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.
How long are your stories? How do you get an audience? How long does it take you to produce each? Do your stories share content, themes, etc i cant imagine coming up with entirely new content all the time.
How many pieces did you have to produce to make 50k?
Passive income is defined as high upfront work and very low maintenance work. Other than possible marketing tasks the author's job is done once the book is published and collects money on every sale.
Authoring a book, sure. But the parent poster implied that he/she continuously writes these stories, i.e. many of them, hence why they said it is "hard on the imagination".
I assume you bang these out and go for quantity to help build a backlog for new fans to dig into and fresh releases to keep getting new content for existing fans. Do you spend much time editing the stories after you write the first draft? Or is it pretty much just a single fast second draft that cleans up the first draft a bit and then push the book out there? How many words do you aim for for each book? What do you do to promote them?
I published a video course ("Rapid Flask") and a book ("Flask by Example") in 2015 and 2016 respectively. I've made on average $100/month in royalties since. It wasn't a great financial decision considering the amount of effort required, but I learned a lot and feel like I could produce something moderately more successful next time (if I could find time) based on lessons learned from the failures.
One small geography site, bringing "only" like 600-700$ a year, but it is passive. https://random.country/
I made few more similiar sites, but they all failed.
To be honest, I don't even know how to montize such small and simple site.
This is not service where you return every day, or every few days.
It's like you use this site for a minute, two, than you forget about it.
What about a newsletter? Like random country/city facts emailed daily/weekly? Keeps traffic and interest in your brand more consistent and eventually you can funnel it into a bigger project?
There was no business model. It was just to learn code few years back.
Then after a year I noticed there is some traffic on site.
So I put ads there, and that is basically everything.
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.
FYI, you’ve got encoding problems. When I was told about the “Aland Islands” (no accent on the A, but I’ll forgive that as a content error rather than an encoding error), the Wikipedia excerpt spoke of “The Ã…land Islands” while the actual Wikipedia article had “The Åland Islands”.
I built https://dependabot.com to be passive, but ended up going full time on it (the startup I was working on feel through). Generates $9k/month passively, but I put my full-time energy into growing it (adding new languages / improving support for existing ones).
This looks awesome and obvious in hindsight, but as patio11 would say, you need to charge more. Especially on the higher end, let people that want to pay more, pay more.
2 months of that (part time) was the initial build and the rest was hustling to get initial users. GitHub wouldn't put it in the GitHub Marketplace (which drives pretty much all signups now - I don't do any marketing or sales) until it had 250 users and it was a struggle getting the word out to that many people. In the end I did it by commenting on relevant open source PRs on GitHub asking if they'd be up for giving it a try (being really careful not to be spammy).
Haha, thanks, I guess that's one place where Dependabot shows its side-project roots - I just want as many people to use it as possible, and am less fussed about capturing the biggest share of value.
You can still get that benefit with the lower tier. I would definitely raise the prices for your higher tiers, because those are going to be for businesses, and they have money to spare. You might see your ARPU go up considerably. :)
Awesome product Grey. I also watched the youtube video shared by other user (thanks for sharing). Very good demo there and they even discussed on how the changes and release notes are fetched from the git repos.
Alright. I'll be that guy. I look at your list of side projects and I see nothing that's remotely passive. They all look like tons of work! My best passive income this year is my index funds -- for instance, the S&P 500 is up 3.9% year-to-date, and I've cumulatively spent under an hour this year thinking about it. Hard to imagine what else besides investments qualifies as passive. Maybe real estate? But how passive that is is questionable and very dependent on your particular circumstances.
Dividends are realized (so realized that you have to pay taxes on them every year), and with a proper diversified portfolio they can very easily reach 3%, which is close to the number the parent poster was quoting.
The best example I’ve heard is that a friend of a friend made the CatFacts app. It automatically texts you (or someone else) cat trivia and he claims to get $8k/month from it. Sounds like a very high ROI on the up front and recurring labor investment, and I think that’s the point of this thread.
Sure, appreciating assets are the best passive income, but the income is a function of how much money you already had / how shrewdly you picked the asset / how much research you put into it (back to work). I think the underlying ideal here is “passive income through talent, wit, or execution” - passive income that you’re earning based on your skills and ideas (or ridiculous dumb luck) not your existing money.
I struggled with this thought for a while, specifically the decision between putting significant effort into revenue generating side projects (I have ideas for a few saas services and a couple domain-specific books that I would likely be qualified for writing), or giving all my intellectual power to my employer and getting a higher compensation than people who have stuff going on on the side (on average, that is).
I opted for the second, so I haven’t done even a single side project in my life and have completely focused on my full time job. It allowed me to quickly grow my net worth and now I’m in the 7 figures after 8 years of full time work, and the effect of having large assets invested in index funds can be felt now.
So, I humbly think my “strategy” is also a form of “passive income through talent, wit, or execution”. I’m 100% sure that if I dabbled with side ideas and put in the hundreds of hours required to write books, courses, ... I wouldn’t have been able to obtain the impact I had at my job, so my net worth would be significantly lower.
As I said though, I thought about it a lot so I haven’t necessarily come to the conclusion that it’s the best thing to do, there are certainly other factors that go in side projects, such as personal satisfaction, pride and sense of ownership, which are only relative when contributing to an employer.
I built https://www.docsapp.io/ while learning new programming language. Now DocsApp generating passive income for me, not a lot, but small profit. Next step is to build content around my product to generate more traffic.
Anyone know where to find good technical content writers?
Depends on what level, you can probably find the more creatively independent on here, and even judge work sample through the comments. Email is in my profile if you're interested.
Real estate. The downstairs apartment gets me a cool $1700 a month for almost no work.
If you're going to buy a first house, it's worth it to go for a multifamily; up to four units you can still get in under FHA, you just have to live in one for a couple of years.
Until they stop paying rent and trash the place and squat and sue you for any imperfection such as accidental loss of heat in the apartment, while simultaneously not letting the boiler repairman in the house.
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.
Yeah, that's the problem. Tenant stops paying, illegally sublets the place, then disappears, and by the time you finally got their stuff out you've lost a year of rent and had to pay their utilities.
It's not that common, but it's a possible outcome, and a contract won't help even a little bit.
1. Invest in pro-landlord states. I know plenty of investors that haven't even walked the properties they own and invest out of state without issues.
2. Interview potential tenants and verify income, rental history, references, credit check, background check, etc.
3. Have a strong lease agreement that outlines all of this.
4. Account for vacancies every month as an expense - 3-5% is pretty reasonable. And don't touch this money.
For every story like this, there's a hundred success stories. While real estate is hardly passive, I enjoy outperforming the stock market year after year with cash flow, leverage, and appreciation.
Strong lease agreements, property management, and vetting the right tenants will avoid 99% of these issues... but you can only do so much to prevent these issues from arising. I account for 3-5% vacancy every month as part of expenses and don't touch that money for this very reason.
I've posted about this before, but years ago I made a blog about completing the application and exams to obtain a professional engineering license in my jurisdiction. It is just a WordPress blog. Over a year or two, it started getting organic traffic since it provided information in an underserved niche.
After making next to nothing with Google ads, I was approached by another site that sold help packages for the licensing process and we struck up an affiliate deal. It didn't work right away and had to build up, but nowadays it generates anywhere from $200 to $800 per month in completely passive revenue (haven't written a new post in years). The revenue has been growing too. It will have done about $5k in 2018.
I built https://hnrecommends.com a little while ago. It's the start of a curated list of Hacker News recommendations. I'm adding recommendations and products daily.
It's made a few dollars from affiliate links so far.
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 linking back to the comment thread? Sometimes, a comment only makes sense in its context, and I couldn't find a link back.
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.
As you noted, you would still miss many recommendations without an Amazon link.
But even so, that would kind of defeat the purpose; I don't just want to aggregate recommendations. I want to include, more so, the ones that are interesting than frequent.
Additionally, besides books, I'll be posting other types of recommendations (travel, hardware, etc.).
When I was about 16 I collated a load of information on looking after your bearded dragon and sold the eBook on eBay - maybe made around £150 overall. I was chuffed at the time.
"Sales Safari"[1] is probably one of the best ways to find which topics will sell.
General guideline from Russel Branson's "Expert Secrets": Pick one of the 3 major hot markets (health, wealth, relationships), pick a sub-market, then create a new niche in that sub-market (not recommended, but you might succeed competing with an existing niche).
"Stop your Divorce" [2] was written in the same way, and seems to have sold pretty well. (Also netted the counselor a lot of leads because his phone # was in the book.)
Interestingly, there's a counter argument to the advice presented in the "Parrot Secrets" book: [3]
Listed a paid vm on azure,aws and gcp . The VM has all the required setup for learning Etherem and Truffle. Created video tutorials alongside to help use the VM.
I have made around $1500 so far in 6 months and still counting.
I built https://basicbands.com/ a fashion blog about watch straps. Its not very much work. Brands send me photography and I post it, or go to websites and request it and people send pictures to me to post. When I have time I write an article, but now most of the obvious articles have been written (how to replace your watch strap, etc), so I don't do that as much.
It's an affiliate income model, and it makes me enough to buy groceries and have a few nights out a month. It's much more fun than I expected it to be though. Turns out there are a lot of custom leather workers out there doing watch straps as a hobby and they produce AMAZING work, just incredible. Stingray leather, horween, lizard, I had no idea this stuff existed before I started. They are also a lot of fun to contact and hear their stories, so now I send them interview questions by email and post those. All in all I'm very happy with it. I got my inspiration from this subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/juststart/
I make anywhere from $100 - $300 a month, once over $450 when someone bought a Rolex. I came across the niche browsing reddit's r/watches. There are a lot of watch blogs and websites, but almost nothing devoted just to watch bands & straps. It turns out a lot of people have an old watch they'd like to fix up because the strap broke.
The research wasn't very hard. I bought some straps and installed them to get the hang of it. Its actually very easy, and now they make quick release straps, so you can change out your strap every day if you want. Mostly it's a fashion blog, so the companies do the work for me by putting out great photography.
I've been doing it about a year and a half. The first 6 months I hardly made money and almost gave up, but then I wrote a popular article and managed to rank quickly and and people purchase watches through it.
I don't really do keyword research. Most of my money comes from two or three articles, one of which is about a particular watch. So I could write more articles about other watches when I have the time. But I have a full-time job that I love, so I only do this for fun. I've done some advertising on Pinterest that seems to have been useful, and Pinterest itself brings in visitors.
I used to write a lot of content but got a new position at my full time job that's been taking up a ton of time. When things settle down I'll write more. Other people hire writers, I'm not sure about that just yet. I don't do reviews, mainly because I didn't want to handle the shipping of bands back and forth. Seems weird to keep the review bands, although plenty of companies have offered free bands I've never accepted any.
I'm an Amazon affiliate, and also Etsy & Jomashop (a popular online watch seller) and one or two others that I've never got a sale from. I usually don't get compensated from featuring independent strapmakers, unless someone buys through Etsy. But they provide the interviews and a lot of great photography, so I basically feature them for free. The blog would be boring otherwise and they're very talented artists and fun to work with. Check out Combat Straps (https://www.combat-straps.com/GALLERY.html) or Jones in Tokyo (https://www.etsy.com/shop/JonesInTokyoLeather) and you'll see what I mean.
I'm not interested in my own straps or watches, there are enough people doing that already so I'll stick with my quiet little niche. My website is just a WordPress theme.
Hope that helps. Check out the reddit link for r/juststart. It really is very informative and fun. This is my second business. The first one was an iPad travel magazine that failed miserably and never made a profit, but was also a lot of fun.
If you have a 2% interest rate, 10-15k in your account will generate that amount monthly. Totally doable if you’re living in a country with a COL that low to begin with.
Due to inflation the value of the money is going down though, so I don’t think this is really income, unless you’re getting returns greater than inflation.
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.
What's the split between your site and your Udemy courses? Udemy seems tempting due to reach and discovery, but their eternal $10 "sale" doesn't give me an encouraging feeling about the cost/benefit.
If you want to succeed on Udemy, you need multiple courses and cross-selling. It will be good to partner a current Udemy instructor for your first course and build on top of his audience.
Revenue from Udemy is generally on the decline. But nonetheless, you can always start on Udemy and branch out to your own site later. I did that.
1. At the start, I do feel it. But over time as I receive good feedback from students, it goes away. The key is to deliver (or rather, over-deliver) value to your students.
Many online teachers think they are not good enough because they compare themselves to the top 1% in the field. But even if they are far behind the top 1%, they are far ahead of the bottom 50% and their teaching is still valuable.
Sometimes, they turn out to be better teachers than the top 1% because they are nearer to their students level and can empathise and hence teach in a more effective manner.
2. Rarely. Some students ask for my trading background and performance. I'll tell them the truth. Don't be afraid they will think you are under-qualified. If they do feel that way, they won't enroll and move on. There are plenty of people who will enroll in your course regardless of your qualification (I only realised this after I started teaching).
I didn't list my trading records online. I worked at a trading firm and a hedge fund so that performance is confidential. Mostly dealt with bond futures. We did decent, nothing too fancy. After which I trade my own money. Turned 5-digits to 7-digits in 2+ years. Take that with a pinch of salt because a lot of the returns came from cryptocurrencies.
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.
Wrote my first ebook about CSS last November [1]. With little marketing, I sold hundreds in the first few months, and after a year it’s still bringing around $500/month.
I’m thinking about writing a new one, but I’m not sure about the topic.
170 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 218 ms ] threadHow many pieces did you have to produce to make 50k?
Passive income is defined as high upfront work and very low maintenance work. Other than possible marketing tasks the author's job is done once the book is published and collects money on every sale.
Authoring a book, sure. But the parent poster implied that he/she continuously writes these stories, i.e. many of them, hence why they said it is "hard on the imagination".
I mean I'm still getting paid for the features I wrote for my company's software two years ago!
I imagine it would do well with the trivia crowd
might also work to feature some amazon products (books, maps, globes, …).
i wonder how to drive more traffic. maybe a social (media) aspect like inviting friends/posting scores.
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.
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 got better Google ranking. (there was no too much similiar sites there, so it was easy to get better ranking).
Once someone on 4chan or similair chan site posted link.
Basically, it has grown without marketing/advertising. But still, it is small site.
Happy you can work on it full time.
2 months of that (part time) was the initial build and the rest was hustling to get initial users. GitHub wouldn't put it in the GitHub Marketplace (which drives pretty much all signups now - I don't do any marketing or sales) until it had 250 users and it was a struggle getting the word out to that many people. In the end I did it by commenting on relevant open source PRs on GitHub asking if they'd be up for giving it a try (being really careful not to be spammy).
I really like the idea! Keep up the good work :)
Even investing takes up-front work in the form of research and to actually setup the investment.
Sure, appreciating assets are the best passive income, but the income is a function of how much money you already had / how shrewdly you picked the asset / how much research you put into it (back to work). I think the underlying ideal here is “passive income through talent, wit, or execution” - passive income that you’re earning based on your skills and ideas (or ridiculous dumb luck) not your existing money.
I opted for the second, so I haven’t done even a single side project in my life and have completely focused on my full time job. It allowed me to quickly grow my net worth and now I’m in the 7 figures after 8 years of full time work, and the effect of having large assets invested in index funds can be felt now.
So, I humbly think my “strategy” is also a form of “passive income through talent, wit, or execution”. I’m 100% sure that if I dabbled with side ideas and put in the hundreds of hours required to write books, courses, ... I wouldn’t have been able to obtain the impact I had at my job, so my net worth would be significantly lower.
As I said though, I thought about it a lot so I haven’t necessarily come to the conclusion that it’s the best thing to do, there are certainly other factors that go in side projects, such as personal satisfaction, pride and sense of ownership, which are only relative when contributing to an employer.
Anyone know where to find good technical content writers?
https://image.ibb.co/b75uVL/B77-D6-BA2-7-EBB-4645-8946-C5-C8...
If you're going to buy a first house, it's worth it to go for a multifamily; up to four units you can still get in under FHA, you just have to live in one for a couple of years.
I for one could probably only afford to be a landlord of a 250-400k property here in NY, not a 700k one!
It's not that common, but it's a possible outcome, and a contract won't help even a little bit.
Strong lease agreements, property management, and vetting the right tenants will avoid 99% of these issues... but you can only do so much to prevent these issues from arising. I account for 3-5% vacancy every month as part of expenses and don't touch that money for this very reason.
- Membership fees and sponsored posts on https://thefootytipster.com (I maintain the WP site, but no real ongoing work) (roughly £300 per month)
- Advertising on my tech blog https://tosbourn.com (roughly £30 per month)
- Advertising on https://howoldistheinter.net (roughly £15 per month) - zero effort put into this once made and one redesign
I'm hoping to grow https://cbdscores.com over the next few months and add it to the list.
After making next to nothing with Google ads, I was approached by another site that sold help packages for the licensing process and we struck up an affiliate deal. It didn't work right away and had to build up, but nowadays it generates anywhere from $200 to $800 per month in completely passive revenue (haven't written a new post in years). The revenue has been growing too. It will have done about $5k in 2018.
It's made a few dollars from affiliate links so far.
> 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 linking back to the comment thread? Sometimes, a comment only makes sense in its context, and I couldn't find a link back.
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.
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.
But even so, that would kind of defeat the purpose; I don't just want to aggregate recommendations. I want to include, more so, the ones that are interesting than frequent.
Additionally, besides books, I'll be posting other types of recommendations (travel, hardware, etc.).
On a serious note 400 USD us probably good enough for a fresher (to be honest its way more than average) but its quite less for a mid-level engineer.
How long did it take you to develop the app ?
Referencing this sort of thing: http://www.parrotsecrets.com/
An explainer: https://www.cringely.com/2009/03/14/parrot-secrets/
General guideline from Russel Branson's "Expert Secrets": Pick one of the 3 major hot markets (health, wealth, relationships), pick a sub-market, then create a new niche in that sub-market (not recommended, but you might succeed competing with an existing niche).
"Stop your Divorce" [2] was written in the same way, and seems to have sold pretty well. (Also netted the counselor a lot of leads because his phone # was in the book.)
Interestingly, there's a counter argument to the advice presented in the "Parrot Secrets" book: [3]
[1]: https://shop.stackingthebricks.com/sales-safari-101
[2]: http://www.stopyourdivorce.com/
[3]: http://goodbirdinc.blogspot.com/2013/06/internet-fraud-targe...
http://techlatest.net/products/products/
http://techlatest.net/support/ethereum/
It's an affiliate income model, and it makes me enough to buy groceries and have a few nights out a month. It's much more fun than I expected it to be though. Turns out there are a lot of custom leather workers out there doing watch straps as a hobby and they produce AMAZING work, just incredible. Stingray leather, horween, lizard, I had no idea this stuff existed before I started. They are also a lot of fun to contact and hear their stories, so now I send them interview questions by email and post those. All in all I'm very happy with it. I got my inspiration from this subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/juststart/
How did you decide on a niche?
How did you research your niche?
How long have you been doing it?
How did you do keyword research and such?
How much content do you write/produce?
Do you do reviews? If so whats your method?
Who are your affiliates? It sounds like you work with independent strap makers, how does being compensated for sales work with them?
How long did you blog before you started seeing a profit?
Do you think one day you’d be on track to promote your own watch/strap?
How did you make the actual site?
Thanks in advance. Hope you dont mind the questions
The research wasn't very hard. I bought some straps and installed them to get the hang of it. Its actually very easy, and now they make quick release straps, so you can change out your strap every day if you want. Mostly it's a fashion blog, so the companies do the work for me by putting out great photography.
I've been doing it about a year and a half. The first 6 months I hardly made money and almost gave up, but then I wrote a popular article and managed to rank quickly and and people purchase watches through it.
I don't really do keyword research. Most of my money comes from two or three articles, one of which is about a particular watch. So I could write more articles about other watches when I have the time. But I have a full-time job that I love, so I only do this for fun. I've done some advertising on Pinterest that seems to have been useful, and Pinterest itself brings in visitors.
I used to write a lot of content but got a new position at my full time job that's been taking up a ton of time. When things settle down I'll write more. Other people hire writers, I'm not sure about that just yet. I don't do reviews, mainly because I didn't want to handle the shipping of bands back and forth. Seems weird to keep the review bands, although plenty of companies have offered free bands I've never accepted any.
I'm an Amazon affiliate, and also Etsy & Jomashop (a popular online watch seller) and one or two others that I've never got a sale from. I usually don't get compensated from featuring independent strapmakers, unless someone buys through Etsy. But they provide the interviews and a lot of great photography, so I basically feature them for free. The blog would be boring otherwise and they're very talented artists and fun to work with. Check out Combat Straps (https://www.combat-straps.com/GALLERY.html) or Jones in Tokyo (https://www.etsy.com/shop/JonesInTokyoLeather) and you'll see what I mean.
I'm not interested in my own straps or watches, there are enough people doing that already so I'll stick with my quiet little niche. My website is just a WordPress theme.
Hope that helps. Check out the reddit link for r/juststart. It really is very informative and fun. This is my second business. The first one was an iPad travel magazine that failed miserably and never made a profit, but was also a lot of fun.
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.
If you want to succeed on Udemy, you need multiple courses and cross-selling. It will be good to partner a current Udemy instructor for your first course and build on top of his audience.
Revenue from Udemy is generally on the decline. But nonetheless, you can always start on Udemy and branch out to your own site later. I did that.
Are you qualifications ever questioned?
Do you think anyone with a self evaluated passion and knowledge of a subject can teach a course online?
How did you entice people tk buy your course? How did you market? Build a reputation?
Many online teachers think they are not good enough because they compare themselves to the top 1% in the field. But even if they are far behind the top 1%, they are far ahead of the bottom 50% and their teaching is still valuable.
Sometimes, they turn out to be better teachers than the top 1% because they are nearer to their students level and can empathise and hence teach in a more effective manner.
2. Rarely. Some students ask for my trading background and performance. I'll tell them the truth. Don't be afraid they will think you are under-qualified. If they do feel that way, they won't enroll and move on. There are plenty of people who will enroll in your course regardless of your qualification (I only realised this after I started teaching).
3. Yes.
4. I did an interview piece, you can find more info on how I started there: https://hackernoon.com/founder-interviews-lucas-liew-of-algo...
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.
Your subscribers were using stolen cards?
So technically you did have subscribers they were just committing fraud to pay you?
I’m thinking about writing a new one, but I’m not sure about the topic.
[1] https://jgthms.com/css-in-44-minutes-ebook