
Let the adventurous journey begin: Passive Income - mindhunter
http://www.patrick-wied.at/blog/let-the-adventurous-journey-begin-passive-income
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webwright
To OP: Your passive income ideas are pretty grandiose. Those are legit startup
ideas. For passive income think: solve the smallest problem possible. Simple
SaaS software. A lead-gen blog (I know a guy who puts up reviews of expensive
niche products and gets hundreds per month in amazon affiliate fees). Simple
mobile apps? An ebook with information that people need? Find something that
is ALREADY SELLING and do it better/different.

Also, think cheap marketing. SEO? Or is there a product that you could sell
whose use would be inherently social? Passive income is barely a software
problem-- you shouldn't be building anything super-complex. It's more a
marketing problem. How do you talk about it? How do you find customers? If you
can solve THAT on paper before you write a line of code, you're way ahead of
most people who take a shot at this.

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gravitronic
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...](http://burnsmod.com/business/2012/04/23/My-
First-2-Months:-App-Sales-Report-For-Android-And-WebOS/)]

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
potentially lucrative.

What you (may) have wrong:

\- passive income in my experience (app development) is constant work. Whether
its blogging to keep traffic up, answering customer support requests, to
adding features or new revenue-generating products, etc.

\- Blogging for ad revenue is not going to be very successful unless you start
a porn blog. Blog for SEO gains and to funnel to your product sale pages.

\- If you _really_ want passive income, try to come up with something that is
a subscription service people will pay you monthly for. It's a lot easier to
maintain a service for existing customers than have to bring new customers in
the door every month.

~~~
vern1
> Blogging for ad revenue is not going to be very > successful unless you
> start a porn blog.

I have a successful porn blog but have not monetized it. How can I do that?
Which ad networks will provide me with the most revenue? Any advice would be
very much appreciated...I've been mulling this question for a while but don't
know much about ad networks outside of AdSense.

~~~
gravitronic
When I did this for about 2 months in college (before meeting my wife and
deciding to exit the 'seedy' business) I made about $2000 if I remember
correctly.

The money is in affiliate networks that pay you a fee for signup/purchases.
Fleshlight was about 70% of my revenue, and paysite affiliate networks was the
rest.

I was hosting my blog on blogger at the time so I just integrated banner ads
into the template and submitted my links to FARK at the time for views.

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cheald
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 it!)

~~~
leoedin
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 largely related
to timing and luck. If you get a large community behind you, people will
promote your site with very little effort on your part.

~~~
cheald
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.

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ssharp
To OP, I wouldn't feel so bad writing about this: "I decided to give passive
income a shot and I’m going to write about my experiences (yep, like almost
everybody these days)".

My request is to be open and stay on top of the writing, even if things don't
go well. If you're marketing the articles, market the "I lost" articles as
much as the "I won" articles. If passive income is myth, as was commented on
previously, part of the myth comes from only seeing positive results. There is
a lot to be learned from failures.

That said, I hope you hit your targets and goals, but if not, I want to hear
about it!

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sl4yerr
Passive income is a myth. It's the HN equivalent of an infomercial.

Cue stories of the masses who had wealth rained down on them by doing very
little work:

~~~
xutopia
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.

~~~
graeme
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 programming for a few months, but I have
a Wordpress blog. I'm probably going to buy that plugin. Always wanted to
track that, but didn't know how.

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ckluis
Here is my impression of code canyon… most devs would be better off building
their own site for selling their code (not true for themeforest and themes).

Look at gravityforms, ninjaforms, popup domination, eventespresso etc.

I think if I were going to focus on wordpress analytics (assuming from your
post). I would build a free plugin that had paid components as add ons all
revolving around analytics.

See --> [http://www.wpbeginner.com/opinion/is-this-the-future-
product...](http://www.wpbeginner.com/opinion/is-this-the-future-product-
placement-model-in-free-wordpress-plugins/)

------
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...

~~~
StavrosK
Well, they do have a method, it's just that the method is "defraud suckers who
think they can make millions in their spare time".

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jamii
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.

~~~
semanticist
That could be exceptionally risky as the mechanism used to block access to The
Pirate Bay is the same used to block sites identified by the Internet Watch
Foundation as child porn.

Even if it's not your intent, the last thing anyone needs is to be branded a
pedophile-enabler.

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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.

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pa7
thanks for the upvotes guys, but I'd even more appreciate some valuable
feedback, tips, and would love to hear about your experiences in this field :)

~~~
not_chriscohoat
Some pretty good passive suggestions! My personal favorite is iOS app sales,
which seem to bring in a couple of extra bucks per day if you have something
people use.

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reidrac
I guess you're employed and you're looking for some extra money. I have a
boring question I'm afraid: what about taxes? How does it work in Austria?

~~~
pa7
I'm currently doing contract work for a client in the US and well yeah this is
some sort of approach for getting some extra money. Right now I'm studying in
Germany and the german tax law applies to me. If the extra money gets over a
specific amount per month you'd have to register a traders-license (in case
you're selling stuff next to your job, there's the usual income tax and if you
get over a even bigger amount you'd have to pay sales tax too) since my
passive income approaches didn't pay off a lot yet I'm still in the boundaries
where I don't have to worry about that.

~~~
reidrac
Thanks for your answer!

It's probably a country specific thing, but I looks like you're usually
allowed to have some income that is tax free (up to a limit; ie UK income tax
personal allowance is £8,105 for 2012 - as long as you total income is less
than £100k).

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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_.

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jbillingsley
I've had (very) modest success at passive income ($60-100 a month) with a
niche iPhone app. The nice thing about it is that it is truly passive. I
haven't touched the ting in over a year (I know I should update and improve on
it but I lost interest in it pretty quickly).

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pa7
I just wanted to say thank you for all the nice comments. great feedback!

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paulhauggis
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.

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

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jQueryIsAwesome
At least with Adsense the payment for the same amount of clicks increase over
time. And the difference between what Adsense pays is order of magnitudes
bigger than what any other ad network pays; an of course is better if your
visitors come from one of the hight-paying countries (USA, Canada, UK,
Germany, etc)

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yaix
"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.

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

~~~
yaix
Could you be more specific, because I really have no idea what you mean.

I provided "useful information" in saying that it is possible to earn good
money with ads, but that it takes more than just copy-pasting a random ad code
into the pages.

What is "supercilious" about what I am writing?

