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Ask HN: How to start earning $500/month in passive income in next 12-18 months?

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Re: Ask HN: How to start earning $500/month in passive income in next 12-18 months?

#191

Post by abuzafor »

I think, You should join Freelancing sites like freelancer.com You can also try fiverr.com,

Alternatively, You can try to write your experience for others like DigitalOcean. DigitalOcean will pay you $100 for per approved article. You can try DigitalOcean here https://www.digitalocean.com/community/get-paid-to-write

And if you are not interested in writing for others or writing as a freelancer, Why don't you start your own Ruby on Rails tutorial blog. A blog can make you more than $500/month by using Google Adsense or Affiliate Marketing. As a blogger, I believe that, Blogging is the best ideas to make money online and the possibilities are endless. But here, In blogging at first you will have to spend around $50.

Now choice is yours.....

Re: Ask HN: How to start earning $500/month in passive income in next 12-18 months?

#192

Post by BorisMelnik »

OK I'll give away a really simple one for the lazy: start your own hosting (reseller) company. Grab a dedicated, throw up some billing software and sell a shared hosting plan to every Tom, Dick and Harry that you know. At $9.99 / month for essentially unlimited email, space, transfer you should be able to clear a few hundred bucks a month in a few months.

Re: Ask HN: How to start earning $500/month in passive income in next 12-18 months?

#193

Post by vjvj »

hluska wrote: post #102
Red_Tarsius wrote: post #12

I'd give a read to Start Small, Stay Small (www.startupbook.net) and other startup literature. Study Paul Graham's essays (www.paulgraham.com). Random ideas: - Start something like skoshbox.com, but with Indian goodies. You may not realize it, but foreign countries crave Indian tastes and flavors. I would probably pay for a monthly delivery of Indian spices and sweets. - Start a podcast on a passion of yours. Offer f…

A monthly delivery of Indian spices would be incredible. If you could get it past the Canadian food inspection agency, I'd definitely subscribe (and possibly get your logo tattooed on my arm)...:)

I remember coming across a start up that did just this. I couldn't find that same one again, but I did find this: http://www.thespicery.com/pages/spiceboxes/nextmonthboxes.ht...

Re: Ask HN: How to start earning $500/month in passive income in next 12-18 months?

#194

Post by eibrahim »

I started http://www.startupoffers.net to put together a list of offers and discounts for services and products that might be used by startups (and that I usually use myself) - all money is from affiliate links. This was meant to generate passive income unfortunately it hasn't taken off and mostly because I did almost zero marketing other than a few social media links here and there. so i don't know if it is not a good idea or it just hasn't be marketed right!!!

if anyone interested in helping it get to profit email me at HNhandle at gmail.com

Re: Ask HN: How to start earning $500/month in passive income in next 12-18 months?

#195

Post by yzzxy »

ytjohn wrote: post #91
tomek_zemla wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a nice and clear summary. You could probably expand it into mini book - one page per each point listed - and sell it for additional revenue...

It'll take some work. You'll need to put an interesting quote on each page and then some anecdote from the author's life that may or may not be related to the the point at the top of the page. If author does not have enough interesting stories to write up, they may have to borrow them from reddit or such.

This sounds like about 1-3 days of work.

Re: Ask HN: How to start earning $500/month in passive income in next 12-18 months?

#196

Post by revorad »

purringmeow wrote: post #181
revorad wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Write online, ask your friends to refer clients, ask people for work at meetups/conferences, cold call and email companies, look up the dozen remote job boards that crop up every other week, subscribe to every industry mailing list you can. There are about a 1000 ways to do it. But you have to actually do it.

Cold call and email what companies? About what work? I doubt most of the mid-sized and big companies will hire a contractor with no recommendations from someone close to the execs. I am not nitpicking, just sharing that what you've suggested works only for very experienced people with a big network. I am still in University.

Unless you've actually tried and failed at cold calling, that sounds like a typical excuse (which I used to use as well). If you're scared, you'll have to get over it by just trying it a few times.

And contrary to your belief, being in university is a great advantage. You can say you're a student doing some research/looking for help, and people are generally much more willing to help.

Re: Ask HN: How to start earning $500/month in passive income in next 12-18 months?

#197

Post by swah »

thenomad wrote: post #122
patio11 wrote: post #84

If you're willing to work five hours a month on your passive income project, then I suggest doing five months of work on Passive Rails Consulting, as that has minimal execution risk. Can I make a suggestion? Most people who say "passive income" spend a lot of time fantasizing about the lifestyle relative to actually producing value. It is not terribly difficult to produce value as a programmer. Concentrate on produci…

I completely agree with this. Generally, completely passive income is massively harder and more time intensive to generate than minimal-time-investment income (which is what Patrick suggests above). I have both completely passive and minimal-time-investment income sources, and the passive ones have been MUCH harder and longer work per dollar over the last few years. Focus on optimising your $/hr (and your hr/month) r…

I had never read your story - very interesting. (Also cool that you're here on HN).

I first heard about Machinima in the Seananners' videos, and now they (you?) appear to be dominating the game market on Youtube. I was surprised the other day when a brazilian (talking in portuguese) had a Machinima affiliation in his video.

Re: Ask HN: How to start earning $500/month in passive income in next 12-18 months?

#198

Post by zhte415 »

jnbiche wrote: post #176
revorad wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Write online, ask your friends to refer clients, ask people for work at meetups/conferences, cold call and email companies, look up the dozen remote job boards that crop up every other week, subscribe to every industry mailing list you can. There are about a 1000 ways to do it. But you have to actually do it.

Here's a business plan: someone build a site for us developers who despise marketing and/or who suck at it. (I mean, if I loved marketing, I would have become a marketer). Pair us with someone who loves marketing. S/he finds high-paying consulting jobs, I build awesome sites and/or mobile apps, and we split all the income 50%/50%, minus fees for the company. Have some kind of rating system, where both your peers and…

I think this could work.

Mediocre developers are often charged out at $1000/hr rates by big name tech companies to their big name clients, who themselves sub-contracted to mid name developers under quite careful contract terms (client liability). Sub-contractors sometimes sub-contract themselves.

I'm thinking from an enterprise type technology stack: A smaller startup offering PaaS or SaaS to enterprise clients, perhaps replacing an in-house system could benefit from the indirectly acquired knowledge and expertise pool of enterprise developers, where the barriers to entry are sometimes slow and expensive.

Re: Ask HN: How to start earning $500/month in passive income in next 12-18 months?

#200

Post by _em_ »

simonhamp wrote: post #62

I run Built With Bootstrap ( http://builtwithbootstrap.com ) that brings close to $2,000 on average each month in "mostly passive" income. How? Here are a few things that have helped: 1) I got lucky - I jumped on something early and got picked up quickly and rode on the back of a giant gorilla as it kept getting higher and higher - right place, right time 2) I keep costs low - I use Tumblr (free) and cheap, pluggable…

might be a dumb question but how much time do you spend figuring out about these websites ? or do you have some sort of crawler ? some repo or something else ? I mean how do you have new content/week
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