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Your best passive income? (2014)

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Re: Your best passive income? (2014)

#341
post #154

My free-to-play Solitaire web app, at http://www.solitr.com/ . It's making a bit over $1,000 in monthly ad revenue. Traffic is at ~3k dailies. I did this as a weekend project 2 years ago, and at some point migrated my blog to it to pick up DomainRank. Other than that I've mostly left it alone.

You make a grand for 3 thousand daily visitors? That's much higher than I expected! Is it normal to earn over a thousand dollars a month for a few thousand daily visitors?

I have no idea. I was surprised at how high it was.

Re: Your best passive income? (2014)

#342
post #154

My free-to-play Solitaire web app, at http://www.solitr.com/ . It's making a bit over $1,000 in monthly ad revenue. Traffic is at ~3k dailies. I did this as a weekend project 2 years ago, and at some point migrated my blog to it to pick up DomainRank. Other than that I've mostly left it alone.

Hey joliss, I'd like to ask how you pick up your traffic? I've got a similar project as yours, and it has the same problem - it's a remake of a popular game with lots of high ranking webapps on Google. None of the SEO and social media did the trick for me. I even built a plug-in widget. So far a handful of links send most of my traffic, and I don't get in a month what you get in a day. My project is: http://sudokuisl…

I'm getting organic search traffic for niche keywords, like 'free solitaire online'. http://sudokuisland.com seems to have a decent amount of keywords already, but perhaps you can think of more. Organic search is probably the only way to get traffic at the scale you need for an ad-monetized game.

My plan is to improve the PageRank and DomainRank, and eventually to make the product better (since Google presumably picks up on that through bounce rates, time on site, sharing). So that'd be the general strategy I recommend.

Another metric you can optimize is the number of times a first-time visitor returns, because it acts as a multiplier on your traffic. Say you get 100 organic first-time visitors per day, if each visitor returns 5 times, you'll have 600 total visits per day.

Re: Your best passive income? (2014)

#343
post #319

For me it's still residential real estate. Between 2010 and 2012 or so I picked up some condos here in San Diego at short sale for about 1/3 of what their price was a few years earlier. I get about 1.5% of their purchase price every month in rent. At the same time, the property values have appreciated so the rents are starting to increase as well. The longest I've had any of them vacant was about two weeks and that w…

How do you get enough money to buy an house at 21? A loan?

Re: Your best passive income? (2014)

#344
post #319

For me it's still residential real estate. Between 2010 and 2012 or so I picked up some condos here in San Diego at short sale for about 1/3 of what their price was a few years earlier. I get about 1.5% of their purchase price every month in rent. At the same time, the property values have appreciated so the rents are starting to increase as well. The longest I've had any of them vacant was about two weeks and that w…

Where did you get your equity? Do have debt on any of them? I want to follow this plan too, but don't have the equity for down payments...

Of the 5 homes, I have mortgages on the 2 most expensive ones (we live in one of them). The other 3 I bought more or less cash.

The first condo I bought by selling most of my stock investments. After buying the condo I started investing again. The following year I took out a HELOC out the next condo, sold all my stocks again and bought the next one cash. I did the same for the one after that. I've since paid off the HELOCs.

Re: Your best passive income? (2014)

#345
post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to hear they're not a great success. They look good though! I've noticed both of those sites use Bootstrap? If you want, submit them to http://builtwithbootstrap.com/submit and I'll publish them tomorrow, see if you get any more action on there.

Thanks! They were indeed built with bootstrap. I'll submit them right away. :)

Done and ready to go :) let me know how it goes!

Re: Your best passive income? (2014)

#346
post #319

For me it's still residential real estate. Between 2010 and 2012 or so I picked up some condos here in San Diego at short sale for about 1/3 of what their price was a few years earlier. I get about 1.5% of their purchase price every month in rent. At the same time, the property values have appreciated so the rents are starting to increase as well. The longest I've had any of them vacant was about two weeks and that w…

How do you get enough money to buy an house at 21? A loan?

Yes. I was in the military so I used the VA loan. Additionally, the house was only $140,000. I've since refinanced to a 15yr loan on that property and the rental income still covers it.

Re: Your best passive income? (2014)

#347

I own/operate a luxury resale business that specializes in high end womens fashion, art, cars, and collectibles. My only time expense is picking up the items... everything else I have automated. On a good month I can clear $10K+ and on a bad month $2-3K. I do all this without any advertising and the primary selling point of my business is thats its discreet and anonymous.

May you write down the link?

Re: Your best passive income? (2014)

#348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems to violate the premise of "the dumber the app, the more popular it will be." Awesome.

"The dumber the app..." works almost everytime. I launched a conceptually great app which was a complete failure: https://itunes.apple.com/in/app/gravity-byte/id504372023?mt=... Then launched a card game which is a decent success..

It's a shame, the icon for Gravity Byte looks really nice, but then the screenshots put me off instantly.

Re: Your best passive income? (2014)

#349
post #74
post #37

I had created http://notationtraining.com in 2010 when I was learning how to play piano. I did update this project few times, but otherwise it is completely on its own. It makes only about 300 USD/month but I am quite happy with it as I am not doing anything to promote it or anything else.

Wow, very good job. Did you think much about SEO when you set it up?

Not really, I create first version in about 5 hours and only marketing I did was to post it into Chrome web store and I was really surprised that people actually using it few days later

Re: Your best passive income? (2014)

#350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can assure you as my wife and I are starting into the rental business that leasing a residence is not passive.

If you're renting your first couple places, absolutely not. But at some point you hit a mark where you have a property manager doing all the day-to-day and a few leasing agents filling vacancies and it becomes as passive as you want it to be.

In my experience (family business is property rental) I think the point at which you can afford a property manager is pretty far down the line for most people.

A cheap property manager or estate agent is generally not worth it - their main goal being to rent the property as quickly as possible to anyone, rather than ensuring rental to a good tenant.

Decent property managers cost a fair bit of money and unless you own the property outright or have a very low mortgage it's tough to afford a good manager and have a reasonable passive income from the property as well.

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