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Daring Adventures with Passive Income

patrick-wied.at

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Re: Daring Adventures with Passive Income

#21

Post by kposehn »

technotony wrote: post #2

People confuse minimum viable product with low quality all the time. Minimum viable is really about the smallest set of features a customer needs to spend money on your product. It doesn't mean a low quality product rushed out quickly. A minimum viable product could still take you months to build, and require design help, if the features demanded were hard to build.

> A minimum viable product could still take you months to build, and require design help, if the features demanded were hard to build.

Oh so very, very true.

A hard lesson to learn, that. We're about to release a new product and man it has taken longer than we ever thought. Still worth it :)

Re: Daring Adventures with Passive Income

#22

Post by _delirium »

barryfandango wrote: post #9
anovikov wrote: post #5

Passive income is a return on equity. Not 'an ec2 instance that makes money'.

I want the second thing. Where do I get that?

Luck?

Honestly, I've found the return I've gotten on various endeavors to be pretty baffling. Wholly dominated by external factors as far as I can tell, many of which are themselves dominated by random contacts. My most profitable projects have been totally random things I put very little work into, and I could not have predicted they'd be the ones to take off.

Re: Daring Adventures with Passive Income

#23

Post by JoeCortopassi »

kposehn wrote: post #20
weaksauce wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now you probably wouldn't want to link to the site here but would you feel comfortable expanding on what type of site it is? Does the site update content regularly either via users or scraping? What are your visitor numbers for that kind of revenue? Is it direct sales of physical products?

- It is an SEO site - It has not seen a single update in 4 months - It gets 2-4k users per month - Direct sales of a physical product through a merchant partner The big advantage for a lot of my affiliate sites is I have exclusive terms and other deals. With the one I pointed out, I get paid 40% more than any affiliate would, have my own branding of the product, provide no support and invoice the merchant at the end…

How would you view your site, in relation to their product:

- Is it articles about that field that point to that product as the best?

- Are you a tutorial/more-info for that product?

- Is it a "Find out which product is best for you" type configurator?

`

I guess what I'm curious of, is what approach you took to make a mutually beneficial affiliate marketing site. Also, do you find yourself spending more time writing code/writing copy/creating graphics? It would seem like the majority of the time for something like this has to be writing copy

Re: Daring Adventures with Passive Income

#25

Post by kposehn »

JoeCortopassi wrote: post #23
kposehn wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- It is an SEO site - It has not seen a single update in 4 months - It gets 2-4k users per month - Direct sales of a physical product through a merchant partner The big advantage for a lot of my affiliate sites is I have exclusive terms and other deals. With the one I pointed out, I get paid 40% more than any affiliate would, have my own branding of the product, provide no support and invoice the merchant at the end…

How would you view your site, in relation to their product: - Is it articles about that field that point to that product as the best? - Are you a tutorial/more-info for that product? - Is it a "Find out which product is best for you" type configurator? ` I guess what I'm curious of, is what approach you took to make a mutually beneficial affiliate marketing site. Also, do you find yourself spending more time writing…

All three actually.

In order to do well in paid search or SEO for the long-haul, you've got to provide a lot of clear information and really guide the user. You have to make something people would miss if it didn't exist.

The best approach to this day, imho, is not to make a straight-up site any longer. So many people create them that you are one voice in a massive crowd competing for attention. What gets that attention now is unique functionality, ie: software. Focus on developing a unique solution instead of the same-old-same-old.

Case in point: RetailMeNot was the most successful of the coupon sites. They sold to WhaleShark for about $36m and had about $1m/month in commissions. However, anybody and their mom made a coupon site, which made any search term for "insert-brand-here coupons" get bombarded with results, all pushing the same thing. They succeeded because they have great social features, deal in printable coupons now, work closely with merchants, etc.

As for us, most of my time was at first in copy/video/graphics; that ended up changing to more code related time as we started packing unique features into our sites.

Eventually, I figured out that we are a marketing-heavy software company. Haven't looked back since.

Re: Daring Adventures with Passive Income

#26

Post by kposehn »

JoeCortopassi wrote: post #23
kposehn wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- It is an SEO site - It has not seen a single update in 4 months - It gets 2-4k users per month - Direct sales of a physical product through a merchant partner The big advantage for a lot of my affiliate sites is I have exclusive terms and other deals. With the one I pointed out, I get paid 40% more than any affiliate would, have my own branding of the product, provide no support and invoice the merchant at the end…

How would you view your site, in relation to their product: - Is it articles about that field that point to that product as the best? - Are you a tutorial/more-info for that product? - Is it a "Find out which product is best for you" type configurator? ` I guess what I'm curious of, is what approach you took to make a mutually beneficial affiliate marketing site. Also, do you find yourself spending more time writing…

I would say my favorite example of an affiliate site today is...Hipmunk :)

Re: Daring Adventures with Passive Income

#27

Post by JoeCortopassi »

kposehn wrote: post #25
JoeCortopassi wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you view your site, in relation to their product: - Is it articles about that field that point to that product as the best? - Are you a tutorial/more-info for that product? - Is it a "Find out which product is best for you" type configurator? ` I guess what I'm curious of, is what approach you took to make a mutually beneficial affiliate marketing site. Also, do you find yourself spending more time writing…

All three actually. In order to do well in paid search or SEO for the long-haul, you've got to provide a lot of clear information and really guide the user. You have to make something people would miss if it didn't exist. The best approach to this day, imho, is not to make a straight-up site any longer. So many people create them that you are one voice in a massive crowd competing for attention. What gets that attent…

Interesting. How do you evaluate different affiliates to see which ones are worth the time? Do you just stick to major ones like Amazon, or talk to them individually? It seems like it can be risky, in the sense that you can spend a ton of time setting something up, only to have the affiliate change the terms.

Re: Daring Adventures with Passive Income

#28

Post by ashray »

Passive income is pretty great but no source of income is truly passive. You'll always have certain issues like maintenance, customer support, etc. i.e. when you're talking about software.

If it were a website/webapp you'd still run into issues with bugs, security fixes.

This doesn't even take into account the fact that new competitors might come in, search algorithms may change, etc.

That said, a well SEO'ed site (for a popular keyword) is possibly the best kind of passive income one can have. No marketing expenses, the content is already there (presuming that's what got it SEO'ed well..) and you'll keep getting visitors. Awesome :)

Re: Daring Adventures with Passive Income

#29

Post by AznHisoka »

kposehn wrote: post #25
JoeCortopassi wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you view your site, in relation to their product: - Is it articles about that field that point to that product as the best? - Are you a tutorial/more-info for that product? - Is it a "Find out which product is best for you" type configurator? ` I guess what I'm curious of, is what approach you took to make a mutually beneficial affiliate marketing site. Also, do you find yourself spending more time writing…

All three actually. In order to do well in paid search or SEO for the long-haul, you've got to provide a lot of clear information and really guide the user. You have to make something people would miss if it didn't exist. The best approach to this day, imho, is not to make a straight-up site any longer. So many people create them that you are one voice in a massive crowd competing for attention. What gets that attent…

Another thing to keep in mind is the game is HARDER now than it was years ago when RetailMeNot, CouponMountain, CouponCabin all started. Google is less forgiving, it's harder to get links, and harder to get through that low morale period when you're gonna be getting ZERO Google love.

In order to do well in SEO I'd say you should take advantage of your programming abilities. Look up this company called Narrative Science. Using algorithms to create automated stories. Now I'm not saying make spam, but leverage something like that to give you a competitive advantage. Plus, I know Demand Media gets tons of hate, but check out "site:livestrong.com" and "site:ehow.com". Millions of pages indexed, and thousands more created day after day. You're competing with people like them.. how the heck are you supposed to succeed?! Create quality content, but also find a way to make it scalable.

Re: Daring Adventures with Passive Income

#30

Post by AznHisoka »

JoeCortopassi wrote: post #27
kposehn wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All three actually. In order to do well in paid search or SEO for the long-haul, you've got to provide a lot of clear information and really guide the user. You have to make something people would miss if it didn't exist. The best approach to this day, imho, is not to make a straight-up site any longer. So many people create them that you are one voice in a massive crowd competing for attention. What gets that attent…

Interesting. How do you evaluate different affiliates to see which ones are worth the time? Do you just stick to major ones like Amazon, or talk to them individually? It seems like it can be risky, in the sense that you can spend a ton of time setting something up, only to have the affiliate change the terms.

Create a site in a profitable niche where there's opportunities to plug in several different affiliate products, not just 1. So if you're making a camera review site, and Adorama affiliate program sucks, you can switch to Amazon, or NewEgg, or Best Buy, etc.
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