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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?

#281

Post by sfennell »

rokhayakebe wrote: post #97
easyname wrote: post #13

I had a motorcycle which I had bought for 126K INR. I was not using it much except to commute from home to office. I was going to sell the bike, then suddenly this idea clicked. It took few hours to make and host indiarider.com(people can take the bike on rent). Its been two months now, I have made 15K till now, 7K last week.

Excellent. Scale it if possible. If you can automate the process for others looking to rent, I think the opportunity is huge.

I was thinking this too, only about jet skis and other RVs (I was hoping that is what I would find when I clicked on the link) - I would think there is a lot of opportunity for something like Airbnb for four wheelers, jet skis, camping trailers.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#282

Post by unreal37 »

euroclydon wrote: post #138

Here are the all time sales figures for http://www.makecupcakewrappers.com They've been pretty bad the last few months. I think it's because the server was overloaded and response times were getting really bad. It was running on a GoDaddy $70/mo VPS with IIS, SqlServer. But that server was also hosting an Umbraco site and a WordPress blog. The PHP process was taking up 99% CPU nearly all the time. Now I have it runni…

I looked at your site briefly. Great idea, similar to patio11's Bingo Card Creator site. Are you doing any A/B testing at all? I think you should be able to ramp up your sales by being more active managers of the site, instead of it being something passive. But even patio11 didn't want to manage bingo cards forever.

Also, the number of template available seems very low. From your home page, if you add up the numbers under "Categories", you only have 10 templates to choose from? You need to get that to 100. Seriously. This is like a business card creator site - you need lots and lots of choices, and people will buy.

Not many want to custom design a complete cupcake wrapper themselves. Just pick a nice baby design and add text to it for the baby name.

Email some of your customers and ask them how you can improve.

My 2 cents. Congrats on the success, and good luck!

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#283

Post by aestra »

vijayr wrote: post #172
jo_ wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I considered investing in a foreign country bank since I happened upon $20k through some fortunate stock picks. I was advised that this is a _very_ bad idea because of the currency fluctuations between countries. You might earn 7% in India (or 19% in the Ukraine), but if suddenly the transaction rate doubles, you've lost half your money.

19%?? woah, that is crazy.

Well, not really. You can't just look at interest rates in a vacuum without any context and make a judgement about them. You have to compare it to inflation rates, currency stability, faith in currency, general economic situation, etc. The US had 16% savings interest rate in 1981[1].

Let's, for example, look at the history of credit cards. I am sure you can agree that the 30% interest rate charged today is unreasonably high. It wasn't at a time, and lets look at how it got that way.

Back in the late 70s/early 80s we had a recession with double digit inflation while at the same time all states had usury laws that capped credit card interest rates. Inflation was so high that inflation surpassed the highest interest rates companies were allowed to charge. Citibank was "going broke" with this model - they were actually losing money lending at that interest rate at that time. Citibank then convinced South Dakota to drop is usury laws on credit cards and Citi would move there in order to charge an interest rate that beat inflation. Citibank moved there and overnight the stage was set for the US credit card industry to now flourish. "All of their senior people used to say it,'' [then governor of South Dakota] said. "That South Dakota saved Citibank. I believe it did. That South Dakota saved Citibank.'' It was a result of an economic recession with high inflation. There was a Frontline special years ago about this - http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/credit/more/ri... - though it is outdated, since credit card legislation has passed that addresses a lot of the topics brought up on the show. you can watch it online for free - I highly recommend you do.

Delaware and Nevada followed with similar legislation, so that's why most (all?) credit card companies have a return address in SD, NV, or DE.

However, we are no longer in double digit inflation but the old interest rates and legislation stand, for the most part. New laws are slowly reeling in on some credit card practices to keep up with the economic times and current circumstances.

[1]http://money.msn.com/saving-money-tips/post.aspx?post=656360...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquette_Nat._Bank_of_Minneapo....

*Disclaimer: I have no idea about the economic situation of Ukraine. I am just making a point about judgements of different times/economies.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#285

Post by ryanfelton »

I built an niche e-commerce marketplace called http://doleaf.com.

Independent Nurseries and Garden Centers (the sellers) sign up and can instantly upload their items for sale directly to customers expanding their sales region of their niche products from just their neighbored to the entire USA. Since its niche customers who are looking for specific items customers find the site fairly easy through search.

The site is now doing about $2,000 total revenue per month. I'm taking a proportion of each sale. For now, I'm mostly covering cost, but hoping to work on some automated marketing tools to increase revenue.

As others have mentioned, my best performing referrers in terms of sales completed are often Forums (as opposed to AdWords, organic search etc).

The site does marketing via emails and some top products Google Ad Words, Facebook, and hopefully Titter soon. I'm using Google Analytics with the e-commerce plugin to build Adwords remarketing campaigns and plan to do Facebook rmarketing campaigns soon.

It's not totally passive as there's some support request, but I'm hoping to bring on an on-demand virtual assistant for support requests as discussed by the Internet Business Mastery guys: http://www.internetbusinessmastery.com/ibm-218-work-less-mak...

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#286

Post by cpursley »

vilius wrote: post #265
cpursley wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting - you've basically accomplished the 4-hour workweek : ) I've been considering doing the same thing with some of my sites. Do you have any tips on refactoring something we've designed and selling it on a theme marketplace? Are there specific site features that sell better than others and/or are requested a lot? Do themes with wordpress/php included sell better than ones without? I'm very curious - thanks!

Except that I have a full time job, so I end up at 44-hour workweek. Not that I do not enjoy it :-) If you look at other themes on TF you will notice how many features they have. Building your first theme with the same amount of features would be very time consuming. I went with "Getting Real" approach and focused on doing the fundamentals right. At the time I launched there were no customisable fonts, colors or side…

Thanks for answering. I'm looking for any additional income I can squeeze out in addition to consulting while building my startup. Getting Real talks about "Selling Your By-products" which didn't sink in when I read it. Now it makes a lot of sense. I suppose I could change a few things, list the theme and add features based on requests/feedback if necessary.

https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1620-sell-your-by-products

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#289

Post by xemoka »

jain_chirag04 wrote: post #275
xemoka wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except how could anyone tell? It wants you to sign up before anything? Or at least that's what it looks like, I'm not punching an e-mail address into a form just to see what's behind door number 1 when there's no information for a shopper and very little for a seller.

We are still building the platform and inviting early adopters. We are a team of designers & developers and wants to solve the pain of giving away 50% of our sales on envato marketplaces. Pluginbag offers 80% to the seller with No Exclusive lock in Shoppers will benefit from the latest, well managed and quality work of the sellers. PS: I'm the cofounder at pluginbag.com

That's cool. How about putting it on your site, even if it means making an 'About Us' page (although it'd probably be better integrated into the landing page)? Pointing people to your domain at this point doesn't help them unless they already know what it is... make people WANT to join your site, even if they can't yet.

Hope it works out, sounds like it's a better deal for sellers (which often makes buyers happier in the long run).

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#290

Post by TheAlchemist »

dotnetkow wrote: post #116

$2-5k per month (after Apple's cut) from my Fitbit mobile app, Fitwatchr: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fitwatchr/id684005201?mt=8&i... . The unique value is Fitbit activity conversion to Weight Watchers points as well as a tougher but more rewarding calorie tracking that is based on real science (Mifflin equation). Effort on my part really depends on me/my current schedule as it's a side project. I admittedly have…

That's quite a good revenue. Is it only from app sales ?

I've checked on App Annie ans your app seems to be around 500 (grossing) in health & fitness in the US. I find it a bit surprising that there are 500 apps in health alone making >2k month.

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