidrac wrote: post #8

I guess you're employed and you're looking for some extra money. I have a boring question I'm afraid: what about taxes? How does it work in Austria?

I'm currently doing contract work for a client in the US and well yeah this is some sort of approach for getting some extra money. Right now I'm studying in Germany and the german tax law applies to me. If the extra money gets over a specific amount per month you'd have to register a traders-license (in case you're selling stuff next to your job, there's the usual income tax and if you get over a even bigger amount you'd have to pay sales tax too) since my passive income approaches didn't pay off a lot yet I'm still in the boundaries where I don't have to worry about that.

Re: Let the adventurous journey begin: Passive Income

#14

Post by pa7 »

yaix wrote: post #10

"Advertising [...] the amount you get [...] isn’t big and only pays off with high traffic" Realy? Glad you think that. And: no, it does not suck but can provide a positive user experience if done correctly. And: no, I am not talking about hit-the-monkey ads. And: no, it's not as easy as copy-pasting some random ad code into your HTML.

I obviously didn't spend enough time to think about it hard enough and wasn't able explore the good sides of advertising. I had a web app and placed a big banner over it, the banner often seemed to show confusing buttons like "SHOW" or "DOWNLOAD" and I guess the users then accidentially clicked it. I think the main problem was that there were no ads that fit to the app (it was a QR encoder/decoder) so I wasn't able to provide a positive ux. Do you have any tips on how to find the best fitting ads for (sometimes very technical related) specific sites/apps?

Re: Let the adventurous journey begin: Passive Income

#15

Post by gravitronic »

Hi Patrick,

Good luck. I've been doing app dev since Jan of this year. I blogged about the profits I experienced in the first few months here:

[http://burnsmod.com/business/2012/04/23/My-First-2-Months:-A...]

What you have right, in my opinion:

- you have low expectations to start

- you haven't quit your job

- none of your plans sound crazy

- of your proposed ideas, writing wordpress themes is probably the most potentially lucrative.

What you (may) have wrong:

- passive income in my experience (app development) is constant work. Whether its blogging to keep traffic up, answering customer support requests, to adding features or new revenue-generating products, etc.

- Blogging for ad revenue is not going to be very successful unless you start a porn blog. Blog for SEO gains and to funnel to your product sale pages.

- If you really want passive income, try to come up with something that is a subscription service people will pay you monthly for. It's a lot easier to maintain a service for existing customers than have to bring new customers in the door every month.

Re: Let the adventurous journey begin: Passive Income

#16

Post by webwright »

To OP: Your passive income ideas are pretty grandiose. Those are legit startup ideas. For passive income think: solve the smallest problem possible. Simple SaaS software. A lead-gen blog (I know a guy who puts up reviews of expensive niche products and gets hundreds per month in amazon affiliate fees). Simple mobile apps? An ebook with information that people need? Find something that is ALREADY SELLING and do it better/different.

Also, think cheap marketing. SEO? Or is there a product that you could sell whose use would be inherently social? Passive income is barely a software problem-- you shouldn't be building anything super-complex. It's more a marketing problem. How do you talk about it? How do you find customers? If you can solve THAT on paper before you write a line of code, you're way ahead of most people who take a shot at this.

Re: Let the adventurous journey begin: Passive Income

#18

Post by reidrac »

pa7 wrote: post #12
reidrac wrote: post #8

I guess you're employed and you're looking for some extra money. I have a boring question I'm afraid: what about taxes? How does it work in Austria?

I'm currently doing contract work for a client in the US and well yeah this is some sort of approach for getting some extra money. Right now I'm studying in Germany and the german tax law applies to me. If the extra money gets over a specific amount per month you'd have to register a traders-license (in case you're selling stuff next to your job, there's the usual income tax and if you get over a even bigger amount y…

Thanks for your answer!

It's probably a country specific thing, but I looks like you're usually allowed to have some income that is tax free (up to a limit; ie UK income tax personal allowance is £8,105 for 2012 - as long as you total income is less than £100k).

Re: Let the adventurous journey begin: Passive Income

#19

Post by leoedin »

cheald wrote: post #3

I've done a few passive income projects, and by far the most lucrative have been: a) Self-serve subscription services (SaaS/hosting platforms have a high buy-in, but are very low maintenance once they're revved) b) Ad-supported projects targeted at loyal niche markets. (Building enough audience for any ad-supported project is hard enough already; if you can build a tool that hooks into an existing community, go for i…

I totally agree with b. I made approximately $2000 from ad supported sites over a 3 year period. The site wasn't particularly unique (a wiki) and I did very little to contribute to it. I was part of a community, noticed a need for somewhere for people to share information about a particular piece of hardware, and introduced the solution at the right time.

I think with most of these things the ability to make money is largely related to timing and luck. If you get a large community behind you, people will promote your site with very little effort on your part.

Re: Let the adventurous journey begin: Passive Income

#20

Post by mmuro »

gravitronic wrote: post #15

Hi Patrick, Good luck. I've been doing app dev since Jan of this year. I blogged about the profits I experienced in the first few months here: [ http://burnsmod.com/business/2012/04/23/My-First-2-Months:-A... ] What you have right, in my opinion: - you have low expectations to start - you haven't quit your job - none of your plans sound crazy - of your proposed ideas, writing wordpress themes is probably the most pot…

passive income in my experience (app development) is constant work. Whether its blogging to keep traffic up, answering customer support requests, to adding features or new revenue-generating products, etc.

I sell a WordPress plugin and I can agree 100% with this. "Passive" income isn't for selling software.

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