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Your best passive income? (2014)

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Re: Your best passive income? (2014)

#391

Post by simonhamp »

4thethrillofit wrote: post #351
simonhamp wrote: post #161

I run Built With Bootstrap ( http://builtwithbootstrap.com ). It's making 4 figures a month at the moment. It's mostly passive income as I spend no more than a few hours per week actually working on the site. Though I spend considerably more monitoring the stats and feeds etc etc My biggest win with this site is the extremely low cost to run it - something I want to talk about more if anyone's interested. My only rea…

Very impressive, thanks for sharing! I'm more interested in how you grew the user base plus any other growth hack tips you might have? There is the obvious free SEO and social media publicities, but it's always tricky to get engaged users.

I would say I got lucky. I started the site not too long after the public launch of Bootstrap. And after about two weeks of farming Bootstrap sites myself (to build up content) I submitted it to HN. Then it went nuts. I got a spot on the official docs homepage without even asking and rode the wave as Bootstrap soared to becoming the most popular frontend framework and Github repo.

The popularity this brought was untold as hundreds of sites started naturally linking to BWB. I guess being first was the most important thing here.

I've also made a point to make it always free and easy for folks to submit a site. There's no complex review process and no fee (if you don't mind waiting in line). This gets some loyal supporters who are happy to provide new content on a somewhat regular basis.

The knock-on effect has been that Google seems to love the site and now the majority of my visitors come from searches. This despite Tumblr not being the greatest base for SEO.

No "growth hacking" required, whatever that is...

Re: Your best passive income? (2014)

#392

Post by rmc »

taigeair wrote: post #202
jayvanguard wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> http://www.wellingtonstravel.com You made that? Beautiful map! You should do those for more cities.

Thanks! I had a business partner who is an architect and she did most of the artwork but we designed it together. It took us 3 years and was kind of a hobby. Now it's quite time consuming to do VAT tax every 3 months and keep records. BTW physical products are so much more work than anything I did on the web. I'm hoping to do a world map next though.

If you did it again, would you do physical products? Is there any sort of "drop shipping" for large paper printing like that? I looked into it before for maps, but it looks horrifcally expensive to print large paper maps if you just want one copy.

Re: Your best passive income? (2014)

#393

Post by rmc »

imdsm wrote: post #126
seivan wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I want this.

I had this, it got boring real fast. The money wasn't great. I could live on it but there was no future prospect. A slow career death if you will. So I took a harder job, with higher pay.

Can't really argue with "and higher pay"

Re: Your best passive income? (2014)

#394

Post by simonhamp »

pcharles wrote: post #386
simonhamp wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As galfarragem mentions, it runs on Tumblr to start with. This is a totally free, simple blogging platform, pretty much perfectly suited to the needs of the site. I get awesome hosting for free and a fair amount of flexibility. Yes there are limitations and the admin of the site isn't quite as easy, but when you haven't got much admin it's ok. The most important reason for choosing Tumblr was the Submissions feature.…

How many uniques/month does it take for you to turn a profit??

Well as revenue is largely from ads (that are reliant on page views) I needed to build up visitor numbers to generate ~100k page views a month on a regular basis

Each visitor brings about 2 page views on average so 50k visits a month puts me over the threshold. Uniques are at about 70% (I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader)

But to actually turn a profit... I really only need a very small fraction of this. Maybe 10%..?

It's all moot tho, as I need the numbers to be high as this is what gets advertisers paying. Thankfully this comes with a natural abundance of funds making this the most profitable project I've ever worked on

Re: Your best passive income? (2014)

#396

Post by rmc »

drdaeman wrote: post #118
zcam wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or worse like where I live (Switzerland), people rent flats, then subrent them for a lot more and go live in Thailand (or somewhere else). And then we all complain because the prices for (renting or buying) flats is insane here.

Don't know about EU laws, but in Russia every apartment rent agreement I've seen (which is statistically insignificant amount, maybe 4-5 agreements) had explicitly prohibited reselling/subrenting.

(a) Switzerland is not in the EU. I have no idea if some other Swiss law might ban it.

(b) Switzerland is crazy expensive. So you can probably make megabucks renting out property there.

Re: Your best passive income? (2014)

#398

Post by jjrumi »

qeorge wrote: post #314

Making $2-300/month off Android apps (AdMob). Despite best efforts, this is dominated by a soundboard app. Not what I expected, but we'll take it! Internet yellow pages, www.ablocal.com, doing quite well. Can't disclose metrics, but it makes more than you probably would guess. Domain sales - again can't disclose specifics, but in the $xx,xxx range this year from domains. Not a huge portfolio, but some good ones. And…

I don't want to ask too much but, could you elaborate more on the ablocal.com site? It's hard to see the value against other services: Google's, Yelp, etc.

Re: Your best passive income? (2014)

#399

Post by elbear »

maheshs wrote: post #371
elbear wrote: post #285

At the end of 2013 I launched http://www.comedylib.com/ . It's a site with curated Youtube videos of comedians, comedy shows and comedy movies. I built this out of my passion for comedy and because I wanted to have only comedy videos in one place and not the mix that Youtube offers. It's not making any money yet, but I haven't put much effort into promoting it so far.

How you make money out of it?

I'm not making any yet, but so far the potential revenue sources are Amazon affiliates and potentially advertising.

Re: Your best passive income? (2014)

#400

Post by nickfox »

mpermar wrote: post #362
nickfox wrote: post #355

I have been working on my Google Map Gps Cell Phone Tracker for several years now. Recently, I updated the project to include tracking for Android, IOS, Windows Phone and Java Me/J2ME phones. The project allows you to track a phone periodically (every 1, 5 or however number of minutes) and display them in real time on Google maps. You can also save routes and display them later. I use google adsense on my website and…

Congrats on the brave move to launching your own projects. On a side note, if I were you I would move the project from SourceForge to github. There is barely anyone using sf.net these days and github social features might also help your project to get noticed.

Hey, thanks for your comment. I use SF as a distribution channel. I use github every day and love it:

https://github.com/nickfox/GpsTracker

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