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.<p>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.
Hi Patrick,<p>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:<p>[<a href="http://burnsmod.com/business/2012/04/23/My-First-2-Months:-App-Sales-Report-For-Android-And-WebOS/" rel="nofollow">http://burnsmod.com/business/2012/04/23/My-First-2-Months:-A...</a>]<p>What you have right, in my opinion:<p>- you have low expectations to start<p>- you haven't quit your job<p>- none of your plans sound crazy<p>- of your proposed ideas, writing wordpress themes is probably the most potentially lucrative.<p>What you (may) have wrong:<p>- 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.<p>- 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.<p>- If you <i>really</i> 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.
I've done a few passive income projects, and by far the most lucrative have been:<p>a) Self-serve subscription services (SaaS/hosting platforms have a high buy-in, but are very low maintenance once they're revved)<p>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!)
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)".<p>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.<p>That said, I hope you hit your targets and goals, but if not, I want to hear about it!
Passive income is a myth. It's the HN equivalent of an infomercial.<p>Cue stories of the masses who had wealth rained down on them by doing very little work:
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).<p>Look at gravityforms, ninjaforms, popup domination, eventespresso etc.<p>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.<p>See --> <a href="http://www.wpbeginner.com/opinion/is-this-the-future-product-placement-model-in-free-wordpress-plugins/" rel="nofollow">http://www.wpbeginner.com/opinion/is-this-the-future-product...</a>
Passive income is indeed real, but is often exaggerated.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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...
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.
Hi Patrick,
Good luck with CodeCanyon. Well, as a seasoned seller in CodeCanyon, here is my bit of advice:<p>1. Quality. Users buy appearances. They judge your application by its quality. Focus on that, and you'll sell.<p>2. Solve a wide spread problem. Like for example, sliders.<p>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.<p>4. Help, Videos, Presentation, Customer Support, Branding... that bullshit.<p>5. Once you made your product and making $2.5k/month, start the old fashioned marketing way.<p>6. The money is on the forest. Team up with a designer and make the money.
As a long-time affiliate marketer, I'd have to say be careful about the prospect of passive income.<p>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 <i>success</i>.
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).
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.
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)
"Advertising [...] the amount you get [...] isn’t big and only pays off with high traffic"<p>Realy? Glad you think that.<p>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.