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What was your best passive income in 2014?

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Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#241

Post by somebodysomeone »

epayne wrote: post #199
somebodysomeone wrote: post #166

I built an information website (not USA) that now pulls in roughly $8800 a month via adsense. To get to that figure takes about 500k user sessions/month (lots of long tail traffic). Runs on a single medium website instance in Azure, takes about an hour a day in maintenance and monitoring for malicious traffic like scraping that can be a problem for info sites (I've mostly automated this). The initial time outlay was…

I am curious about how you chose the niche and which factors you think make it successful for you?

It was certainly an area that I was interested in and understood. Also, I made a conscious decision to choose something that would have interest for a very broad group of people, or that was owned by a lot of people.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#242

Post by stevekemp »

aroch wrote: post #28

"Administrating" a few servers that are rented out (ie, running apt-get every week and fixing the occasional symlink the tenants break). -$2000/m in power/space/bandwidth in costs +$4000/m in fees Banking a little under ~$1700 after I account for taxes for what amounts to an hour of effort a month.

I do like the idea of being a remote system administrator, but the trust issues seem to scare people away.

(Though I realize you're doing more than that if you're renting out physical boxes too.)

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#243

Post by somebodysomeone »

deluvas wrote: post #218
somebodysomeone wrote: post #166

I built an information website (not USA) that now pulls in roughly $8800 a month via adsense. To get to that figure takes about 500k user sessions/month (lots of long tail traffic). Runs on a single medium website instance in Azure, takes about an hour a day in maintenance and monitoring for malicious traffic like scraping that can be a problem for info sites (I've mostly automated this). The initial time outlay was…

Holy cow! I'm taking a guess; is it some sort of aggregator website?

Sort of. I took various information sets (some external, some my own), and spent a lot of time pivoting them, merging them etc so that they could be useful. You couldn't find the information as it is on the website elsewhere in the same form, but you could research and produce it yourself, albeit at a much slower pace and with a lot of insider knowledge required.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#244

Post by aestra »

vijayr wrote: post #128
eli wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What counts as high-interest these days? Half a percent?

Depends on where you are. In the U.S, interest rates aren't anything to talk about. In India, my dad gets something like 7% (I think it is more for people over 60)

And the inflation rate in India is 8.9%.[1] so 7% interest is terrible. Doesn't beat inflation. Your money still loses value over time.

The US has had very low inflation in the last decade or so with very small deflation in 2009.[2] but interest isn't beating inflation here either though.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_in_India

[2]http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/historical-in...

As far as "high yield" savings goes, for a normal savings account or money market account you'll be looking at 1% being the max rate right now, if you can find it. Last I took a glance I saw .95% being the highest. Those are for online banks. I get .85% with Discover Bank (online savings account). I also have a 17 month CD that earn me a whopping 2%. That was a one time special my [brick and mortar] credit union was offering. Those accounts are FDIC (or NCUA) insured.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#245

Post by tomjen3 »

chrisa wrote: post #76

$500/month from "Play Piano HD" iPad app: http://mobilesort.com/play_piano.html I built it two years ago, and have only had to do minor bug fixes to keep it up to date. It stays on the top iPad music charts in at least a couple of countries, so it does ok without any marketing.

You could than likely charge significantly more for it if you positioned it as a way to learn to play the piano - ten bucks (or twenty) is much, much cheaper than a teacher.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#246

Post by thedevopsguy »

iD3 wrote: post #164
opless wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which city? (There's more than one you know!)

London. The financial district is often referred to simply as 'the city', so force of habit!

Haven't seen flats sell as quickly as they are now. Living a 3 minute walk from Liverpool Street station and the flat I wa renting sold by the second viewing. It was on the market for three days but things are cooling off.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#247

Post by mjwhansen »

phkahler wrote: post #126
computerbob wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't know who downvoted you but I absolutely agree. I have a few homes that I help rent with and having a good tenant is high above and away better than having a bad tenant pay more money. Just the cost alone in time is worth giving a good tenant cheaper rent.

I think the normal reasoning is that higher rent filters out the bad tenants (statistically). But once you have a good tenant then you probably don't want to raise the rent unless they move out and you're seeking a new one.

Another way to screen out bad tenants is to offer zero deposit for high credit score applicants. Several large apartment buildings in my city (DC) do this, and the buildings are full of professionals.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#248

Post by vilius »

andreash wrote: post #56
vilius wrote: post #34

$5k per month for 18 months in a row. Made a portfolio website for my girlfriend. Got positive feedback, refactored into Wordpress theme and published on ThemeForest. Not 100% passive as I spend 3-4 hours per week for answering support emails. ThemeForest is a perfect place for passive income if you are a website developer. At first it challenges your skills as you need to create the concept, design it and code it. T…

Impressive. Link to the theme? curious.

Link to theme's landing page: http://themeforest.net/item/fluxus-portfolio-theme-for-photo... (affiliate)

Direct link to the demo: http://inthe.me/demo/fluxus/

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#249

Post by dusing »

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 online only (have not pursued wholesale yet) and is enough to live off of if all else fails. After 6 years we are have about $600K in total sales.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#250

Post by baudehlo »

AlexNeoNomad wrote: post #212
mjwhansen wrote: post #204

Geocodio ( http://geocod.io ) is adding 5-10 new users a day and monthly revenue has gone from $1,000 in just over six months. It's a self-serve product (geocoding US addresses via API or CSV upload), though there is a fair amount of support and continuing development. I've posted this before, but I wrote up some thoughts about things I've learned about launching a side project here that you might find helpful: https…

Can't people just make a request to google maps? Why do they you use your service instead? In what sense is it better (if it is)?

Honestly, no. Both Google and Bing's APIs are too restrictive, even in paid mode. They basically require that you show a Google/Bing map in conjunction with the lookup, which isn't something a lot of people want to do.

Admittedly a lot of people don't read these fine prints, but they are overly restrictive for a lot of uses.

I looked at various services to do postcode/zip to lat/long and eventually settled on just doing it in-house using downloaded data. After a bit of data massaging it actually works really well.

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