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Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2018?

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Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2018?

#85

Post by thrower123 »

anoncoward111 wrote: post #80
thrower123 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it helps if you put a little effort into renovating the place, so that it attracts a different type of clientele and prices out the riffraff.

Agree, but unpredictable things do happen either way and more importantly, you need to have immense operating capital and cash flow to bring in the top of the market. I for one could probably only afford to be a landlord of a 250-400k property here in NY, not a 700k one!

Very true, stuff is going to happen, and you've got to scramble to get it fixed. I would imagine NY would be tough, I'm in an area where COL is probably half, maybe one-third of NYC, and expectations are considerably lower as well.

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2018?

#86

Post by bemmu »

t0mislav wrote: post #49
alehul wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I ask how you bring in site visitors? For such a niche site, I imagine you didn't do any advertising-- or did you do some based on search keywords on Google? I have a lot of ideas for small interesting websites like this, but I've no clue how to popularize them at all. Maybe a Show HN or something, but that seems like a short burst if the site is more of a novelty.

Correct, there was no advertising. At first, It was not even plan to make money from this site. It was to learn few new things. In first year, I maybe leaved link on one or two subreddits, with not too many subscribers. I had little bit of traffic from reddit. I had this url also in signature in 2 discussion boards, but boards were in Croatian language. So only little bit of traffic from there. Then after some time I…

Just people searching for "random country"?

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2018?

#87

Post by bemmu »

tinktank wrote: post #4
nokya wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how did you start?

Came across some reddit posts saying there's good money to be made -- found a niche that seemed underserved and started banging out the stories. It's hard work but if you get a following and have a style your readers like it becomes easier.

When you release a new one, do most of the sales come immediately after release and then trickle to almost nothing? I'm wondering if you are gradually building up more income, or if you need to keep working to remain stable.

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2018?

#88

Post by lukasluke »

Started an online course on algorithmic trading at https://algotrading101.com and some Udemy courses 4 years ago.

Revenue peaked at $20k/month 2 years ago and is less than half of that now. That's probably because my SEO rankings plummeted this year, and that people seem less and less eager to pay for online courses. Maintaining the course is quite passive (answering students' questions by email) but growing revenue is an active process.

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2018?

#89

Post by fdw »

fadys wrote: post #79
fdw wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, that looks quite interesting. I have already found a book I might like. > I'm adding recommendations and products daily. Do you add the recommendations manually or do you use a crawler/API to copy the comment? How automatic is it? Finally, I have two suggestions: You're only selling to people in the US. Maybe you could also add links to other Amazon domains (or use a service like geni.us)? And how about linki…

I do it all manually, but I use the API to get the actual comment text. I have been collecting recommendations for years. This is my way of organizing and sharing them. Amazon has a service called OneLink that supposedly routes users to the Amazon store that's closest to their country (presumably, from their IP address). I'm using it (a simple script tag) but I don't know how reliable it is.

Thanks, I was wondering if you can parse all comments for a link to Amazon or something (but even that probably wouldn't get the recommendations without links).

At least for me, OneLink doesn't work. Apparently you need to be in the US, Canada or UK; the other countries aren't supported so far. Pity.

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2018?

#90

Post by bemmu »

Back in 2015 I wrote an ebook called "how to start and grow your subscription box from 0 to 1000 subscribers", as I felt I had learned enough about the topic while running my own business to have something useful to share. Odd thing happened though soon after releasing it, I'll get to that in a bit.

I recall it sold about $2k right after release, as Product Hunt happened to have just opened a book section back then and it got to #1 place for a day. I put it on Amazon, iBooks and Gumroad. Basically all the initial sales were from Gumroad.

But the cool thing is that although comparatively sales slowed to a trickle, now 3 years later it's still selling about $10 worth each month, now completely from iBooks and Amazon. It's not much, but at this point it's completely passive.

So the odd thing? While I was writing it I had just crossed 1000 subscribers myself. But after I released the book, I soon found out that a lot of my subscribers were actually using stolen card numbers and I had to cancel about a third.

So now I have a book out about how to get 1000 subscribers, but I don't actually have 1000 subscribers, and turns out I never really did, although I was convinced of it while writing it. It feels a bit like karma from being too proud too soon.

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