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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

#31

Post by gravitronic »

pa7 wrote: post #28
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…

hey, thank you for your this comment. Regarding the point that based on your experience passive income means constant work: Yes, I agree with you, passive income is constant work, my target will be to reduce this constant work to a minimum (e.g. a maximum of 2-4 hours per week) and optimize the revenue with the least work. I'm curious whether there are good strategies for doing that otherwise this will just be an emp…

My approach thus far has been to not invest too much into a single idea before monetizing it, so I can "fail fast" without losing too much time.

It's a double-edged sword as I have people who paid for my DJ app and are expecting many new features. Which is good as it drives my efforts, but its bad because I can't spend that time working on new revenue-generating products.

The other approach I have when writing code is to try to have plans to sell each code module I write at least twice. For example the UI engine I wrote for my DJ app also powers my little iOS app released yesterday [http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/drinkpacer/id522224281?ls=1&#...], and I plan on using the audio engine for more audio projects. I call it the "combo effect".

Re: Let the adventurous journey begin: Passive Income

#32

Post by Anirak »

graeme wrote: post #9
xutopia wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see passive income like that. I see passive income as something you can gain by spending some of your free time to get recurring money.

Agreed. I think it's better to say it takes time up front. But the upfront work may take a while. I spent six months last year writing explanations for a standardized test. It was extraordinarily boring. But now I get $1000-$1500 per month in licensing fees. I think there are lots of passive income opportunities for developers to make passive income in non-technical niches. For instance, I've only been learning progr…

What other ideas do you see for developers in non-technical niches to get passive income? All I can really think of is stuff relevant to other tech industries.

Re: Let the adventurous journey begin: Passive Income

#33

Post by csomar »

Hi Patrick, Good luck with CodeCanyon. Well, as a seasoned seller in CodeCanyon, here is my bit of advice:

1. Quality. Users buy appearances. They judge your application by its quality. Focus on that, and you'll sell.

2. Solve a wide spread problem. Like for example, sliders.

3. Innovate. I don't mean invent thing, but just tick new ideas. For example, a different slider will sell at $10k/year, with its WordPress plugin, you are at $20-25k/year from two items only.

4. Help, Videos, Presentation, Customer Support, Branding... that bullshit.

5. Once you made your product and making $2.5k/month, start the old fashioned marketing way.

6. The money is on the forest. Team up with a designer and make the money.

Re: Let the adventurous journey begin: Passive Income

#34

Post by kposehn »

As a long-time affiliate marketer, I'd have to say be careful about the prospect of passive income.

For online advertising at least, there are many ways to generate large amounts of money - the difficulty is that there is a very low barrier to entry but an exceedingly high barrier to success.

Re: Let the adventurous journey begin: Passive Income

#35

Post by zupreme »

Passive income is indeed real, but is often exaggerated.

I've been doing quite nicely from my ebooks and ad-supported sites for some time, with no additional promotion or other activities to drive sales since they were each published. However I could certainly not pay all of my bills from them.

However, just like anything else, you get out what you put in. If I had no other career and just spent all my time writing ebooks, I would probably be earning from ebooks as much or more than I currently earn from my other, non-passive, activities. It's all about what you put into it.

The guys who lead you to believe that you will make millions of dollars with no effort are just plain frauds. If they really had a method for doing that they wouldn't sell it to you...

Re: Let the adventurous journey begin: Passive Income

#36

Post by cheald »

leoedin wrote: post #19
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…

Absolutely. I did several for World of Warcraft players (~11m people in that market), and each made $150-$1100/month in AdSense revenue for between 6 and 18 months. Each product has died off as it has become obsolete or replaced by something better, but plugging into an existing loyal and social community meant that I just had to give each product a gentle push, and off it went under its own steam.

This does touch on the other edge of the passive income sword, though, which is that passive income projects of this sort tend to not sustain themselves for too long. If it's a good idea, someone will come along and do it better. If it's a bad idea, it'll eventually wither on its own. The passive AdSense project that makes you $40k/month in perpetuity is more or less a myth.

Re: Let the adventurous journey begin: Passive Income

#37

Post by chc »

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.

You had an opportunity to provide useful information here, but instead just chose to cop a supercilious attitude. That's disappointing.

Re: Let the adventurous journey begin: Passive Income

#39

Post by gravitronic »

jamii wrote: post #13

In the light of recent UK news, I suspect someone could make good money by selling a user-friendly browser plugin that proxies connections to blocked sites like the pirate bay. Of course, you probably don't want to be living in the UK whilst doing that.

While torrenting seems to have become considered ethically grey-area in the common internet's view, profiting from copyright infringement is definitely legally very bad. Not a good idea.

Re: Let the adventurous journey begin: Passive Income

#40

Post by TamDenholm »

paulhauggis wrote: post #38

I wouldn't call it completely passive, but I was making $3000/month with only about an hour of work/day. However, this was after I put 6 months and many hours of work into figuring out exactly what works.

I'd love to read a blog post on this.
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