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.
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.
I sell a WordPress plugin and I can agree 100% with this. "Passive" income isn't for selling software.
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.
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.
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".
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!)
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.
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.
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!
Cue stories of the masses who had wealth rained down on them by doing very little work:
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.
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.
And I also want to point out that nobody is talking about "wealth" around here, just about a few more bucks.
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...
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...
Even if it's not your intent, the last thing anyone needs is to be branded a pedophile-enabler.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
