Daring Adventures with Passive Income • Hacker News Board

Re: Daring Adventures with Passive Income

#31

Post by kposehn » Fri, Aug 03, 2012, 1:10 AM UTC

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.

While AznHisoka has a point there - find the best program as far as commissions go - there is more to it.

There is always a risk in affiliate marketing, and at this point I'd consider the major success differentiators to be 1) innovation and 2) risk mitigation. You can make a really innovative site and get lots of quality traffic, but you had better do your damnedest to mitigate your overall risk or you may find your source of revenue gone overnight.

You can mitigate risk by spreading your site out so that it covers many products, brokering custom deals, making your own community (FatWallet.com and Extrabux are great examples), or doing something really innovative in terms of functionality (HipMunk, Mint.com).

As an example of what can happen, we had an affiliate site running for the better part of 3 years on Google AdWords. We owned the top spots in a pretty significant vertical and made quite a lot of money. The client (the agency of record for the product) was super happy, we had exclusive terms and business was booming.

All was well until one day I get a call. The merchant decided to drop the agency and eliminate their entire affiliate program. It didn't matter that we generated them huge sales each month, that was it. Nothing we said could convince them otherwise.

That was it.

Re: Daring Adventures with Passive Income

#32

Post by kposehn » Fri, Aug 03, 2012, 1:17 AM UTC

AznHisoka wrote: post #29

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…

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 Scien…

It is indeed much harder than ever before.

SEO is something I consider to be the game of major companies...and hackers like us now as well. However, it isn't enough to make a page, slap ads on and SEO the hell out of it.

If you don't have lasting value in your site, you don't have staying power. No staying power means low future profit and therefore lower sustainable startup opportunity cost.

Re: Daring Adventures with Passive Income

#33

Post by kposehn » Fri, Aug 03, 2012, 1:22 AM UTC

ashray wrote: post #28

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 (f…

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

This was really true a few years ago, but changed as of late. Right now we are running all of our sites on a Sinatra-based engine on Heroku. It has no admin backend, no security fixes to make, nothing. There isn't even a database!

The whole thing is compiled and cached. Any changes made on a live basis come through git or via a unique caching system I did with S3/Cloudfront. The upshot of this stack is zero overall maintenance. It doesn't break as there is simply nothing to break (except Heroku/AWS)

Re: Daring Adventures with Passive Income

#34

Post by crafter » Fri, Aug 03, 2012, 2:33 AM UTC

Kerrick wrote: post #6

I must say that making $1,000 in a year from passive income is a pretty low goal. I make that in under three months with my "now passive" income. (I prefer to call it "now passive" income because it came from a lot of hard work in the past, but requires little to no upkeep.) The author mentions that he plans to set another goal once he reaches the $1,000 goal. My advice: definitely do so! It may not be easy, but it i…

It's not a low goal if you're just starting out, it's a realistic goal.

It takes time and triangulating over a lot of ideas before one gets good at coming up with passive income winners. I think the author is right on track and he has a great giver mcgiver attitude.

Also, the marriage proposal app is a pretty good idea FWIW.

Re: Daring Adventures with Passive Income

#35

Post by oh_sigh » Fri, Aug 03, 2012, 2:55 AM UTC

Can someone give some examples of (hypothetical or real) "passive income" service/site? Every time I hear about the concept, the person is always very circumspect of revealing anything about their business(rightfully so), so it's hard to visualize for me.

Re: Daring Adventures with Passive Income

#36

Post by mark_story » Fri, Aug 03, 2012, 3:11 AM UTC

kposehn wrote: post #16

steveplace wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case, it isn't. Sharing would remove their competitive edge.

Hit the nail on the head there. Affiliate marketing is intensely competitive - the reason I can make a fair amount of money in the field is because we pursue every advantage at our disposal. The plethora of competitive intelligence tools in the field and the low barrier to entry make it extremely tough. However, there is a high barrier to success as well.

Thanks for sharing what you did though, it was a very interesting and illuminating read for me.

Re: Daring Adventures with Passive Income

#37

Post by chunkyslink » Fri, Aug 03, 2012, 3:51 AM UTC

oh_sigh wrote: post #35

Can someone give some examples of (hypothetical or real) "passive income" service/site? Every time I hear about the concept, the person is always very circumspect of revealing anything about their business(rightfully so), so it's hard to visualize for me.

Here you go: http://www.smartpassiveincome.com/how-to-build-a-niche-site/

Re: Daring Adventures with Passive Income

#38

Post by kposehn » Fri, Aug 03, 2012, 5:18 AM UTC

mark_story wrote: post #36

kposehn wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hit the nail on the head there. Affiliate marketing is intensely competitive - the reason I can make a fair amount of money in the field is because we pursue every advantage at our disposal. The plethora of competitive intelligence tools in the field and the low barrier to entry make it extremely tough. However, there is a high barrier to success as well.

Thanks for sharing what you did though, it was a very interesting and illuminating read for me.

Glad I could help

Re: Daring Adventures with Passive Income

#39

Post by ashray » Fri, Aug 03, 2012, 7:15 AM UTC

kposehn wrote: post #33

ashray wrote: post #28

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 (f…

> If it were a website/webapp you'd still run into issues with bugs, security fixes. This was really true a few years ago, but changed as of late. Right now we are running all of our sites on a Sinatra-based engine on Heroku. It has no admin backend, no security fixes to make, nothing. There isn't even a database! The whole thing is compiled and cached. Any changes made on a live basis come through git or via a uniqu…

That's interesting but definitely not a global use case. Most apps will require some sort of bug fixes and security updates. Even the linux kernel requires security updates and I do think that's some tight code right there =)

Not every app can be compiled-cached-served. I think 99% of them can't go that route.. Would love to see how you can run relatively dynamic code/functionality by the method you're suggesting.

Re: Daring Adventures with Passive Income

#40

Post by yitchelle » Fri, Aug 03, 2012, 10:35 AM UTC

Kerrick wrote: post #6

I must say that making $1,000 in a year from passive income is a pretty low goal. I make that in under three months with my "now passive" income. (I prefer to call it "now passive" income because it came from a lot of hard work in the past, but requires little to no upkeep.) The author mentions that he plans to set another goal once he reaches the $1,000 goal. My advice: definitely do so! It may not be easy, but it i…

I think that the first goal is totally dependent upon his current situation. It is very much a low hanging fruit scenario, so that grabbing the low fruit will provide some motivation and inspiration to continue one. Nothing worse than setting the bar too high, missing it and getting depressed about it.