Let the adventurous journey begin: Passive Income

http://www.patrick-wied.at/blog/let-the-adventurous-journey-begin-passive-income

by mindhunter • 14 years ago

107 42 14 years ago

pa75• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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.

cheald2• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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.

cheald2• 14 years ago

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.

ckluis• 14 years ago

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...

sl4yerr2• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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.

sopooneo• 14 years ago

That seems less "passive" than just "small". But then again, as the poster noted, there are many ways to define passive income.

psylence519• 14 years ago

Ah, your problem is you haven't yet bought my book on passive income success.

sl4yerr2• 14 years ago

Ah yes, that is the problem indeed. I assume it's published by RonCo?

jQueryIsAwesome2• 14 years ago

I have passive income thanks to Adsense, in comparison with the average salary in USA is kind of low; but is bigger than the average salary in my country (Colombia).

And I also want to point out that nobody is talking about "wealth" around here, just about a few more bucks.

AJ007• 14 years ago

It isn't a myth, its just poorly defined.

I've had adsense sites making a few hundred $ a month since 2005. Its hands off to the point I don't even know what they made until I get the 1099 from Google each year.

However every (or nearly every) business that makes money truly passively is an under performer. They are like boats without captains that have not sunk yet. Those same sites, along with the A list domains some are on should be earning $200k+ a year by now.

In that sense, I would define passive income as doing a terrible job on a stellar business model.

Of course, there are also businesses employees or partners can run. Those absolutely can be done. I have one project like that right now. But, just like a dividend paying stock or bond, you are going to have to put in a serious asset to minimize the chance of the people running the show from fleeing.

reidrac2• 14 years ago

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?

pa75• 14 years ago

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.

reidrac2• 14 years ago

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).

lifeisstillgood• 14 years ago

May I ask if you registered for W-8BEN exception for the work in the US - and how much effort was getting the EIN / TIN? I am having fun with that right now

yaix2• 14 years ago

"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.

pa75• 14 years ago

I obviously didn't spend enough time to think about it hard enough and wasn't able explore the good sides of advertising. I had a web app and placed a big banner over it, the banner often seemed to show confusing buttons like "SHOW" or "DOWNLOAD" and I guess the users then accidentially clicked it. I think the main problem was that there were no ads that fit to the app (it was a QR encoder/decoder) so I wasn't able to provide a positive ux. Do you have any tips on how to find the best fitting ads for (sometimes very technical related) specific sites/apps?

chc• 14 years ago

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

yaix2• 14 years ago

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?

ssharp• 14 years ago

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!

jamii• 14 years ago

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.

gravitronic4• 14 years ago

While torrenting seems to have become considered ethically grey-area in the common internet's view, profiting from copyright infringement is definitely legally very bad. Not a good idea.

semanticist• 14 years ago

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.

gravitronic4• 14 years ago

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...]

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.

mmuro• 14 years ago

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.

I sell a WordPress plugin and I can agree 100% with this. "Passive" income isn't for selling software.

vern1• 14 years ago

> 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.

gravitronic4• 14 years ago

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.

pa75• 14 years ago

hey, thank you for your this comment. Regarding the point that based on your experience passive income means constant work: Yes, I agree with you, passive income is constant work, my target will be to reduce this constant work to a minimum (e.g. a maximum of 2-4 hours per week) and optimize the revenue with the least work. I'm curious whether there are good strategies for doing that otherwise this will just be an empirical experiment :)

gravitronic4• 14 years ago

My approach thus far has been to not invest too much into a single idea before monetizing it, so I can "fail fast" without losing too much time.

It's a double-edged sword as I have people who paid for my DJ app and are expecting many new features. Which is good as it drives my efforts, but its bad because I can't spend that time working on new revenue-generating products.

The other approach I have when writing code is to try to have plans to sell each code module I write at least twice. For example the UI engine I wrote for my DJ app also powers my little iOS app released yesterday [http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/drinkpacer/id522224281?ls=1&#...], and I plan on using the audio engine for more audio projects. I call it the "combo effect".

webwright• 14 years ago

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.

jQueryIsAwesome2• 14 years ago

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)

jbillingsley• 14 years ago

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).

csomar• 14 years ago

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.

kposehn• 14 years ago

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.

zupreme• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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".

paulhauggis• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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

pa75• 14 years ago

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

Let the adventurous journey begin: Passive Income

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